Who Is Being Monitored?
tutanota.com
tutanota.com
Now what do I do? Avoid privacy-focused email addresses for anything in daily life. It seems to be a battle that cannot be won.
What makes you think this person isn't black?
Maybe the first step we can take to ensuring all people are treated with dignity and respect is to not assume Group X is that group other there, an other. Maybe we can instead assume Group X is everywhere.
I can’t - is there a reason you can’t name the service?
Not GP, but the process is pretty simple:
You'll need to be able to send, receive, store and forward emails. A variety of resources are required to do this. Note that pretty much all of the software suggestions are available through the default software trees of just about every Linux/BSD distribution.
1. You'll need a domain;
2. You'll need DNS services to publish your MX records with DMARC/DKIM/SPF[17] and/or DANE[18] support. If you can/want to host your own (not difficult), lots of folks like Unbound[0][1]. And while some folks hate on BIND[2][3], it's always a good choice. There are many others[4] as well;
3. You'll need a Mail Transfer Agent[5] (MTA) to send and receive emails. Postfix[6][7] is very popular. Some folks use Exim[8][9]. And others use the venerable sendmail[10][11];
4. You'll also need a Mail Delivery Agent[12] to store your mailboxes and serve them via a web interface and/or your mail client. Lots of folks like Dovecot[13][14]. Others use Cyrus[15][16].
[0] https://www.nlnetlabs.nl/projects/unbound/about/
[1] https://www.redhat.com/sysadmin/bound-dns
[3] https://www.firewall.cx/linux-knowledgebase-tutorials/system...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_DNS_server_softw...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_transfer_agent
[7] http://www.postfix.org/documentation.html
[9] https://www.exim.org/exim-html-current/doc/html/spec_html/ch...
[10] ftp://ftp.sendmail.org/
[11] https://www.sendmail.org/~ca/email/doc8.12/op.html
[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Message_delivery_agent
[15] https://www.cyrusimap.org/
[16] https://www.cyrusimap.org/quickstart.html
[17] https://trendlineinteractive.com/resources/article/what-are-...
[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS-based_Authentication_of_Na...
Edit: Added link for DMARC/DKIM/SPF and reference/link for DANE.
But you still need to know everything above.
Then once you done this a few times, you have your own niche in tech - email is old and going no where and job security is ensured, it's funny, tech really is a circle.
Thanks!
A fair point. Although the bulk of that deployment time is, regardless of platform, going to be the configuration.
And since pretty much all the tools needed can be installed via 'apt-get'/'dnf install', etc. through default software repositories, is there any real advantage for more technical folks (as we generally see here)to use mailinabox over someone's preferred *nix configuration?
I'm not being snarky here, I'm not familiar with mailinabox and genuinely curious.
But having a place where to exchange (haha get it) info and see whats targeting/affecting most self hosted email users is really a time savings vs having to scope through your own logs and wonder what broke, or what's wrong.
How exactly did you find this out? I don't think you generally get letter mail saying "Hey, we're monitoring you now". How do you differentiate monitoring behavior from something like an individual service flagging an individual transaction because of your email and killing it?
I'm always deeply skeptical of claims like this since they're almost always unverifiable by any party (including the commenter).
Therefore, encryption is their enemy. For now. Until they break it all. Or until we break away.
I'm not saying these measures are perfect or fair, but they are not related to government (though government may also use them); they are just obvious ways to prevent unwanted activity such as spam, fraud, hacking attacks, etc.
> Their AI determined that people using particular email providers need to be watched
How do you know that government has concluded 'particular providers need to be watched', and that the decision was performed by an AI?
> for using a privacy focused email address when signing up for services operated by a government entity
How do you know the cause?
people act like anonymity is some kind of right, but it really wasn't in the past. You needed to prove who you are to get a loan, drivers license, etc.
I think it's not that anonymity is a right, it's that other rights are strongly impacted by the lack of anonymity.
I imagine few people doubt the practicality of trust in a transaction or application as you mention.
But we should be able to sit in a cafe and discuss our plans for cultural subversion and last night's sports event without the *till* shopping us out to the thought police.
