[qwerty456127]

In just so many countries (including those many people never know are in too) the state-led war on privacy and communication freedom is getting hotter and hotter. Some countries do it openly, some manage to look liberal until you look closer. Just try to start marketing a proprietary privacy-oriented messenger app or something like that and the intelligence guys will emerge promptly at your doorstep, demanding you to bake a backdoor in. Sad but true. I don't really know how are we (the people, who value privacy of themselves and of the others) going to win this war while keeping legal, it's an open challenge so far...

[peterburkimsher]

"the intelligence guys will emerge promptly at your doorstep" - for the US, I'm emotionally inclined to agree with you.

ProtonMail was developed in Geneva, where I grew up. It was a spin-off from people who worked at CERN, like the World Wide Web itself.

Geneva is also a United Nations base, and many other NGOs are headquartered/have offices in the area for that reason (the Red Cross, WWF, Amnesty, Greenpeace). There's a lot of local community support for the operators of ProtonMail.

Switzerland is not EU, although it is Schengen. International incidents occur all the time, such as the time I forgot to take my passport when going to school (my parents live in France, but I went to the International School of Geneva in Switzerland). Because people don't need a visa to cross the border, it would be easy for an intimidated web developer to flee the country. Attempting to get an extradition would then require an arrest warrant, which would require a criminal case to be brought against that person in absentia. Although intelligence services can try to threaten ProtonMail (and probably already have), there are a lot of options available in that area to keep individual staff safe.

[secfirstmd]

"Just try to start marketing a proprietary privacy-oriented messenger app or something like that and the intelligence guys will emerge promptly at your doorstep, demanding you to bake a backdoor in"

Nope...Been making one for 3+ years, worked on high risk human rights type stuff for over a decade and never happened.

Surprisingly most people doing things in this space don't have g-men kicking in the door. Live in UK, Ireland and many other countries and hasn't been an issue.

Might not seem real to a lot of people who are affected by certain biases but most Western government type people we meet at conferences etc are actually quietly supportive and respectly agree/disagree with what we are all trying to do. Not eveything is a black or white echo chamber - we are all citizens who understand nuance (for those of us fortunate to live on free countries - of course Turkey is no longer anything near that.)

FWIW Protonmail is very useful for a large chunk of threat models were security is pretty high but implementing PGP in all its various forms is a pain the ass.

[digianarchist]

Protonmail routinely hands over information to the authorities. They also determine themselves what cases should be allowed to bypass the requirements for a search warrant.

https://protonmail.com/blog/transparency-report/

[DomreiRoam]

I just read the provided link and it seems to me that that will not provide anything without a court order.

They say they may decide to terminate an account or preserve the requested account data without a court order.

[digianarchist]

"We rendered assistance to Swiss law enforcement working on this case without having yet received a court order, but with the understanding that an approved court was on its way to us."

Conveniently the page is never update to say whether these court orders were actually delivered.

[protonmail]

We got the court order. 100%. If not we would have taken the requesting agency to court.

[friesen]

Y'all rendered assistance to Swiss law enforcement prior to actually receiving the order?

[digianarchist]

Please update the page stating such.

[Erlich_Bachman]

That is why your privacy-oriented messenger app needs to be decentralized. And open-source.

[Spooky23]

Technolgoists need to remember that tech is nothing without law.

[qwerty456127]

> Technolgoists need to remember that tech is nothing without law.

It works both ways. A law can be almost nothing without technical means to enforce it efficiently. There can be cases that make a law [almost] futile so the governments give it up. E.g. many governments tried to ban alcohol but it's so easy (yet dangerous as it can blow up and set the house on fire, especially if the cook is drunk and/or the hardware is amateur) to produce at home that fighting it seriously just doesn't seem to make any sense. Some governments have tried to ban the phalaris grass as it may contain tiny amounts of ​dimethyltryptamines but it just grows all over everywhere so they have given up the ban as it was almost as ridiculous as it would be to ban sand, flies or whatever this common. The problem is to invent a medium for exchanging messages that is easy to establish independently (no need for uncommon devices, no special requirements to the underlying ISP) yet very hard to detect, compromise or disrupt. This sounds like a serious challenge yet not like an entirely impossible thing provided breakthroughs in mathematics/cryptography, physics and the telecom tech still happen from time to time. Some political/economical factors may also play on our side occasionally. My hope is for the whole Internet to morph into a fully-decentralized distributed network employing DIY P2P links as its organic and vital part. Perhaps this may happen once if something is going to make classic ISPs unprofitable and stimulate growth of MESH networks with something like i2P serving as a layer connecting them in one secure and reliable global network.

