3 ms·

"Crypto AG was a Swiss company specialising in communications and information security. It was secretly jointly owned by the American Central Intelligence Agenc

"Crypto AG was a Swiss company specialising in communications and information security. It was secretly jointly owned by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and West German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) from 1970 until about 1993, with the CIA continuing as sole owner until about 2018.[1] With headquarters in Steinhausen, the company was a long-established manufacturer of encryption machines and a wide variety of cipher devices." see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG Basically they were world's leading manufacturer of encrypted phones & fax machines for military use and it was revealed that they were controlled by German and US intelligence all along. My suspicion for ProtonMail is only that it's too good to be true: A small amount per month to solve all my privacy/confidentiality needs w/o really inconveniencing me? I'm in!

kelnos 7y ago
At least now that all PM's non-beta apps are open source, you (or someone) can audit all their client-side apps to ensure that it doesn't matter if the sever is trying to do something nefarious. As long as your encryption key and plaintext mail never leaves the client, and the encryption being used is sound, you should be safe. Now, if it's run by the CIA/NSA/whatever, and they have found vulnerabilities in state-of-the-art encryption algorithms that we don't know about, you're hosed. But we're still hosed even if they aren't running the mail server (that just makes it easier for them to get hold of the data), so I'm not sure that's a threat model the average person could reasonably protect against anyway.
pixxel 7y ago
I see. Thanks for the info. PM is competitively priced for the VPN/Email market, so I can’t quite make the leap you mentioned. If your concerns are based on price it would mean the whole market is corrupt. Maybe it is, heh, I’m open to that. I use PM because fuck Google(Gmail), and fuck my ISP for profiting off my private data. I’ve always figured the 3 letter agencies can get access when they want. I’m not doing anything nefarious so I’m happy just to battle against corporate greed. Stay suspicious though!

kelnos 7y ago

At least now that all PM's non-beta apps are open source, you (or someone) can audit all their client-side apps to ensure that it doesn't matter if the sever is trying to do something nefarious. As long as your encryption key and plaintext mail never leaves the client, and the encryption being used is sound, you should be safe. Now, if it's run by the CIA/NSA/whatever, and they have found vulnerabilities in state-of-the-art encryption algorithms that we don't know about, you're hosed. But we're still hosed even if they aren't running the mail server (that just makes it easier for them to get hold of the data), so I'm not sure that's a threat model the average person could reasonably protect against anyway.

pixxel 7y ago

I see. Thanks for the info. PM is competitively priced for the VPN/Email market, so I can’t quite make the leap you mentioned. If your concerns are based on price it would mean the whole market is corrupt. Maybe it is, heh, I’m open to that. I use PM because fuck Google(Gmail), and fuck my ISP for profiting off my private data. I’ve always figured the 3 letter agencies can get access when they want. I’m not doing anything nefarious so I’m happy just to battle against corporate greed. Stay suspicious though!