[PLUG] Proton mail not exempt from surveillance

[Ben Koenig]

Legally speaking all servers keep IP logs. This is an intersection between technical definition and legal terminology.

In order for a host to communicate over the internet, it needs to hold onto the IP address of the host it communicates with. It can hold onto this IP in RAM for 5 seconds or log it to persistent storage for future use. Either way it obtained the IP and can choose to do something with it. Lawyers and politicians don't give a flying fuck about the difference between an IP in a text file and a log file sitting in volatile memory.

The legal explanation of this is clearly stated here:
https://protonmail.com/blog/climate-activist-arrest/

"As detailed in our transparency report, our published threat model, and also our privacy policy, under Swiss law, Proton can be forced to collect information on accounts belonging to users under Swiss criminal investigation. This is obviously not done by default, but only if Proton gets a legal order for a specific account."

What happens when psg.com gets a court order? ;-)
-Ben

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐

On Tuesday, September 7th, 2021 at 7:24 PM, Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> wrote:

> > Not to cause a flame war or get into the weeds of how email works, but
> >
> > no email service you use is immune to a subpoena or court order - in
> >
> > any country. ...
>
> protonmail said publicly in their adverts that they did not keep ip
>
> logs. turns out they did. today they removed that section of their
>
> braggadocio.
>
> randy