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[Discussion] Which privacy apps / services do you think are most likely US government honeypots?

10d 1h ago by lemmy.ml/u/dessalines in privacy@lemmy.ml

IE like Crypto AG:

In 2020, it was revealed that the Swiss company, Crypto AG, which provided secure communications services to ~120 governments throughout the 20th century, was secretly ran by the CIA and West German Intelligence. The CIA and later NSA were able to read encrypted communications for many countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Italy, Indonesia, Iraq, Libya, Jordan and South Korea.

Most likely all free vpns

Israeli actually, like express VPN

Maybe not a honeypot, but definitely too large for my taste by now: Proton. With Mail, VPN, password manager, file storage, AI and whatnot, it's one ginormous basket to put all of your eggs into, hopping it'll hold.

the owner is fine with fascism because fascism makes his product more lucrative

Did he say that? :o

https://web.archive.org/web/20250318235233/https://www.letemps.ch/articles/sur-les-reseaux-sociaux-l-entreprise-genevoise-proton-accusee-de-soutenir-donald-trump/gifts/ybn6gho5JTnuet2bcoda4jDMR573NaKyC9cKGuFh

not exactly. the more nuanced inspection of what he said was that donald trump's plans to deregulate the tech industry he expected to benefit his company. however, that deregulation is in service of allowing more surveillance capitalism, environmental degredation, and worker mistreatment. the wording i provided is what that ultimately means as an analysis of how and why proton would make more money in that type of environment

I know your example is the opposite, but any service that is run and hosted in the US.

It's one of the major issues with Signal.

Not to mention Graphite and Pegasus, Israeli spyware.

When parliaments have to inquire their own spy services, it's a sign that these spy services must be disbanded, as they are becoming a deep state of their own, intimidating and harassing politicians. After all, if you can't trust your own politicians, whom can you? And that's problematic.

Disbanding those services and prohibiting any secret services from ever forming, would also regain a great deal of trust of society in each other. And that trust in turn, can foster society to advance for mankind.

You got that right.

Probably various VPNs on the market

Especially Israeli owned VPNs. Which seems to be most of them lately.

Oh yeah definitely

Especially the ones aggressively marketed, or noted as independent when they cannot give concrete evidence for whence their finances and ownership come. Always question and investigate, and make sure trusted people know you do so.

I always assume the more popular it is, the more likely it is of being compromised.

I have no idea if it's the case, but I switched away from mullvad after seeing billboards and ads of it everywhere, even on city infrastructure like trains and buses.

If the company is owned by "Kape" its ikely a Israeli honeypot:

https://medium.com/illumination/vpns-the-privacy-trap-4aef67f39634

Kape’s portfolio includes ExpressVPN, acquired in 2021 for $936 million; CyberGhost, purchased in 2017; Private Internet Access, bought in 2019 for $127 million; and ZenMate.

Together, these services account for three of the six most popular VPN products globally, serving approximately 7.4 million paying subscribers.

Kape also owns VPNMentor and Wizcase, review platforms that rank VPN services — including Kape’s own products — for consumers seeking expert guidance.

Mullvad is very likely one of the few good ones. I'd suggest reevaluating it.

I have no reason to go back to it, and I switched away from it for the reasons mentioned: its grown very large, and has mainstream ads everywhere now.

if it makes you feel better i know an employee there and theyre a communist and say a lot of mullvad employees are lefties too, idk if they have a union or anything. nym vpn has chelsea manning backing it. not really a traditional vpn though its basically unfree tor that is not slow as balls, has the benefit of really good server coverage and few people blocking it. coolest thing is you can use a seedbox to route traffic to pay it down.

Most people only use vpn providers for streaming location hopping, torrenting, p*rn and on public networks. For day to day 24/7 use you are just trusting your VPN provider not to spy on your traffic instead of your ISP.

Not a privacy app, but you should definitely not think anything said on discord is private in any sense whatsoever

Signal I think. I don't mean that the end2end algorithm or messaging itself are itself unsafe, the algo has been shown to be secure. This is what people usually rebuke this with, with the reminder of Signal's OSS nature.

The issue the servers and the social networking data that can be harvested. The server code only partially exists in public and we just have to trust that that is actually what is running on whatever AWS server without tampering and self hosting is nearly impossible in practice if technically possible and nobody does it. The social network data (who talks to who) is more valuable than the actual messages logs, which give a massive, but mainly useless datasets. Until LLMs, like 10-15 years ago they were basically impossible to parse for any useful info without using large quantities of eye pairs. Basically if you are an organizer, criminal, government, part of a hunted opposition, you will leak the whole core group structure of your org with attached phone numbers. Whoever with that data can then target their devices and persons with other means. Plus it's literally built on top of CIA money. I think signal is totally safe and adequate for friends and family type of use, but not much else, but then all in all so is whatsapp, mostly since signal and Whattsapp share the same end to end algorithm.

