Advocating for privacy in Australia

Thanks - that's pretty much exactly it. If someone needs end-to-end encryption, it's only safe from intermediate third parties if they aren't trusting software which is updated by those third parties.

So we use effective methods to protect the privacy of our users while performing our civic duty of assisting law enforcement when bad actors use or abuse our platform, and we never pretend to use the bulk of our customers as human shields to protect bad actors trying to hide among them.

So the article's tl;dr is basically: "We're advocating for privacy, but we aren't going to try to offer you any. We never did, and we certainly won't now that this law passed. You're on your own."

Is this supposed to be a PR-positive announcement from FastMail, because I can't quite tell?!

Their "Actions we are taking" section is almost entirely composed of a political lobbying strategy. Given the outcome of the vote, 44 votes for and only 12 against, their plan doesn't exude much confidence. I would have expected plans to move data and key technologists out of Australia at the very least.

The company I work for uses Fastmail but our CEO has already decided to switch mail providers sometime in 2019. I don't know what other service they'll choose.

1. Once a user identifies messages containing the search term, what are they supposed to do then? The message should still be un-decryptable to them.

2. Can't a user search all common words against a message and then rearrange those found to roughly match the message length. There are only so many ways the words "noon begins the tomorrow revolution at" can be arranged and make sense.

We never offered, and never claimed to offer, a safe haven for people who have broken the law in both Australia and their own country to hide from the police. We don't place ourselves above law enforcement.

We don't have data trading agreements with anybody, and we don't sell or provide backdoor channels - we only provide data in response to lawful warrants.

That's the right amount of privacy and the right tradeoff with usability for just about everyone. Certainly storing your emails super encrypted in a concrete bunker on an island somewhere is theoretically safer along one axis - I wrote a whole series about Confidentiality, Availability and Integrity just over 4 years ago on this very topic: https://fastmail.blog/2014/12/02/security-confidentiality-in...

And the specific one on confidentiality here: https://fastmail.blog/2014/12/15/security-confidentiality/ (excuse the line wrapping, we moved to a new blog platform a while back and some of the older posts didn't import perfectly, but I don't want to look suspicious by editing it today!)