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 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.
Proton can be legally ordered to start recording the IP address of a specific user. That’s why they recommend that you always connect through their Onion site.
Other than that and if that’s possible, I think it may also be possible to legally order Proton to keep the unencrypted form of incoming emails for a specific user, but Proton did not said it in the article, and Swiss laws might protect them against that. It’s certainly possible technically, and good to be aware of it, I think.
Sorry but I can’t open the second link, as it actively resists it. I suspect though that the problem with Tutanota was not their encryption, but their legal system, which required them to keep a copy of the incoming emails.
Also, don’t mistake me, I’m all for protonmail, and I mean this. But did you know they only encrypt the email contents? Metadata like title, sender recipient and other things in the mail header don’t get encrypted.
you’re right about the IP thing. that’s a good clarification rather than just “spy”. i suppose it’s less dire than Tutanota not encrypting incoming mails if you use tor and vpn by default.
yeah basically it more or less proves that swiss privacy is a bit stronger in this case vs Germany.
on the proton encryption, i did know about this but does that apply to proton-to-proton, proton-to-NonProton, or both? if you have details on this let me know.
either way the fact that they dont makes me feel that proton is a similar honeypot to signal and telegram, where they make a compromise with the five eyes, to give them metadata even if actual contents are safe. metadata can be much more powerful than contents often times
in general email is just the worst protocol when it comes to privacy. sadly.