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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

#521

Post by AndrewThrowaway »

Cases like this always remind me this XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/538/

Technology people always want to imagine that technology will save/deceive them.

Imagine a situation where some "enemy of the state" is using some "secure" service like "securomail" or similar.

Is it hard to imagine Police/Interpol/KGB coming to the offices of "securomail" and demanding providing IP addresses, no longer encrypting, installing malware for this particular user, etc? Or else all the C-level of "securomail" are "helping the enemy of the state" with all the consequences.

There is always this "5$ wrench human layer" which no technology will protect from.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#522

Post by raxxorrax »

yunohn wrote: post #414

I’m a web developer, and I assume a lot of HNers are too. So I’m really confused by the lack of understanding around IP addresses in the comments here. Everyone realizes that, by default, literally just connecting to another service over the web, will expose your IP address? It’s trivial to monitor and report your IP to the authorities, as soon as you login to ProtonMail, despite lack of “logging”. Logs only matter f…

You can just not save the info. Not surprised that web developers have no concept of not saving everything anymore, but it is technically feasible. In many cases the IP wouldn't even reach your service and you only see it in the log of some load balancer or other proxy. How fleeting those logs are is a matter of choice.

You can come up with an excuse, depending on the service it might be laborious to get an IP on a running live system that doesn't otherwise care about connection information.

Depending on the truthfulness of that you might make yourself guilty of impeding investigations though.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#523

Post by woko »

jonas21 wrote: post #104
tephra wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So also a proton customer here. "By default we do not keep any IP logs" and this case does not seem like the default? Seems like they were required to by law to log and turn over this specific IP? (Of course I haven't seen the actual case but I would assume that meant a warrant.)

As a user, I'd take that to mean that they wouldn't keep any IP logs unless I turned logging on. I wouldn't expect that they would enable logging on their own. Interestingly, ProtonMail's privacy policy lists a number of cases in which they may log your IP address permanently (including if you breach their Terms and Conditions). But a request from law enforcement is not one them.

A user with the intent to engage in unlawful activities should read the terms of services in full. If that user only reads the homepage of the service, without understanding the implication of each word, and does not bother to review the terms in details, that is on him.

Moreover, I would like to point out that ProtonMail is about encryption of email *content*. It is foolish to expect more from them. They won't protect your identity: law enforcement can know who you are and who you communicate with, but they cannot know the content of your emails (if you recipient uses encryption services as well).

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#525

Post by TylerLives »

sodality2 wrote: post #337
istingray wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a great point. This should be better publicized. Protonmail requires a phone number to register through Tor.

This is completely false. I have created accounts (for others) over tor, without ever divulging a number. The exit node is a factor here. Sometimes email is required; if the need is there, throwaway emails work. I hate to tragedy-of-the-commons a good service, though, which is why I have a subscription.

Can you do it now?

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#526

Post by pera »

jakobdabo wrote: post #465
grappler wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sad to say, Proton's onion service is for their old version. Proton has recently rolled out a new updated version of their service, and as far as I'm aware they don't offer a Tor onion service for that newer version. So Proton users who like to connect via Tor onion services have been faced with a choice of either staying on the old version of ProtonMail, or giving up on connecting via a Tor onion service. It definit…

I don't think you can use Proton without JS. You need JS for cryptography; the emails get encrypted/decrypted/signed/verified on client-side.

I use proton-bridge and a normal email client, although I've never tried to use it with Tor.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#528

Post by Broken_Hippo »

shantara wrote: post #166
newbie789 wrote: post #107

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…

So, you are complaining that they had immigrants working for them? They are part of the EU free movement region, so that is hardly surprising. Immigrants on the payroll don't change whether or not a company is Swiss.

Were they inside the country? Were also they subject to Swiss laws? Aren't these the things that would make a company Swiss? Even if the company was started by a person that isn't Swiss, I'm pretty sure it is still a Swiss company if it is initially located in Switzerland and governed by Swiss laws.

Re: Climate activist arrested after ProtonMail provided his IP address

#529

Post by dbsmith83 »

vntok wrote: post #412
dbsmith83 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they don't serve targeted ads, but they still read your gmail

Protonmail will scan all messages sent from non-protonmail addresses (content and attachments) for viruses. So they do read your gmail as well.

That's an interesting point, but I'd contend there is a difference between scanning for known virus patterns vs. feeding your email into ML algorithms to do God knows what with.
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