I have no idea how, but he issued me a loan on that vehicle using incorrect information for basically everything except my address. Name, birthday, etc. did not match. Somehow the system had a completely different set of records. When I called the lender about it, they didn't even seem surprised. Just took a phone call to get everything corrected and a new set of paperwork mailed out to me.
We can still do that, it's called paying with cash. Paper money is the people's money.
> Your examples of loan, licence etc are not like 99% of interactions, and those can be handled as special cases like before
With regards to loans, it is possible for state governments to establish regional public land loan offices to issue equity loans in reference to the production and replacement cost of existent tangible personal property fixed or held on site without monitoring all of the purchases of movable personal property by the borrower to determine credit-worthiness. The borrower just has to prove there is some tangible artifact of personal property which exists, which the loan office can auction if the debt goes bad or write off if the artifact is destroyed.
We just have to mandate the loan offices don't do something stupid, like issue loans against the excess value of real estate attributable land scarcity and resell mortgages to private investors which will resell derivatives, to avoid generating a real estate bubble and the accumulation of $100+ trillion in derivatives. Additionally we'd probably need to replace many regressive taxes with distributive land taxes to ensure that households and cooperatives had cheaper access to land in order to obtain a deed or long term lease granting the security for spatially fixed personal property necessary to qualify for such loans.
anonymity is a recent thing
it was for tens of thousands of years in the past
I wonder: Few people traveled and communities were smaller, so generally everyone knew you.
When your payment was declined, the company 1) had access to this watch list that you're on, 2) was able to share with you that you were on a watch list, and 3) you were able to figure out why this is. This sounds very unbelievable to me. The data that comes from programs like this isn't generally being passed around to businesses, and if it is, the support folks are not going to be in the know.
It still sounds more like you're being hit by algorithmic blacklisting than that you're on some secret not-secret blacklist. That, or you got added to a public sector blacklist, by some security company because you use ProtonMail which has issues with abuse by fraudsters.
You're correct, I misremembered how you wrote that. Unfortunately, that makes it even less believable. How did you find out that you were being monitored, and why was that disclosed to you? Who disclosed this monitoring to you? Did you run some sort of FOIA request (whatever your nation's version is)? You're making a very big claim with very little to substantiate. Keep in mind ProtonMail has over 50 million users, It beggars belief that using PM is sufficient to get yourself monitored in any serious capacity.
This is ultimately a question of freedom vs security. Said government entity is prioritizing security over freedom.
You don't need nefarious motives to explain that particular behavior. Operate a store or payment system without rejecting easy-to-sign-up-for-anonymously email addresses, especially ones with a free tier, and you'll find out very quickly why they downrank the trustworthiness of, or simply block, such services. Automated credit card fraud is huge and no fun at all to deal with.
There are fully anonymous coins like Monero, ZCash, etc.
This. Good old fashioned police-work is needed instead of back-doors into our favorite messaging apps.
The Internet and app ecosystems can't work properly if they're weakened by LEAs. People would just not use them if they know they're being watched. I'm not saying the majority would switch to Linux phones either (like Librem 5 & Pinephone), simply that the two dominating app-stores (Play & Apple Store) would be phased out and people would probably fund independent FLOSS app stores to replace them.
In the end, the people will speak out and respond to back-doors. In-fact we need FLOSS app stores right now (Similar to F-Droid[0], but baked in as the default store), and they need to be funded properly & they need sound economic incentives to continue. No more 'free' apps where you pay for them with your data. It's possible to have FLOSS apps that are not gratis where people pay for them with money, not their data.
(The reason I suggest we switch to FLOSS app stores is that the apps can easily be checked for back-doors or malicious code since the code is open source. It makes the apps readily available for audits too)
We may see most mainstream services play along - maybe "voluntarily", as good citizens - because they would probably be quite happy to lose the dodgy contingent of their userbase. Let them be herded!
That does leave people who care about privacy, but aren't outlaws, with an awful dilemma - migrate to the few platforms that still offer confidentiality (along with the outlaws), and instantly make yourself a suspect - or give up and stay with the mainstream services, trusting that you'll be OK so long as you've got nothing to hide.
All of these are understandable forces and motivations - it'll be interesting to see how they net out. I do think the powers that be are overlooking what an appalling precedent / justification they offer, both for contemporary authoritarian powers in other countries, and the future authoritarians that from time to time form part of the government in our own countries.
