[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.