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It is impossible to run an email service without being able to decrypt data. You can search your entire email archive in seconds, from a phone on the end of a

It is impossible to run an email service without being able to decrypt data. You can search your entire email archive in seconds, from a phone on the end of a slow network, and it just works. End-to-end encryption isn't compatible with the way people want to use email. We are happy for people to use PGP, though of course we don't offer an interface to it because that would involve sharing keys with us and defeat the purpose. We've addressed the legal framework we work in in the linked blogpost, and addressed precisely the scenario you lay out. Governments change, and they love to posture, but the reality is the laws, not the soundbytes. We would be aware of the outage - have you seen how reliable NYI are? http://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/10/security-availability/ http://blog.fastmail.com/2014/12/10/security-availability/ They don't have outages. I'm much more worried about the NSA (or any of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_agencies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_intelligence_agencies) knowing of a hole in one of the pieces of software that we use and injecting a rootkit with that. Thankfully the same security practices that defend against hackers are also useful here.

alfiedotwtf 12y ago
To add to this, and this needs to be emphasised, is that we make it clear to anybody requesting data that there are legal channels with due process to go through which work. See the following for more info - http://blog.fastmail.com/2013/10/07/fastmails-servers-are-in-the-us-what-this-means-for-you/ http://blog.fastmail.com/2013/10/07/fastmails-servers-are-in...
- sasas 12y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srk9c4rOgZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srk9c4rOgZ4 Pretty scary isn't it?
  - hellbanner 12y ago
    Yes. Thanks for sharing this video. The minister refused to answer the guys question, just said "We collect what we need to do to our job, and stop asking this question."
  - ownagefool 12y ago
    One wonders if he's too stupid to understand the question, doesn't know the answer but can't be seen to not be answering, or if he's just trying to keep the options open. All of the above are scary. But this is not without precedence. The UK chancellor couldn't even answer which tax greggs should be paying.
na85 12y ago
>It is impossible to run an email service without being able to decrypt data. Counterpoint: seems to me that protonmail is doing exactly that. >We've addressed the legal framework we work in in the linked blogpost, and addressed precisely the scenario you lay out. Governments change, and they love to posture, but the reality is the laws, not the soundbytes. You haven't addressed any of the points I initially raised. Your blog post skirts the issue quite handily. >They don't have outages. Anyone claiming 100% uptime are fraudsters.
- brongondwana 12y ago
  They don't claim 100% uptime. They just happen to have it. We had a 30 second outage on ONE power circuit during hurricane sandy - we noticed because two non-production devices weren't dual power, and of course the notifications from the servers about their dual power being interrupted. We've been there over 10 years, so we actually kind of know, rather than guessing, how reliable they are. What exactly do you want us to say? We aren't participating in any dragnets. We've said that plenty of times. If you think that the NSA is in our datacentre, tapping our wires. Well, I was there in July and I moved all the devices by hand. I didn't pull them open and audit the circuit boards - but there's a level beyond which reality is impossible to distinguish from paranoia. We don't follow our hardware from the silicon sands through all the steps before it reaches our datacentre. Of course it could have nasties injected in it. We design our security processes to make it hard for both hackers AND agencies to attack us with a bunch of things. Not running the same switch with VLANs for both internal and external networks is a big thing - switches are a notorious attack vector. Our internal network devices are fully isolated from the external links. And then - the security agencies reading your email isn't even the biggest risk to your security and your life for 99.9999% of people. We're not going to throw out tons of features that improve their life for a perception of improved security - so end to end encryption isn't a sane response.
- kijin 12y ago
  > Counterpoint: seems to me that protonmail is doing exactly that. ProtonMail is security theater. It is simply not possible for a webmail service to maintain a zero-knowledge policy. They can capture your password every time you log in, and use that to decrypt your email if they want to. Or they could send you a backdoored version of their own JS-based encryption library the next time you visit protonmail.ch. (Hushmail got under fire for doing this a few years ago at the behest of the Canadian government.) At the end of the day, the only thing that is actually protecting your email at ProtonMail is the fact that Switzerland is not yet known to be collaborating with the NSA. If they claim otherwise, they're either lying, incompetent, or seriously lacking in imagination.

alfiedotwtf 12y ago

To add to this, and this needs to be emphasised, is that we make it clear to anybody requesting data that there are legal channels with due process to go through which work. See the following for more info - http://blog.fastmail.com/2013/10/07/fastmails-servers-are-in-the-us-what-this-means-for-you/ http://blog.fastmail.com/2013/10/07/fastmails-servers-are-in...

sasas 12y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srk9c4rOgZ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srk9c4rOgZ4 Pretty scary isn't it?
- hellbanner 12y ago
  Yes. Thanks for sharing this video. The minister refused to answer the guys question, just said "We collect what we need to do to our job, and stop asking this question."
- ownagefool 12y ago
  One wonders if he's too stupid to understand the question, doesn't know the answer but can't be seen to not be answering, or if he's just trying to keep the options open. All of the above are scary. But this is not without precedence. The UK chancellor couldn't even answer which tax greggs should be paying.

na85 12y ago

>It is impossible to run an email service without being able to decrypt data. Counterpoint: seems to me that protonmail is doing exactly that. >We've addressed the legal framework we work in in the linked blogpost, and addressed precisely the scenario you lay out. Governments change, and they love to posture, but the reality is the laws, not the soundbytes. You haven't addressed any of the points I initially raised. Your blog post skirts the issue quite handily. >They don't have outages. Anyone claiming 100% uptime are fraudsters.

brongondwana 12y ago
They don't claim 100% uptime. They just happen to have it. We had a 30 second outage on ONE power circuit during hurricane sandy - we noticed because two non-production devices weren't dual power, and of course the notifications from the servers about their dual power being interrupted. We've been there over 10 years, so we actually kind of know, rather than guessing, how reliable they are. What exactly do you want us to say? We aren't participating in any dragnets. We've said that plenty of times. If you think that the NSA is in our datacentre, tapping our wires. Well, I was there in July and I moved all the devices by hand. I didn't pull them open and audit the circuit boards - but there's a level beyond which reality is impossible to distinguish from paranoia. We don't follow our hardware from the silicon sands through all the steps before it reaches our datacentre. Of course it could have nasties injected in it. We design our security processes to make it hard for both hackers AND agencies to attack us with a bunch of things. Not running the same switch with VLANs for both internal and external networks is a big thing - switches are a notorious attack vector. Our internal network devices are fully isolated from the external links. And then - the security agencies reading your email isn't even the biggest risk to your security and your life for 99.9999% of people. We're not going to throw out tons of features that improve their life for a perception of improved security - so end to end encryption isn't a sane response.
kijin 12y ago
> Counterpoint: seems to me that protonmail is doing exactly that. ProtonMail is security theater. It is simply not possible for a webmail service to maintain a zero-knowledge policy. They can capture your password every time you log in, and use that to decrypt your email if they want to. Or they could send you a backdoored version of their own JS-based encryption library the next time you visit protonmail.ch. (Hushmail got under fire for doing this a few years ago at the behest of the Canadian government.) At the end of the day, the only thing that is actually protecting your email at ProtonMail is the fact that Switzerland is not yet known to be collaborating with the NSA. If they claim otherwise, they're either lying, incompetent, or seriously lacking in imagination.