I don't think people are that stupid, they know they have everything to hide from someone, and no idea who someone is. People think they can hide in the herd, the zebra defense. So long as my stripes are the same as everyone else's the lions won't get me. And they are not wrong, its a poor substitute for anonymity but it is a substitute. Problem is with our every move cataloged and indexed, and with searching bots and AI becoming more and more complex.. Its becoming not good enough to just look the same, we have to have the same political views, the same opinions, the same interests. There are other countries that have taken this to its natural conclusion and; having grown up in a democracy, its depressing seeing the level of subjugation humans will put up with.
"Every time you use encryption, you're protecting someone who needs to use it to stay alive." -- Bruce Schneier
However, in the meantime, I think the average citizen has largely caught up. For example, even on reddit, comments are exceedingly pro-privacy. I also remember net neutrality being overwhelmingly important to people, even the ones who had never programmed in their life.
I think it's time to unlearn that helplessness, because I think the average citizen is informed enough to care and finally is starting to care. A lot of the old fox-news-watchers have since passed on, and now nearly every citizen uses the internet daily. Examples of corrupts government are no longer hypothetical sci-fi exercises, they are public knowledge.
Not from the US, but could you have imagined a US conservative arguing for free speech and against censorship in 2010? They were always big on the constitution, but very selectively for this topic and there was some kind of flip.
But even a disingenuous introduction to matters of digital privacy and mass censorship is an education. 1/20 of them may enter into a relationship with the subject separate from the people clumsily manipulating them. Part of the right-wing revival (really a Eustace Mullins revival) amongst average people is a sense that they are being deceived and a consequent lust for secret, forbidden knowledge. Real conspiracies are going to be more interesting to the smarter ones than the ancient, fake conspiracies that are constantly being pumped by people asking for money.
TBH, the claim that normal people don't care about privacy has been almost exclusively used to silence normal people who are concerned about privacy on the basis of zero evidence. I remember being "in the know" about when and how people were being tracked and being paranoid about things most people weren't paranoid about, but when I explained it to people, it also bothered them - they hadn't 1) realized they were that interesting, or 2) realized how granular and concrete the records they leave behind are.
I've virtually never met someone who wasn't concerned about privacy other than David Brin-familiar nerdballs and radical devotees of communal living and/or eastern philosophy. What people don't know is how computers work, and people who build their business models around surveillance and rent-seeking make a huge effort to obscure how computers work.
But lo and behold tutanota.de is using DANE for SMTP. I know the last time I checked they didn't have it, and I think that was a few months ago or maybe a year.
Good job Tutanota!
Government always thinks they're the good guys, but we increasingly become aware of abuses by agencies and people working in government, and also companies who increasingly exploit people with tactics that are always ahead of lawmakers.
I really doubt those governments even care about children or their abuse, all they want is to break encryption for survelliance, and they are using a sensitive topic about children for their own benefit.
Disgusting.
While I am sure there are instances of politicians invoking child pornography to argue against encryption, I do not remember any specific instances of it from the recent past.
Claims of "massive propaganda" are stretching the facts beyond what's reasonable. Indeed, it might itself be the only instance of propaganda on the issue.
[0] https://www.heise.de/news/Crypto-Wars-Deutsche-EU-Ratspraesi...
It's them who are the most vulnerable to corruption. It's them who are most likely to abuse their power, including child abuse.
It's them who are most likely to think that they're some privileged caste, so they can do "whatever they want" (c) Trump.
Don't worry, they have been and will be. Monitoring dragnets filled with normal people are attractive because squeezing a dime out of a few million people is profitable. But the real monitoring will be of wealthy, powerful people, for the purpose of manipulation and blackmail.
selling some weed == selling photos of a baby being raped? Probably not right? So what is the scalar of impact on society & the victims of these crimes? 10x? 100x? 1,000x? 1,000,000x?
What about terrorism? Is death by terrorism == death by murder? Based on the way the two are treated for 'privacy' reasons it would apper that being shot and killed by a terrorist is about 1,000x more impactful than being shot and killed by a school shooter which in turn is about 100x being shot by the guy who lives down the street.
It is a fundamental fear that people believe they can get rid of if they constrain others.