However, we need to be clear about what it’s good for (encrypting the contents of email messages between ProtonMail users) and what it requires extra measures to achieve (anonymity for its users and encrypting emails to non-ProtonMail users): ProtonMail is still, in many cases, a good option for activists’ encrypted email, as it provides strong message encryption that’s quick and easy to set up and use correctly, requiring no special technical skills. If all activist-providing services shut down in response to legal requests, we would have a catastrophic loss of infrastructure that would drive many to worse providers, thus posing much more danger to our movements as a whole. Should ProtonMail have heroically shut down their service (as Riseup promises to do) in the face of demands for client info? The answer unfortunately isn’t a simple yes. However, activists would be mistaken (now and in the past and future) to expect any company or its executives to go to prison or shut down their service rather than cooperate to some extent with law enforcement. Nevertheless, the targeting of a climate activist by authorities is so reprehensible that we’re not writing here to defend this company’s actions. Proton appears to have only reluctantly handed over a user’s information (having been compelled by Swiss police, under threat of presumably serious legal penalties, with no venue for challenging this order).
Many activists likely had an understandably strong visceral reaction to the news that Proton had apparently acted as an informant in this case.
Ever since the broadly-trusted, Switzerland-based encrypted email service ProtonMail acknowledged that it helped identify a young French climate activist, organizers have been pondering whether they should continue using ProtonMail accounts.įor the sake of solidarity, the strength of our movements, and the safety of our people, activists must never cooperate with law enforcement, and they need to be able rely on their communication channels to protect them from invasive government overreach.
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