Signal is def one, otherwise US government orgs like RFA and OTF wouldn't be defending and pushing for it so hard in western privacy spaces, nor fund it.

Have a look at Deltachat

Its starting to make headway: FOSS, Decentralised and anyone who is tech inclined can setup their own Relay.

Any VPN that isn't actively being sued by world gov/agencies to try and get their data is suspicious.

Alternatively any VPN company with the ability to store data is untrustworthy.

Also every cryptocurrency that exsts.

How do you feel about Tailscale?

they were talking about proxy VPNs, whereas tailscale is for building actual virtual networks to connect your devices, which is a completely different thing (besides sharing the same approval foundation).

If you were to distrust tailscale (and you're not simply self hosting headscale), an attacker might be able to access for otherwise non-public devices(' ports), reroute/MitM your traffic and monitor which device connects to which.

Dating apps.

All of the "delete my information from data brokers" services IMO, especially the ones that advertise on YouTube. Always smelled fishy to me.

Either that or they're just more data brokers trying to get exclusivity.

Reject Convenience did a pretty thorough rundown on what they're doing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX3JT6q3AxA

It's been a minute since I watched, but my key takeaways were that they just reach out to one type of broker which barely scratches the surface of the Data Economy iceberg, and since there's no legal precedent outside of California and the EU, it's purely up to the brokers to decide whether or not they want to comply.

So I think it's probably more likely they really are just private companies preying on people's anxieties about privacy and relative ignorance about the topic, rather than some kind of governmental conspiracy

Sometimes I think that DNS providers could be, like NextDNS (I use them).

I wish there was a possible way to run an authoritative DNS yourself. The best I can do is a recursive server blah.

Yeah, that would be perfect. I thought some time ago about doing a DoT port -> nginx -> pihole -> unbound inside a cloud VM for the outside world , like this, but that would be too much work and maybe insecure.

You can tunnel your DNS requests via wireguard to your pihole server. If it has good bandwidth even the full traffic. Why would that be insecure?

Yeah, using a VPN would be good enough, but I want it to be open to the internet, without any port/config restriction, so I can access it from any device and anywhere, so the only remaining thing would be to host and open the port on a VM, only DoT and DoH, no :53 open (that would really be insecure, as DDoS insecure).

DNS providers can only see which sites you are visiting but not the actual content right?

I briefly used NextDNS but decided against using a DNS server tied to my email.

Proxies and VPNs seem like the most obvious targets. They mostly prey on people who don't understand the technical workings thereof (had my mom ask if she needed to get a VPN bc firefox opened on ad for theirs, claiming it enhanced privacy), and serve little benefit to people who are doing the kind of illegal activities that make governments take notice. They serve as a single point of compromise for anyone, and they work worldwide so that all your traffic can be monitored even when you're on a different ISP/in a different country. It's like the perfect MITM, and people are even willing to pay to have themselves monitored.

The truth is that at best they benefit people who only don't want their network-provider watching, but don't care who else may be. It's the perfect setup for a 3-letter agency to just sit and monitor everything anyone does, waiting for someone who's just a little too careless to access illegal content thinking they're anonymous.

They are perfect for torrenting though. The kind of activity 3 letter agencies don't want their spying to be disturbed for.

they benefit people who only don’t want their network-provider watching, but don’t care who else may be.

Just FYI: It's not the network provide we have to worry about in my country. That is specific to the USA I believe.

Here they have "headhunters" that make a contract with a rights holder, torrent a file, write down the IP of someone who uploads a video to them, then legally request the name to the IP and send an invoice for about $2000. No three warnings or anything. And they are very good at sending legal officials to impound any of your valuable stuff in case you don't pay.

Even other "illegal" activity like calling Israel an apartheid regime or supporting palestine or insulting your head of state might get you flagged by a three letter agency, but they won't use official legal channels. There is a protection of the herd with VPN.

Bitcoin.

Hell, monero is the only crypto I think isn't a honeypot, since so many exchanges refuse to list it. That could just be how the government wants us to think though 🤔

It's not even that Bitcoin is a honeypot, it's that it isn't actually private at all, and through good ol detective work a wallet can be connected to a person, as well as their inflows and outflows and what wallets they're sending or receiving money from.

yeah, the whole point of Bitcoin is literally everyone sees your transaction on there. not very cryptic if you ask me

This thread basically illustrates the challenges for a beginner, such as myself.

I've been locked into the Google ecosystem for nearly two decades and am now trying to free myself.

I'd like to migrate to a hybrid solution that involves self-hosted NextCloud synchronized with a cloud provider that I can trust more than Google.

However:

Proton apparently makes false, or at least misleading, marketing claims and doesn't fight a vast majority of its inbound government requests.

Tuta has been publicly accused by a member of the intelligence community of being a honeypot.

The rest of the email providers seem to implement even fewer protections, relative to these two.

So, what's a guy to do?

Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that either of these companies are bad or that I believe that they're actually honeypots. I'm just trying to illustrate the challenges faced by newcomers (and probably all of us).

