ProtonMail Logs Activist's IP Address With Authorities After Swiss Court Order

The_King

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Aug 2, 2020
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There is no EU government that labels any and all activists as criminals. France and Switzerland certainly are not doing that in this case.

Since Europol is involved that means the so-called "peaceful Youth for Climate" activists did something criminal across national borders. Evidently it is at such a level that 3 nation-state agencies all agreed, and the Swiss government gave the non-cooperating Proton CEO no choice. He either cooperates or goes to jail for obstruction. it is almost a certainty that he has put himself into this same position multiple times. Nobody did it to him. He does it to himself through the choices he makes.

There is a minority of activists that are militant and use violence and property damage to further the goals of their ideology. They try to bring change via intimidation and coercion. They are criminals and need to be pursued to fullest extent of the law. And that is exactly what is happening in this case.
Not much info on why the French activist was arrested from Google. I need to find a better source for News than Google.
 

SpiderWeb

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Aug 21, 2020
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The weakness in ProtonMail is that they put all their eggs in one basket: Switzerland.

-Why is metadata still not encrypted? The excuse has existed for many years but there are ways to enable search client-side without breaking encryption.
-If they are serious they would have worked on a decentralized system that is end-to-end encrypted and serves as a backup if one server site gets shut down.
-Why not use your ProtonVPN backbone to tunnel emails across the web effectively creating a Tor for emails?
-And why is the onion site of ProtonMail only partially on the hidden network? Some elements force people to navigate to the clearweb...

There are so many ways that this could have been avoided and ProtonMail is doing less than the minimum they promised. There is just too much incompetence here that makes me suspicious that they are intentionally leaving these holes for authorities. lol
 
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Bushman

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Sep 9, 2017
55
It seems to me that the marketing of VPNs confuses the user on 2 subjects confidentiality and anonymity which generally leads to the majority of users believing that anonymity is promised to them even for messaging. It doesn't really exist on the Internet because states monitor the Internet regardless of the country. The debate in democracies is for the citizen to know what is being watched.
Is it abnormal in a democracy in the event of use for terrorist activities, for cyber crimes, for proven racism or subversion to deliver information on such individuals at the request of the courts?
Protonmail must submit to Swiss law as each country also has because I do not know of any companies or individuals from sovereign democratic countries that may not respect the law.
Finally to imply that France and Switzerland would resemble lawless countries like many other dictatorships in the world is to ignore them.
 

Bushman

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Sep 9, 2017
55
Maybe they are being charged with stealing a portrait of Macron from a government installation. Currently, there are like 91 militant Youth for Climate activists convicted and fined 500 € for stealing Macron portraits from government buildings.

C'mon young people. Be so petty as to steal pictures then be outraged and call it government oppression because you are charged with a crime. Behaving this way you are not helping your cause. :ROFLMAO:
I encourage you to remove the portraits of Putin, Xi Jinping, Ebrahim Raïssi .... well of all the most illustrious democrats on the planet and tell us, if you can afterwards, what sanctions you will suffer?;)
 

CyberTech

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Nov 10, 2017
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Encrypted email service ProtonMail has become embroiled in a minor scandal after responding to a legal request to hand over to Swiss police a user's IP address and details of the devices he used to access his mailbox – resulting in the user's arrest.

Police were executing a warrant obtained by French authorities and served on their Swiss counterparts through Interpol, according to social media rumours that ProtonMail chief exec Andy Yen acknowledged to The Register.




At the time of writing, the company's website said: "We believe privacy and security are universal values which cross borders."

After data from ProtonMail was handed to the Swiss and then French police, the author of a left-wing political activists' blog in France wrote (en français) that a group called

Youth for Climate had been targeted:
The police also noticed that the collective communicated via a ProtonMail email address. They therefore sent a requisition (via EUROPOL) to the Swiss company managing the messaging system in order to find out the identity of the creator of the address. ProtonMail responded to this request by providing the IP address and the fingerprint of the browser used by the collective. It is therefore imperative to go through the tor network (or at least a VPN) when using a ProtonMail mailbox (or another secure mailbox) if you want to guarantee sufficient security.

ProtonMail has said in the past that it does not collect user data and implements end-to-end encryption and repeated that over the weekend, saying: "Under no circumstances however, can our encryption be bypassed, meaning emails, attachments, calendars, files, etc, cannot be compromised by legal orders."

 

Moonhorse

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Yandex works with the Russian FSB.
Baidu works with the CCP Ministry of State Security.

Definitely much worse than France, Europol and the Swiss government.
If you follow world politics at all, thats pretty much the opposite of this
 

Moonhorse

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Opposite of what?

Switzerland is worse than Russia and CCP?

:ROFLMAO:
Yes but its not forum for politics, and i would get banned for strong opinions about nato, un and facism in europe against the russia

I think russia > finland , even im born in finland
 

Zorro

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Jun 11, 2019
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Yandex works with the Russian FSB.
Baidu works with the CCP Ministry of State Security.
The list goes on ...
Microsoft and Google work with the NSA and the CIA. :cool:
Avira works with the German Federal Intelligence Service.:cool:
And Trend Micro submits personally to the Japanese emperor ⛩️
 
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Moonhorse

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The list goes on ...
Microsoft and Google work with the NSA and the CIA. :cool:
Avira works with the German Federal Intelligence Service.:cool:
And Trend Micro submits personally to the Japanese emperor ⛩️
Honeypots, honeypots everywhere
 

Moonhorse

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And yet you came here and made an obnoxiously absurd statement claiming Switzerland is more repressive than Russia?

Fascism against Russia? :ROFLMAO: Where? Receipts?

Yandex does cooperate with the FSB:


Baidu does cooperate with the CCP:

Sorry to say but you probably believe in tooth fairy too ( i dont bother to continue this as it wont server mt anyhow) No hate
 
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Moonhorse

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SumTingWong

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Apr 2, 2018
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No big corporation is going to protect your privacy. We go by trusting their policy, but we don't know what they are doing behind our back a lot of time. Best is you write and develop your own email client.
 

dabluez98

Level 3
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Oct 2, 2018
138

this should’ve been a bad dream but it is real - speaks to power of property and real estate values these days -

Yandex works with the Russian FSB.
Baidu works with the CCP Ministry of State Security.

Definitely much worse than France, Europol and the Swiss government.

Yes last thing i remeber french company is under court order for aiding isis. basically if you are tortured by france it will be much smoother than chinese torture- i heard italian police is specially soft on the torture. only russia and china scary.
 

dabluez98

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Oct 2, 2018
138
anyway to me this sounds like private prosecution using government tools - its justice alright
 

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