Martin Steiger also responded. Addendum 2 in his blog article [1]:
Tonight, on 29 May 2019, ProtonMail responded to this article with a blog post entitled „Response to false statements on surveillance made by Martin Steiger“. (This article was published on 23 May 2019 and not „earlier today“ as claimed by ProtonMail.)
ProtonMail claims that this article is „factually incorrect“ and states first and foremost that it does not voluntarily offer assistance for real-time surveillance. Apart from that, ProtonMail does not respond to the many points raised in this article.
ProtonMail essentially refers to my addendum, where I point out that the public prosecutor in question contacted me, saying he had been misquoted. ProtonMail of course „forgets“ to quote my full addendum and shows an incomplete screenshot of my addendum. ProtonMail quotes only the part with the public prosecutor’s claim and not my explanation why I am confident that the public prosecutor was not misquoted. ProtonMail also claims that the addendum is „hidden at the bottom of Mr. Steiger’s article“, although it is linked right at the beginning of this article.
In a direct email to me, ProtonMail’s legal department confirmed that real-time monitoring could be carried out. The legal counsel of ProtonMail now argues that ProtonMail is after all a provider of derived communication services and that having to tolerate surveillance carried out by the Swiss Federal Post and Telecommunications Surveillance Service (PTSS) according to Art. 27 para. 1 SPTA is equal to an obligation for real-time surveillance. In addition, ProtonMail threatens to take legal action for defamation pursuant to art. 174 of the Swiss Criminal Code.
As mentioned above, the SPTA provides neither for providers of derived communications services without more extensive surveillance obligations nor for telecommunications service providers with reduced surveillance obligations an obligation for real-time surveillance. As also mentioned above, ProtonMail used to claim to be a telecommunications service provider with reduced surveillance obligations. In either case, there is no obligation for real-time surveillance, i.e., any real-time surveillance is performed voluntarily by ProtonMail.
ProtonMail once again argues contradictorily and inconsistently. Every user of ProtonMail must still decide for himself whether the email service is trustworthy.
It's absolutely necessary in today's outrage fueled world to get your statement out as quickly as possible. The longer it takes to get a response out, the more the outraged masses dig in, and the less likely the truth will stand in peoples minds after the dust settles.
A false story will propagate and get thousands or hundreds of thousands of retweets and likes and spread like wildfire. The correction? Maybe a few hundred if you're lucky.
Sometimes I feel like we're living in a real life block chain. Whatever version of a story gets out first becomes the immutable truth. Nothing you can say or post has the ability to change that or reel it back in.
The conversation we had yesterday on this topic was not very productive. One thing I'd like to see is a clarification about what surveillance actually means to a user. Does it mean:
- Providing IP address details?
- Providing message contents?
- The police compelling you to provide your password?
- Anything else I'm missing?
It would be nice to avoid equivocating "surveillance" and stick to a common definition so we can argue the merits of each potential practice.
- enabled IP logging against a specific user account
- disabled an account and rendered assistance
- comply with the data request, to the extent that it is possible, given our cryptography.
The unknowns are what assistance they render and what extent is possible for them to comply with data requests. They have complied with requests without court orders in cases when they believed a court order was inevitable. They have also delayed reporting incidents at the request of authorities in order to not endanger victims.
I'm not going to get into the meat of the drama here but I do want to say, and I hope the protonmail team is reading, the value of protonmail for me isn't even in protecting me from state actors and whatever they're proud about for being in Switzerland etc.
The value of their service to me is primarily:
- they aren't mining my communication for ad revenue or the enabling of any convenience features which indirectly leads to ad revenue
- should someone (perhaps not nation state) gain access to their storage, that attacker can't see the plaintext of my past mail. Perhaps this doesn't stop them from monitoring incoming/outgoing unencrypted mail, but at least my life history is secure.
I guess they're trying to get this across with their marketing/branding but it always felt a little more over the top to me than the more practical feelings I have about it if that makes sense.
I know some people will say "go with google because their security team is the best" and maybe that's true but my threat model here is googles business model, not nation states. Would it bother me if I found out Protonmail was colluding with nation states etc, yeah, maybe enough to switch providers should one of similar quality exist. Now to read into this kerfluffle...
edited for formatting
edit post read (quote from Steigers second addendum regarding protonmail response):
> ProtonMail once again argues contradictorily and inconsistently. Every user of ProtonMail must still decide for himself whether the email service is trustworthy.
The decision I'm making, and this shouldn't be surprising given my initial comment above, is that I will continue to be a happy paying user. I agree the advertising is kind of misleading, but I always had the pessimist view that the service might give away more than their marketing/branding tries to let on, whether voluntarily/knowingly or not.
