Piero Bosio Social Web Site Personale

@Pyrogenesis "The headline is not biased" - so I'll ask again: Did Proton help the FBI? Or did Proton comply with a Swiss Court Order, and the Swiss government helped the FBI?

A more unbiased headline might be, "Proton turns over user payment information because of Swiss Court Order".

I'm not blaming a victim. I'm demanding better activism. We live in a world where organized activism is becoming more and more crucial, and it's the responsibility of activists, especially those organizing activism, to understand the capabilities and limitations of their communications networks.

I'm not blaming anyone. I'm saying I want people to realize that it doesn't matter if this was Proton, or Tuta, or some other "private" service, and realize that they are all beholden to legal systems that determine the minimal amount of data that must be collected, the length of time it has to be retained, and how personally identifiable that information is.

So if I'm "blaming the victim" by saying, "There is a valuable lesson to be learned here, and it's not just dunking on Proton" then sure, that's what I'm doing and I stand by it.

EDIT
For anyone going, "tHiS iS wHy I uSe TuTa!", here's a link to a page with a big red banner that Tuta rejected 75% of all court orders in 2025. Which is very cool, don't get me wrong - that's super cool - but what are those other 25%?
https://tuta.com/blog/transparency-report

Am I more into Tuta than Proton at this point? Yep. Do I think Proton was really the issue this time? Nope.

Stay sharp.

@skinnylatte This headline is incredibly biased. Did Proton help the FBI? Or did they hand over data to the Swiss government that the Swiss government ordered them to, and then the Swiss helped the FBI unmask an anonymous protester?

I keep seeing this post pop up in my feed with permutations of "WHY PROTON DO THIS!?" -- Because they were legally ordered to.

We're doing a disservice to ourselves for not recognizing the bounds of the privacy that Proton, or Tuta, or any other "private" email service provides, and looking at this moment as a failure by the provider - when really it's the failure of a user to recognize the technical & legal bounds of of their comms services to keep them anonymous.

The lesson here, i think, is about opsec, and knowing the bounds of the tools we're employing for whatever our goals are.

@lucas @skinnylatte YES!

@danirabbit I read this post maybe an hour and a half ago and scrolled past it and thought, "Well that's silly".

But something in the back of my mind made me scroll back and bookmark it.

And then I started typing a response, mostly about why I found this silly.

But then I thought maybe I don't understand, and started reading the comments.

And then typed part of a new comment about why I thought this was silly.

But then I deleted that and walked away from my computer and thought about this and set this next to some other ideas I've held onto for years and felt those kind of come apart, and then came back to my computer and journaled about a thing that seems kind of unrelated, but your post here brought into clarity.

And now I'm back here writing this because at first I was with the comments going, "Is this satire?" and then "Oh it's not...but this is kind of silly." and now I'm at, "Yeah - this is a really excellent point and really important and I'm going to need to sit with this for a bit because this is a noble perspective about language & bigotry & intentions that I need to internalize."

Thanks for this. This is important in a way that I can't really articulate concisely yet -- but this incredibly insightful and important. Thank you for this.