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Advocating for privacy in Australia

fastmail.blog

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Re: Advocating for privacy in Australia

#71

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #43
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is simply that you expect the impossible. Either you give the factual power to access your emails to some party, then whoever you give that power to can as a matter of fact access your emails, and in particular that means that they can be coerced into accessing your emails, or you don't give them the power, then they can't. You are demanding that they offer a product where they have the power to access yo…

Not sure what you are getting at exactly, but you can provide browser based email where the browser using J.S. decrypts the email. Obviously need to figure a way to make that AA proof.

Yes, you can provide such a service. With such a service, you have the power to access the emails. Telling people that you can not access the emails would be marketing bullshit.

Re: Advocating for privacy in Australia

#72

Post by dannyw »

brongondwana wrote: post #11
Jedi72 wrote: post #7

Good writeup. Since I can already see not everyone here actually read the article, here are some highlights. > Law enforcement has always been able to request information from us through the Telecommunications Act with a lawful warrant. Because we have the ability to decrypt all data, there is no need to make changes that circumvent encryption. ... While FastMail is not directly affected, we don’t support this legisl…

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 custome…

It's weird that you take this stance. It almost feels like you're implying that ProtonMail is a bad actor, and end to end encryption is bad because 'civic duty'. That's like "but terrorism".

I understand that you're not a privacy-first company, but still, your communications haven't been reassuring me. There is extensive documentation (e.g. Yahoo FISA) that ALL content not end-to-end-encrypted is ingested for bulk surveillance and decades-long (if not infinite) retention.

The only solution is 100% end to end encryption, with NO mechanism for unauthorised access (including law enforcement). Like iMessage and Signal. Anything partial of that, while saying you are pro-privacy, is IMHO harmful to privacy.

Re: Advocating for privacy in Australia

#74

Post by newscracker »

brongondwana wrote: post #8
jammygit wrote: post #2

Fastmail should relocate to Canada. Just throwing suggestions out there.

Damn, I just lost $100. Thanks. We had a bet on how long it would take for somebody to say "just relocate your entire company and all your staff's lives to another jurisdiction".

Slightly off topic: you have a broken link in your blog post titled 'Submission regarding “The Assistance And Access Bill 2018”'. The link [2] in the line "For more information around this submission, see our about the bill" leads to a 404 page not found.

[1]: https://fastmail.blog/accessbill-submission/

[2]: https://fastmail.blog/access-and-assistance-bill/

Re: Advocating for privacy in Australia

#75

Post by raxxorrax »

brongondwana wrote: post #19
mtgx wrote: post #13

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?!

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 w…

Not a user and not an Australian but that sounds like a bad deal for customers. Especially since warrants will probably not be thoroughly checked in the future. So the invasion of privacy seems to be seen as a trifle.

Re: Advocating for privacy in Australia

#77

Post by cyphar »

brongondwana wrote: post #22
Jerry2 wrote: post #15

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…

The data hasn't ever been stored in Australia. All our data is currently stored in the USA and Netherlands. Of course the "people are planning to leave us because of the hamhanded way you introduced this legislation" is a major part of all our feedback to legislators. The AABill happened the way it did in Australia because our politics is particularly broken right now (seriously, we have a minority government which h…

> The data hasn't ever been stored in Australia. All our data is currently stored in the USA and Netherlands.

Though of course, since you're in the jurisdiction of our great nation you have to turn over data if requested anyway (this hasn't changed). Actually I'm a bit more concerned that you store data in the US.

> The AABill happened the way it did in Australia because our politics is particularly broken right now (seriously, we have a minority government which has change leaders twice and lost multiple members to scandals). We call it "wedge politics" and Labor were forced into supporting it because otherwise they'd look soft on terrorism going into the holiday period, and anything at all which happened would be blamed on them not supporting the bill.

Our politics has been broken for almost 2 decades. It's not really a recent phenomenon.

Re: Advocating for privacy in Australia

#78

Post by FuckOffNeemo »

brongondwana wrote: post #30
jen729w wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and obviously someone who doesn't live in Melbourne. -- John Noble Happy Fastmail customer of, I dunno, 5+ years? Melbourne, Australia :-)

I dunno, I stepped out of the office at 5:45pm to head home and got drenched. 4 seasons in 1 day and all that.

We had three seasons today. And the rainfall of an entire season this afternoon.

Neemo of Brisbane.

Re: Advocating for privacy in Australia

#79

Post by rswail »

brongondwana wrote: post #30
jen729w wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...and obviously someone who doesn't live in Melbourne. -- John Noble Happy Fastmail customer of, I dunno, 5+ years? Melbourne, Australia :-)

I dunno, I stepped out of the office at 5:45pm to head home and got drenched. 4 seasons in 1 day and all that.

Ah Melbourne in the "between spring and summer"... the storms recently have been impressive. But next week we enter the Xmas slumber and hot weather...

Re: Advocating for privacy in Australia

#80

Post by cyphar »

neotek wrote: post #52
throwaway12iii wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Labor are happy to take this power, and blame the power grab on the others.

Labor had a series of sensible amendments that would have diminished the opportunity for any government to abuse this silly legislation. I think trying to equate both parties is disingenuous and wilfully ignores a mountain of context.

> Labor had a series of sensible amendments that would have diminished the opportunity for any government to abuse this silly legislation. I think trying to equate both parties is disingenuous and wilfully ignores a mountain of context.

A series of amendments that were dropped, despite the political reasons for keeping them (including the Nauru medical bill which didn't pass). Now, there were a series of useful House of Representatives amendments, but a series of useful amendments to an awful idea really isn't much of an improvement.

Feel free to put Labor above the Liberals on your next ballot, but please consider putting a third party (Greens, Science Party, Pirate Party) above them. We have preferential voting for a reason.

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