Re: Protonmail and 'Swiss privacy' remind me of Operation Rubicon.

Anonymous wrote:

Are you aware of
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anonymous_remailer&diff=prev&oldid=260821642

The latest removal of that remailer software section happened in 2017.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Anonymous_remailer&diff=next&oldid=774688059>

And yes, we have to resist.  Freedom of speech is too important!


Have a look at the polished Proton Mail Wikipedia article and compare
that with reality:

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* PROTONMAIL provides IP logs to police *

A recently released court document revealed that PROTONMAIL provided IP
address logs of a user to the French authorities, and this was
instrumental in the arrest of the respective user.

* Swiss jurisdiction isn’t what it used to be *

From the company’s inception, PROTONMAIL punctuated that their Swiss

jurisdiction confers them legal independence and that the Swiss Federal
Supreme Court can compel them to only release extremely limited
information.

Here’s a quote from their official website:

“As PROTONMAIL is outside of US and EU jurisdiction, only a court order
from the Cantonal Court of Geneva or the Swiss Federal Supreme Court can
compel us to release the extremely limited user information we have.”

What was previously unknown was what this “extremely limited
information” actually meant. Seemingly, in the past this did not include
IP logs. However, now this seems to have changed as per Swiss
regulations.

Again, it’s important to point out here that contrary to what’s being
reported in other media outlets, it seems that it was not PROTONMAIL who
was at fault in this case.

The data handover happened as a consequence of a legal request by a
Swiss court, something the email provider was legally unable to
challenge.

Therefore, the essence of this case is not the fact how PROTONMAIL
handled this situation, but the fact that seemingly Swiss jurisdiction
does not offer as many protections anymore as it was assumed in the
past.

* Other email providers have surrendered to pressure too *

RISEUP, a US-based email and VPN provider, was legally compelled to
cooperate on two sealed warrants from the FBI. The consequences should
they not obey – jail time and premature closing of the RISEUP company.

In their defense, they had a gag order preventing them from warning
users of these events. They couldn’t even update their Warrant Canary
because of this. Only when the gag orders expired could they breathe a
word about it.

Another famous case is that of TUTANOTA, a German email provider. In
2020, a German court compelled TUTANOTA to log incoming and outgoing
unencrypted emails for a German user.

The German court could access all unencrypted emails sent to and from
the user’s email address, while the encrypted correspondence stayed that
way.

The situation with TUTANOTA is strikingly similar to PROTONMAIL, in that
a court-issued order targeted one individual. The email providers had to
log that specific user’s activities and collect the IP address. Other
users were not affected at all.

From <https://www.privacyaffairs.com/protonmail-surrenders-user-logs/>

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Snake oil everywhere you look.


The best we have are anonymous remailers.  That has to be made public!