Post #728728

2026-03-06 00:32 UTC

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 -&gt; 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&#39;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&#39;s errand. It doesn&#39;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.

Replies (5)

@notyourfanboy@kolektiva.social 2026-03-06 02:26

@COSAntiFascists Everyone only reads the first paragraph then runs around like a chicken with no head.

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@MHowell@kolektiva.social 2026-03-06 03:10

@COSAntiFascists If you're going to use a VPN to establish a Proton/Tuta account, or grab your email, be sure you know what data they can leak as well. Here is a comparison spreadsheet someone kindly put together several years ago, has not been updated with new VPN providers since (2020?) https://web.archive.org/web/20170107044454/https://thatoneprivacysite.net/vpn-comparison-chart/

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@Pink_black_insr@kolektiva.social 2026-03-06 04:28

@COSAntiFascists its a shame more people are not hip to this. You need to treat security like an onion, and deal with all aspects of OPSEC all the way down the stack.

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@axolotl@kolektiva.social 2026-03-06 06:56

@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)

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@LukefromDC@kolektiva.social 2026-03-07 21:18

@COSAntiFascists A similar case to this exists with media and videographers: a corporate media outlet on receiveing a grand jury subpoena might challenge it in court but won't fall on their sword if it fails. An activists videographer on the other hand will either defy the grand jury or cease to be an activist. Example here is my own response to that 2018 grand jury subpeona after the failed nazi "Unite the Right II" attempt to stage a second Charlottesville in DC. I was prepared to give up my own life to protect the folks being investigated, but the grand jury itself wasn't up for this kind of heavy and folded. Had this been the Washington Post or CNN they would have gotten what they wanted for sure. Note that in the Crimethinc hypothetical about an all-out crackdown and collapse https://crimethinc.com/2025/03/21/survival-a-story-about-anarchists-enduring-mass-raids there is exactly ONE email provider that falls on their sword to protect their users: Riseup. Riseup is activist run so same obligations I have. Here's the relevent text from the Crimethinc hypothetical: "Riseup allegedly melted their servers with thermite during a raid and were all arrested. Protonmail has apparently been collaborating, injecting spyware onto user’s devices, and some people are surprised by this? " AGAIN-that's a hypothetical of the relative responses of activist-owned Riseup vs corporate owned Proton in an all-out crackdown. Proton has no more vested interest in defending us than Riseup does in defending ransomware operators, whon they did in fact allegedly provide information on in one case. Nobody goes to the mat and slugs it out for those whom they have no alleigence to: not Proton for us, and not Riseup for organized crime ransomware operators.

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