[dogma1138]

The technical means to enforce a law are a bunch of guys with sharp sticks.

[adrianN]

But programmers building the tools for perfect surveillance are the ones enabling them to know who to stick.

[qwerty456127]

They can hardly run around sticking everyone for having what everybody can have easily and what is not easily visible unless too many people start collaborating and reporting each other.

[dogma1138]

Take a look at no other than Turkey.

[Erlich_Bachman]

Everyone knows that. And yet the example with alcohol still works, so it's kind of a moot point.

[dogma1138]

Enforcement will never be completely universal and the more "free" the society is in general the harder it would be to enforce it via draconian means.

So the dry laws in the US and in other western (primarily Nordic) countries isn't that great of an example as these were still mainly liberal democracies despite the restrictions.

The similar laws in more authoritarian regimes would work quite differently.

And unfortunately we have too many modern examples of how effective governments can be at suppressing various behaviors and or ideas.

[megous]

It's not entirely nothing. Even if gov. thugs are there to beat you, if you communicated with others safely, at least those people are still protected as long as you will not reveal their identity or whatever you've communicated about.

If the gov. just murders you and gets to your stuff, they can't analyze it to get at more people in your circle.

It just doesn't solve the problem of violent government. But there are still benefits.

[teekert]

Politicians need to remember that The Law is nothing in the face of technology. (You can't block fundamental math, you can't block decentralized apps that hide their traffic as something else, you can't prevent knowledge from leaking out, from anywhere, etc.)

[incognito209357]

You are thinking in absolutes. The politicians don't. They're fine with 99% solutions that cover the general population. The remaining 1% of dissidents will be dealt with by throwing them in jail, not by making the technology impossible to access so that they are forced to give up their efforts. Look at north korea or china for examples.

[soundwave106]

Turn the screws too tight though and the talented will leave for greener pastures. This is definitely happening in Turkey (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-42433668). This has happened in the past too, many times. You describe more the politicians that care more about their power then the general welfare of their nation. North Korea is a great example here.

China's an interesting case, as Xi Jinping is indeed turning the screws tighter as well, so far seemingly without any sort of harm. The historical record on this however suggests this is unwise. Time will tell, I guess. As I see it, at some point, censorship will end up conflicting with the type of knowledge / information needed to allow an economy to prosper.

On encryption, what "law and order" people need to recognize is that any crude tool "designed for law enforcement" will eventually be misused by criminals. Think if there was an enforced national house lock standard that includes a "police master key" that the police could use to open doors. I think most people would instinctively recognize the flaw, that in no short order a "police master key" would easily appear on the black market, making breaking-and-entering very easy (and consequently quite attractive to execute). Not sure why there are blinders on encryption, frankly the Internet needs way more security, not less.

[teekert]

Ok so, let's assume europe and the US will not be like N Korea and China. How is a politician going to stop me from developing an encryption algorithm and using it to send my friends a message? This sounds completely 1984, thought police level insane.

[natvert]

Lawyers and law makers need to remember technology will continually outpace them. Both in execution of ideas and in value creation.

[DomreiRoam]

Lots of our technology cannot work without the support of a complex society and I think you can't have that without court and some kind of rules. We are interdependent.

[golergka]

> the people, who value privacy of themselves and of the others

The problem is that privacy is not the only thing we care about, and the balance between different needs is a complicated political problem - which is exactly the kind of "soft", people problem which complexity a typical software engineer would underestimate.

Turkey is becoming more and more authoritatian, indeed. However, they're also sharing a border with ISIS and there's a lot of terror activities in the region. Fighting such threats always leads to increasing influence of the military and secret services, and their new capabilities will be used both to fight terror and suppress citizens.

These things are a double-edged sword; any simplistic view on this is inadequate, regardless of whether it's positive or negative.