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Comment by akimball | Hacker News Reader

It’s not protection FROM your customers. It is protection FOR your customers. Most customers are not technically astute

A corporation is a power centralization, and government authority can lean on power centralization.

In general, regardless of what their TOS say, never believe that a corporation can't be compelled by the law to do anything they could physically do. CEOs can be jailed; when's the last time we heard of one actually going to jail over user privacy?

The point being made agrees with you, and is just saying that since protonmail can't help but obey sometimes, they should make the effort to educate their customers about that fact and whatever their customers can personally do to mitigate the risks of that fact.

> CEOs can be jailed; when's the last time we heard of one actually going to jail over user privacy?

Ladar Levison from Lavabit came close. But even he admits that was because the FBI wanted to subvert every single Lavabit user's account (attempting vast overreach on the brazen assumption that "we are after Snowden" was going to pull the wool over everybody's eyes). Levison admits though, to having "responded to" at least two dozen subpoenas and complied with at least one warrant before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit#Suspension_and_gag_ord...

> CEOs can be jailed; when's the last time we heard of one actually going to jail, period.

The CEO of the phone company qwest claims that the insider trading charges he got prison for was only brought to court because he refused to allow the installation of NSA surveillance equipment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nacchio

A customer that specifically chooses Proton for privacy, must read and agree to privacy policy, which explicitly states, that Proton may in fact keep temporary IP logs and that user may opt in for login IP logs. Requests from authorities may ask for this kind of information and Proton will have to provide it.

The „opt-in“ part for login logs is particularly interesting, because in fact Proton recommends this as a security best practice. Whether it’s in the best interest of the customer or not, it’s an open question. I would say, in a risk model, where threat of human rights violation by Swiss government is much lower than risks of unauthorized party accessing the account, it makes sense. Tough luck for the criminals that followed this advice.

https://protonmail.com/privacy-policy

Anyone that uses ANY electronic device to plan and arrange clandestine opetations - IS AN IDIOT.

Do tell, how do you plan your clandestine operations?

By using the classics of course.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histiaeus#Ionian_revolt_(499-4...

Sure the bitrate is a bit slow and it's UDP only but our governments have proved over and over again that they can't learn from history.

> In 499 BC, he shaved the head of his most trusted slave, tattooed a message on his head, and then waited for his hair to grow back. The slave was then sent to Aristagoras, who was instructed to shave the slave's head again and read the message, which told him to revolt against the Persians.

Since this was a trusted slave, the tattoo seems unnecessary. The slave could just tell Aristagoras "Histiaeus says to revolt against the Persians".

There is trust and there is trust.

There was enough trust that the slave did not desert and that they were taking the message to the destination.

There was not enough trust that the slave would actually know the CONTENT of the message. As such the slave wouldn't even know to where to desert to :)

The fact that the slave had been signed confirmed the authenticity to the recipient.

All analogue.

ADC means analog is trivially made digital. Analog is not an effective firewall unless it is physically shrouded from all sensor networks.

I am betting on ravens

Do as terrorists and generals do.just use one mail account, never send mail, use the draft feature, and start everything as a discussion about an elaborate real world spy/crime novel.

3 days ago i did this very thing. when the oppressive govt banned internet, i had to talk to someone outside india and then i dictated them some text. reddit keeps ip logs for 100 days so i had a dormant account for over a year. i asked the guy to log in, type that message and post.

that way the govt can demand from reddit that account ip but since the only ip available is from outside india, they cant do shit.

i was ready to dictate base64 image character by character but the internet blockade remained for only 2 days so yeah. there are plenty of ways

You think nobody can tap phone records, when you called someone outside India?

Oppressive government?

ah yes. unless they are actively listening in am i not safe enough as compared to DPI censorship and network analyzers mandated by the said oppressive government?

Mass capture of telephony is real. Voice recognition is real. Text processing is real. All of these are low-tech these days.

> . I know that when an individual uses an electronic device to communicate withothers in order to commit a crime, the individual’s electronic device will generallyserve both as an instrumentality for committing the crime, and also as a storagemedium for evidence of the crime. The electronic devices are an instrumentalityof the crime because it is used as a means of committing the criminal offense.The electronic devices are also likely to be a storage medium for evidence ofcrime. From my training and experience, I believe that an electronic device usedto commit a crime of this type may contain: data that is evidence of how theelectronic device was used; data that was sent or received; and other records thatindicate the nature of the offense.

Right from a recent court filing, search warrant.

If the tech. companies involved have monetized surveillance, and no I am not talking about the kind they do for advertising, but instead the $ for data on users/portal, all that jazz, fees for LE levels of access, cost for responses, etc the LE are also the customers too then?

I'm fine with Proton treating my data as a liability. Give me the tools to take away that liability by only sending them noise through an anonymous email address. I will pay for that.

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