I am a little disappointed that protonmail didn't respond more directly to some accusations, I guess they might not want to if they're suing for defamation (according to Steiger?). Am also a little disappointed that both in their response and in their HN comment they said he "hid" something on the bottom which was clearly linked. Though I think he could have done a better job of highlighting the content of that addendum where it was relevant in the article, I wouldn't call it hiding given the link.
I would be happy to see the marketing/branding take a shift towards my more practical viewpoint of it and maybe this incident will encourage that. I have friends/family creeped out by google/yahoo but when they go to the home page for protonmail they tell me (in different words) that the branding is too tin foil hat. The value is there for them otherwise but hard to get past that.
"my threat model here is googles business model, not nation states"
Same here, for this Proton Mail user. I am, of course, attracted to the idea of keeping my mail private from nation states, but Google (and most other providers) is a bigger thing in my (personal) threat model.
Agreed and I'm not the type to be like "well I've got nothing to hide" but the reality is email is a requirement for modern life and I'm guessing nation states can intercept my plaintext mail in places besides the servers of my mail provider so...
> they aren't mining my communication for ad revenue or the enabling of any convenience features which indirectly leads to ad revenue
Exactly. Ever wonder why Amazon stopped including an itemized list of your order in its conformation emails? (and switched to things like "Your order of Super Soake... (and 33 other items) has shipped")? Google was mining the hell out of them to flesh out their user profiles, and Amazon didn't want to gift them its customer data.
Google need to be broken up, and Gmail doubly so (which shouldn't be too hard, since email was designed as a federated system).
They have metadata (ips, ports, date, time, bytes, etc.) and can be compelled to release it. This can be (and is) used to correlate activities and make accusations, obtain warrants, etc.
Metadata is very powerful and is captured on every network. It's a byproduct of the requirements of the network and its protocols. How many bytes were sent? To where from where? How long was the session? etc. They may not know what the data contained, but they'll know everything else down to the second.
Can someone answer simple question regarding privacy value.
What exactly protonmail has/can disclose by law obligation? Only encrypted message? "Envelope" meta data? Something else?
I think this is important to understand this to assess their service before calling alarm bells that it's useless or storing criminal correspodence there. I couldn't grasp it clearly from the message.
>In its transparency report, ProtonMail explicitly mentions the possibility of real-time surveillance („ProtonMail may also be obligated to monitor the IP addresses which are being used to access the ProtonMail accounts which are engaged in criminal activities“). ProtonMail even mentions a current case of real-time surveillance:
>"In April 2019, at the request of the Swiss judiciary in a case of clear criminal conduct, we enabled IP logging against a specific user account which is engaged in illegal activities which contravene Swiss law. Pursuant to Swiss law, the user in question will also be notified and afforded the opportunity to defend against this in court before the data can be used in criminal proceedings."
The original blog post from Steiger did seem suspect to me when I read it earlier today when this story broke. What's still unclear is what the motive would be to make up or exaggerate such a story.
And what about the statement in their own transparency report that corroborates it, which is a major part of Steiger's case? This response is pure bluster and indicates Steiger is right.
Your snail mail’s “metadata” is inspected and saved. Your snail mail can be intercepted. The snail mail system is a public good if ever there was one, and managing it is done with the whole in mind.
If the s-mail system were used to deliver viruses daily, and in large volumes, I wonder what the reaction would be? Would we say, “Those individuals have every right to utilize the s-mail system to deliver deadly viruses as they like. It is the receiver’s responsibility to not open those packages.” How many people that disproved of e-mail “surveillance” also disapproved of s-mail surveillance during post 9-11 anthrax attacks? I wonder.
I don't see how it's a revelation that governments are able to use warrants to force companies to provide data. And we already knew that Protonmail could serve malicious code if forced to, that's been a common criticism of their mail service from day one.
To the extent that it is possible on the web today to do clientside encryption, Protonmail does clientside encryption. Yes, it's bound by platform limitations around code signing and browser crypto. But in a broad sense, all of the apps you have set to auto-update (including privacy gold-standards like Signal and Wire) are vulnerable to malicious update attacks if law enforcement is able to compel them. That has always been true.
So what new information have we actually learned at this point?
The only interesting part of this story to me was the idea that Protonmail might go beyond their legal requirements in assisting law enforcement. That part appears to be false.
No one should be using a 3rd-party service, whether advertised as "truly private" or not, under the expectation that the parent company is going to just ignore warrants and gag orders.
Protonmail has taken the perfectly reasonable position they will comply with the laws of the jurisdiction in which they are located: Switzerland. Other web mail services generally take the same position, though often in different jurisdictions. To the extent laws differ between Switzerland and the home countries of other services, they are different, and this would be true EVEN IF their technology, and policy for handling such requests, was identical to those of other web services.
