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Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

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Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#161
post #18

So with FastMail under Australian privacy-bashing laws and now this, what are our options for secure, private e-mail?

Anything that you access using thunderbird with GPG configured?

It gives no worse privacy guarantees than protonmail and possibly way better - because if you use protonmail through a web client and they get a court order to serve you a "special" client that forwards your certificate you won't notice it.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH in 2021 people engaging in potentially dangerous activities should be literate enough to understand, that no business will guarantee them full security and decline all requests from authorities to disclose their identity. The wording you suggest is equivalent of „do not dry your cat in microwave“ instruction - a legal protection from dumb customers, that does not contribute meaningfully to safety. For the non-Swi…

Sure, the wording istingray suggested is a bit over the top. But the existing wording "By default, we do not keep any IP logs" is misleading. Why even say it? They should simply delete it.

How do you understand „by default“ and „keep“ in this phrase? Does it actually mean that they do not collect the logs?

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically correct but misleading. They tout that off-by-default statement on their homepage, underneath the header of "Anonymous Email," with the closing sentence of "Your privacy comes first." So why even market that? It provides no meaningful security.

Were _you_ mislead by this? Did you really expect a Switzerland-based company not to comply with law of the land? There is a difference between "available to police, not retroactively, and only with a valid warrant" and "available to any government agency constantly and in bulk, as well as to data-collecting commercial entities, Russian and Chinese hackers, and their dogs". Don't you agree?

Fair point. I still don't think they've worded that well enough. I would probably not have read "By default" to have the context of "Unless asked to do so by authorities."

They're not being as transparent as possible in their marketing, which is at odds with their allure of security.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People really don't seem to understand that Protonmail is a western company in a western country with pretty generous surveillance laws. Yes, your email text may be encrypted, but everything else is free game to the authorities unless you use additional protection.

Protonmail should be pushing more of this messaging in their branding. "Don't trust us further than you can throw us. We're doing our best, and here's what we recommend, use Tor, etc."

This is just not realistic, though.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#166

I’m aware that this is a very silly sounding question, but I’m very confused about what’s going on here. If the subject of this investigation had been using ProtonVPN to connect to ProtonMail, would this have (in a marginal way) protected their anonymity? If Proton Mail can be compelled to begin logging, surely the same must be said of Proton VPN right? It’s interesting how many “privacy focused” companies tout being…

I used to work for a now defunct Swiss company that had “Swiss quality, security and privacy” plastered all over the website and marketing materials. The number of actual Swiss people on the team could be counted on one hand, the rest of developers being from every European country out there, with the most represented ones being Ukraine and Romania. And from talking with my coworkers, the situation is the same across other Swiss IT companies.

I would not pay any attention to the “Swiss X” marketing.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#167
post #136
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tor is a State Dept/DARPA project, so at best a sidegrade from Proton if your concern is being surveilled by Western governments.

Tor is open source. Point to the vulnerability you are claiming, or stop spreading FUD.

https://nusenu.medium.com/tracking-one-year-of-malicious-tor...

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#168
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also a Protonmail customer. Tor solves this. Protonmail's Tor support is lukewarm. They have a Tor based login without captchas. It's mentioned on their homepage in the bottom menu under "Onion Site", (/tor). And there's one blog post from 2017 that still promotes their v2/shorter onion address. I expect Protonmail to push its users to login through Tor. "Don't trust us, trust math". Embed Tor support in their ap…

How is that lukewarm? Sounds like first class support if they have a dedicated onion address and not just let you connect to the regular clearnet. Or is that address only in that old blog post and not mentioned in places you'd usually look? It's a bit unclear to me.

It's lukewarm because what less could you do besides not support Tor?

Tor is mentioned on their homepage in the bottom menu under "Onion Site". However, this menu link redirects to their Tor placeholder page, rather than directly to the Tor service: https://protonmail.com/tor

There's one blog post from 2017 that still promotes their old v2 onion address: https://protonmail.com/blog/tor-encrypted-email/

Protonmail's Tor service is located at: https://protonmailrmez3lotccipshtkleegetolb73fuirgj7r4o4vfu7...

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#169
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Protonmail should be pushing more of this messaging in their branding. "Don't trust us further than you can throw us. We're doing our best, and here's what we recommend, use Tor, etc."

This is just not realistic, though.

Why not?

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#170
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once again: if you can't see their server software, you should assume they are FOS, and are capable of recording anything. Also: One more reason NAT was a good thing over IPv6. The closer we get to the platonic ideal of "UUID per person" the more likely justice systems will use it that way. The day everyone learns how to self-host mail on ephemeral compute instances is the day law enforcement starts requiring MX doma…

doesn't the amount of available IPv6 mean you can get a new one every time?

Theoretically yes but if your ISP assigns your home a /64 you can use 2^64 different addresses to access the internet.

This still doesn’t protect your privacy because your ISP knows what prefix they gave you and will likely provide that to the authorities if you broke the law while using that address. Just like they would even if you used NAT and ipv4 so I don’t get where the parent comment thinks that is protecting their privacy at all.

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