The term "lawful" and "court" is meaningless in this context.
Edit: It's like saying "Mafia Don's Capo decided...."
this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2026
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I see what youre saying, but the longer I live under us rule, the more all laws seem this way.
There are no absolutes, and no one is perfect, but the US is among the most egregious and corrupt examples in the world.
This US didn't order them to do this. The Swiss court did.
Did I stutter?
No, you just seem confused.
Read one post above mine that triggered dude and get back to me.
I don't really see how proton is the bad guy here. If they gave VPN logs, sure, they claim to not keep those. They make no claims that their email service is completely anonymous, though. If you're going to do something that riles up the feds, use a disposable email or pay for email using a method that isn't easily traceable. If this person had done that, proton wouldn't have had any info to respond to the subpoena with.
Honestly it's my take. I have proton. I know i'm paying with a credit card so if they were served a warrant for my information, they'd get it. BUT they wouldn't get anything from my email because 1) It's encrypted and 2) it's encrypted with my own key and not the one generated by Proton when you create an account. I casually wonder if someone didn't fully understand the nuance of things like this in the modern surveilance state.
Unless I'm misreading the article, that's not at all what happened here and even with encrypted emails, you'd still have been caught. They knew the email address that allegedly belonged to the instigator; they just needed to connect that email address to an actual person, not to see the contents of their emails. The payment data made that connection.
- It's encrypted and 2) it's encrypted with my own key
None of this is of any use if the mailbox of the sender or recipient of the email is not also encrypted.
If nothing else, you don't hand over more information to help them develop leads, and it makes more work for them having to subpoena the providers for suspected contacts and hope they get the emails they want from them. Depending on what it is they want to get you for and how many contacts you had that they would need to follow up on, that could be enough to make it no longer cost-effective to pursue.
Yeah, I'm also using proton and knew about this type of situation happening before. If I was going to do something illegal/disruptive enough to attract the attention of police, I simply would not attach my personal email to it. I just don't see why anyone would think that the police won't have a way of tracing a service that you paid for with banking details in your name back to you. It's just shitty opsec.
If I was going to do something illegal/disruptive enough to attract the attention of police, I simply would not attach my personal email to it.
Fair, but let's be real, protesting the Copy City in Atlanta shouldn't be something that captures police attention since it's well within free speech rights. Literally, as it says in the article:
404 Media is not publishing the person’s name because they don’t appear to have been charged with a crime, according to searches of court databases.
This is merely an intimidation campaign against people who have valid concerns with the Cop City being built outside of Atlanta.
Broadly, members were protesting the building of a large police training center next to the Intrenchment Creek Park in Atlanta, and actions also included camping in the forest and lawsuits. Charges against more than 60 people have since been dropped.
The blog in question documents protest events that have happened, including ones that are law breaking. There is no proof that the person who runs the blog has any direct involvement with the events they cover, despite their political stripe supporting the same goal of dropping the contract to stop the funding and building of Cop City in the forest outside of Atlanta. Calling people to action to protest is not the same as calling them to commit crimes in protest.
Because while I agree with you, we need to be clear here. Legal protest and coverage of protest (including coverage of crimes done by individuals at a protest) are not crimes nor should those acts alone be enough to get the FBI on your ass.
Oh 100%. We live in a nightmare dystopian hellscape where rights are made up and the laws don't matter. All the better reason to not publicly oppose the freaks in power in an easily traceable way.
We live in a nightmare dystopian hellscape where rights are made up and the laws don’t matter.
Fuck ain't that the truth.
Proton is in the bad, or at least in the wrong, for keeping PII about a client to identify via payment option (and did extra wrong by not securing it enough). Honestly, this could all have been avoided if Proton offered a one-time payment service, like SDF does, so that once the payment is received the connecting information can be deleted or expired (or even better: never collected). But a rent-seeking grift model such as subscriptions likely precludes this capability.
You are never anonymous if you use payment information that literally has your name attached to it
Proton has recently partnered with proxystore, so you can pay for proton services with monero to avoid this risk
I didn't know that. Cool!
Just pay no attention to the security services that fund crypto, they definetly do it for your privacy.
I think you don't know anything about monero but okay
yes i am sure that will do it
Paying with monero is just one important part of a healthy and balanced ~~breakfast~~ opsec
i don’t see this as "proton being the bad guy", or them "betraying their userbase", i see this as proton being fundamentally unable to offer the kinds of service they claim to offer
they’re a lot better than google or microsoft, for sure, but still not fully private. if you have any important privacy requirements, don’t rely on big commercial services. this goes to others like tutanota, too (in fact there’s credible evidence that tuta is a honeypot lol)
I agree with your first sentiment, proton's not the bad guy here.
I disagree with your second sentiment, that they are unable to services they claim to.
They never claim to make you anonymous. They claim to offer privacy focused services, helping you stay private and not selling your information for profit like big tech does. Privacy is not anonymity.
If you want to be a ghost you need to take far stricter measures than buying a proton account.
What evidence? I have never heard of this.
an RCMP intelligence official testified in court that it was a honeypot
That counterpart, according to Ortis, briefed him about a "storefront" that was being created to attract criminal targets to an online encryption service. A storefront, said Ortis, is a fake business or entity, either online or bricks-and-mortar, set up by police or intelligence agencies.
The plan, he said, was to have criminals use the storefront — an online end-to-end encryption service called Tutanota — to allow authorities to collect intelligence about them.
"So if targets begin to use that service, the agency that's collecting that information would be able to feed it back, that information, into the Five Eyes system, and then back into the RCMP," Ortis said.
of course tuta replied, with their reply basically being "no we're not, you have no proof". so.
Anyone selling you end-2-end encryption that's delivered on a browser on a site they control is sus.
Given the CEO's tweets, this does not surprise me.
Please, go on?
the ceo made vague pro trump tweets and claimed that jd vance was deeply caring about the average joe and met with them.
https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-trump-republicans/
Privacy and anonimity are two wholly different concepts. Proton offers the first, not the latter.
People always thinks privacy means the state of being private, and the state of not being seen by others, just because its the definition. But its not.
My take after reading the response as well: I think it's good that 404 reported this. Also, I think Proton acted responsibly. If you don't read the 404 headline with a "Proton is a snitch!!!" mindset but more as "This is a thing that happened", then there is some value in this story. Proton had to cooperate, they explain why and what users can do to minimize risks. Be aware.
Thanks for posting this!
Thank you for acknowledging!
Want privacy? Want private email?
Host it yourself
wait who was telling me that the swiss government is still a black hole of anonymity even after KYC because i want to laugh in their face