We will only disclose the limited user data we possess if we are instructed to do so by a fully binding request coming from the competent Swiss authorities (legal obligation). While we may comply with electronically delivered notices (see exceptions below), the disclosed data can only be used in court after we have received an original copy of the court order by registered post or in person, and provide a formal response.
If a request is made for encrypted message content that ProtonMail does not possess the ability to decrypt, the fully encrypted message content may be turned over. If permitted by law, ProtonMail will always contact a user first before any data disclosure. Under Swiss law, it is obligatory to notify the target of a data request, although such notification may come from the authorities and not from the Company.
ProtonMail may from time to time, contest requests if there is a public interest in doing so. In such situations, the Company will not comply with the request until all legal or other remedies have been exhausted. Therefore, not all requests described in our Transparency Report will lead to data disclosure.
As a user who is primarily concerned with privacy in the sense of not having my emails read in order to advertise to me, this is perfectly reasonable. If I were planning a criminal enterprise or legitimately feared persecution by my government for my activities, I might take a harder look at email providers. Even then, as long as PM can't read my emails, I'd say that's far better than currently using Gmail.
OP is in the wrong about message contents. Message contents were never compromised to my knowledge. The issue was specifically metadata like login times and IP addresses. Also possibly mail server logs, such as that a user sent a message to a Gmail account, although I'm not 100% certain on that last point. Once again, when using the proper settings in ProtonMail, the message contents cannot be retrieved without a brute force attack thanks to end-to-end encryption.
I think the real meat of the question is the extent to which they cooperate with law enforcement. Do they respond to requests to extract keys from the client? Or used compromised keys for select users? If the government orders them to build such a mechanism to their client then encryption doesn't help. Even things like tracking the dates that messages are sent and received can make users vulnerable to correlation attacks.
I stand by the claim that the only truly secure mail is to do your own encryption and decryption client-side with open source tools. Anything done by a 3rd party service should be assumed to be compromised.
If the government could force them to extract keys from clients, to utilize compromise keys, or build a mechanism into a silent update, what makes you think and other company would have a different choice? Wouldn't such a government pose the same threat to any email provider?
> what makes you think and other company would have a different choice?
A company that operates in a country where the government is legally forbidden from doing such things would be more resilient to attack through the judicial or law enforcement system. Granted, there's always the suspicion that surveillance maybe be conducted extra-judicially, but it's still better. I don't know of any such countries. I think the Apple v. FBI case was going to set precedence in this matter, but that never went to trial.
>That user activity is rendered largely inaccessible even Protonmail employees, no matter how badly they'd like to crack the security encapsulating user information. Even under duress and threat of hostility.
Tonight, on 29 May 2019, ProtonMail responded to this article with a blog post entitled „Response to false statements on surveillance made by Martin Steiger“. (This article was published on 23 May 2019 and not „earlier today“ as claimed by ProtonMail.)
ProtonMail claims that this article is „factually incorrect“ and states first and foremost that it does not voluntarily offer assistance for real-time surveillance. Apart from that, ProtonMail does not respond to the many points raised in this article.
ProtonMail essentially refers to my addendum, where I point out that the public prosecutor in question contacted me, saying he had been misquoted. ProtonMail of course „forgets“ to quote my full addendum and shows an incomplete screenshot of my addendum. ProtonMail quotes only the part with the public prosecutor’s claim and not my explanation why I am confident that the public prosecutor was not misquoted. ProtonMail also claims that the addendum is „hidden at the bottom of Mr. Steiger’s article“, although it is linked right at the beginning of this article.
In a direct email to me, ProtonMail’s legal department confirmed that real-time monitoring could be carried out. The legal counsel of ProtonMail now argues that ProtonMail is after all a provider of derived communication services and that having to tolerate surveillance carried out by the Swiss Federal Post and Telecommunications Surveillance Service (PTSS) according to Art. 27 para. 1 SPTA is equal to an obligation for real-time surveillance. In addition, ProtonMail threatens to take legal action for defamation pursuant to art. 174 of the Swiss Criminal Code.
As mentioned above, the SPTA provides neither for providers of derived communications services without more extensive surveillance obligations nor for telecommunications service providers with reduced surveillance obligations an obligation for real-time surveillance. As also mentioned above, ProtonMail used to claim to be a telecommunications service provider with reduced surveillance obligations. In either case, there is no obligation for real-time surveillance, i.e., any real-time surveillance is performed voluntarily by ProtonMail.
ProtonMail once again argues contradictorily and inconsistently. Every user of ProtonMail must still decide for himself whether the email service is trustworthy.
[1] https://steigerlegal.ch/2019/05/23/protonmail-real-time-surv...