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

On Wed,  5 Jun 2024 16:25:31 +0200 (CEST), Nomen Nescio <[email protected]> wrote:
>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:
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>* 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/>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>Snake oil everywhere you look.
>The best we have are anonymous remailers.  That has to be made public!

"made public" to whom? articles posted to unmoderated usenet newsgroups
have already been made public . . . wikipedia has certainly been useful 
for many categories of research, but is also categorically "mainstream"