Colorado Springs Anti-FascistsMar 6

A lot of people talking about dumping Proton right now are misunderstanding what actually happened.

Feds were able to coerce the Swiss government to coerce Proton to hand over whatever data they had on an anonymous Stop Cop City email address, that was being investigated for terrorism.

That metadata included credit card details information for the account, which is very difficult to anonymize.

Proton offers cash payments to work around this obvious security flaw.

If you must pay for a Proton account for a radical project, pay with cash (you can mail it) or washed crypto (Monero -> Bitcoin).

All credit card payments are traceable, even to a privacy-focused company.

Your security model should not rely on a business to fight the state on your behalf.

Your email or VPN provider is not going to risk prison time for your $5/mo. It's just not going to happen, at least for anything commercial. Tuta and every other email privacy-focused email company will comply with court orders.

Trying to find the perfect email provider is a fool's errand. It doesn't exist.

You can however anonymize your useage of privacy friendly services like Proton, Tuta, or Mailbox by not entering your credit card number, phone number, name, personal email, or IP to that account.

Show threadaxolotl solidarioMar 6

@COSAntiFascists "Your email or VPN provider is not going to risk prison time for your $5/mo."

- Taking a risk for $5/mo, no. But given the masses talking about dumping Proton rn, this decision is going to cost them much, much more than $5/mo.

- Im no lawyer, but im pretty sure this isnt a case of going straight to prison. Unless Switzerland is a totalitarian state and i didnt notice, there are legal measures they could have taken instead of immediately folding.

- Selling themselves as the 'privacy' option then selling out an activist without so much as a whimper is a bad look, and they deserve to lose trust and users.

- This wouldn't happen with riseup (like, they dont charge, so its literately impossible)

Show threadRed
@axolotl I had to look up riseup - this looks amazing at first glance! Have I just been completely living under a rock, or is my surprise that more people aren't talking about this org justified?
Mar 6 at 7:42amWeb
Show threadaxolotl solidarioMar 6
@r3dr3clus3 yeah, i dont know. they have been around for quite awhile and provide a bunch of rad services for free. Some years ago they locked down new email accounts and you can only get one with a code from an og user. I assume this is the main reason they arent well known anymore.
But most of their services are open. Their vpn is free and easy, and i use their pads to collaborate on (non-sensitive) texts pretty much daily.