I saw this over on reddit and people complaining that they “betrayed” their user base. It’s amazing how many people think just because they’re privacy based that means they won’t respond to a lawful court order.
I saw this over on reddit and people complaining that they “betrayed” their user base. It’s amazing how many people think just because they’re privacy based that means they won’t respond to a lawful court order.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
This is merely an intimidation campaign against people who have valid concerns with the Cop City being built outside of Atlanta.
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.
Fuck ain’t that the truth.