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Comment by protonmail | Hacker News Reader

Proton team here. We are very much against censorship, in fact that's one of our core principles. However, as mentioned on Reddit, we needed to lock the thread because too many bot and fake accounts were posting.

Many people fail to appreciate the full extent of the defamation campaign that was waged against ProtonVPN by PIA and others. This was not the case of a couple fake accounts that could be handled with manual moderation. We're talking literally hundreds of accounts trying to spread false information, to the point where it became a case study on fake news: https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1036353291662360577

The fact remains that to this day, ProtonVPN remains the only VPN service that has been thoroughly and continuously vetted by an independent third party, Mozilla no less: https://protonvpn.com/blog/mozilla-partnership/

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You really need to stop making false claims of some “defamation campaign.”

Your business was registered in Lithuania and was owned by the owner of Tesonet/Nord. You signed your Android app with “Tesonet” as the name. I pointed these facts out and linked to them. Ever since, I have seen nothing but slanderous and defamatory attacks from you, as an individual and from Proton.

Why do you attack a truthful messenger?

Please stop this activity immediately. I’m asking you as a netizen. I did nothing wrong for pointing out these extremely scary peculiarities with ProtonVPN.

And now you attack me non stop for sharing facts with the internet one time on hacker news with links to sources - which everyone on HN agreed with and even found more peculiarities.

I guess you believe in censorship.

Where this crosses into defamation is using the fact that Proton has a small office in Vilnius (representing <10% of total headcount) to imply, without proof, that Proton is part of some Lithuanian data mining conspiracy.

This defamation becomes willful when an attempt is made to spread this to the press and on social media, even after the story has been debunked.

The data-mining narrative is false, has been verified as false by third parties, and that's where we would like to leave things.

Unfortunately as this false narrative still comes up from time to time, we still need to comment on this from time to time. What we can do from now on, since it bothers you, is to leave PIA out of it when responding. However, that won't change the fact that many people are aware the allegations were first made by PIA. This last point is beyond our reasonable control.

In combination with the fact that the Android App was signed by Tesonet, are you telling me that ME or OTHERS shouldn’t be concerned? Do you realize I was a protonmail user until I saw that shit?

Also, I haven’t seen any verification that anything is false - Tesonets one website CONTINUES to say they conduct said activities.

Finally, the allegations were made by Google Play and the Lithuanian Government.

Stop blaming me for bad decisions you regret to this day. That being said, I would appreciate if you leave my name and PIAs name out. I’m happy to get on an encrypted phone call with you - like on jitsi - to talk things out.

You have my contact since you sent me a cease and desist letter. This is not a VPN/pro internet thing to do by the way.

I don’t dislike you - so stop thinking this is anything else other than me seeing some really scary stuff and pointing it out.

If you saw that PIA’s app was signed by Tesonet wouldn’t you be like wtf?

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