While I'd prefer to absolutely maximize privacy and security on all fronts, given that my first goal is de-googling, I will probably start with Proton and NextCloud and re-evaluate from there, but I'm open to suggestions.

Thank you all -- I really appreciate this community.

Email is a really tough one especially, because it wasn't designed with security in mind, and of course even if you're on a secure email service, 99% of the emails you send and receive are going to be with non-secure services hoovered up by google or AWS.

Anything is better than google at least.

Tbh for email I'd say don't bother with privacy as it wasn't meant to be private, as Dessalines said. If you care about data sovereignty (which is different to privacy, though often hand-in-hand), you can self-host email—it's not as hard as it's reputed to be. I've self-hosted my main email address for a couple years now and not had major hiccups. For the most part, after initial setup, it just runs. And if you're daunted by configuring it, there are out-of-the-box solutions like Mailcow you can use. I'd only really recommend it if you already have a VPS/home lab/etc where you already self-host things.

I intend to do that but basically wanted to have an off site copy, for both backup and deliverability purposes.

I don't have much in the way of privacy expectations for email, but I figure that Proton or Tuta are probably still safer than Google.

I self-host on a VPS, so my off-site copy is the VPS, and my on-site copy is the emails downloaded to my email clients.

I figure that Proton or Tuta are probably still safer than Google.

Define "safer". If you are receiving unencrypted emails (which is the case in the vast majority of cases), there is nothing stopping Proton or Tuta from reading them. Fundamentally, if something arrives at a server unencrypted, the server can read it—nothing can be done about that.

If you're exchanging e2ee emails, then it doesn't matter if you use Google, because the body of the email can't be read by Google. A lot of metadata is required to be unencrypted though (this is the case for Proton and Tuta too).

I don't really see the benefit to using an email service like Proton or Tuta from a perspective of meaningful data privacy. If it were between e.g. Proton and Google I'd probably pick Proton to avoid my emails being used to serve me ads from Google, but I wouldn't have any illusions about Proton being able to read unencrypted incoming mail.

Yes, I know and agree that the mail providers can read unencrypted email. I'd just rather use a provider that probably isn't intentionally using it to build profiles about myself and others.

VPS/home lab

VPS is probably fine, hosting something this important on your own hardware sounds like a recipe for disaster though

the worse part is that; by the time security professionals' tribal knowledge is known to the general public; it's already outdated enough to keep you ensnared.

they say that you have to become your own lawyer to protect yourself and you have to become your own dentist/doctor to heal yourself; now you have to be your own secops to guard your information.

for email, the protocol itself is insecure by design. if using it for actual communication you should use something like pgp encryption on top. even proton receives your mails in plaintext, though they claim to store it encrypted afterwards.

get your own domain and use it instead of the provider's domain, this way you can easily change email providers later on.

also btw, proton doesn't support imap/pop (afaik)

Yes, I intend to use my own domain name when I switch.

For IMAP, it looks like there are bridges for both Proton and Tuta that I can run locally.

No company is in a position to resist lawful orders from government (not good orders, lawful).

It’s why every company that sells security makes a big show about planning to leave some western country when they say they’re gonna do mass surveillance. It’s all they can do.

Email is not secure and cannot be made secure.

Do not ever send anything through email that you rely on being private.

I'm certainly not suggesting that email providers should resist lawful orders, but if Proton complies with 89% of requests while Tuta complies with 25%, it suggests a difference in methodology, no?

It could, of course, be the case that the Swiss are just much more skilled at sending lawful requests relative to the Germans, but that seems unlikely.

So you have two different countries, two different sets of laws, and two different services with wildly different offerings.

You can’t really compare a drilled down percentage of compliance and reach the conclusion that there’s a difference in methodology under those conditions.

Just the much broader spectrum of services that proton offers makes it more likely that they will be in a position where they are required to comply with a larger portion of requests than tuta.

This is not intended to be a defense of proton, just a recognition that metrics are hard to take seriously in a comparison.

Tuta would make sense to me as a honeypot. Who called them out? Add it to the list of free providers I use that are just the CIA... In order to "anonymize" my social media profiles on their other sites lol

https://gizmodo.com/tuta-email-denies-connection-to-intelligence-services-1851022465

And again, I'm not saying that I believe this. I have no idea what to think. My original point was that it's all very confusing to beginners.

Be careful of accepting some of the criticism of Signal in this thread. For most of us, we have to make choices about secure comms from subject matter experts. Almost all the criticism I see of Signal comes from anonymous or otherwise random users online. If you believe in such a thing as expertise, please seek it out when evaluating something like this.

It is absolutely irrelevant who makes the criticism, what needs to be addressed is the criticism itself. If somebody gives you advice to simply trust people blindly then you should be very suspicious of their motivations.

Most issues are complex enough that we have to delegate trust. It's not feasible to verify every claim yourself. And trust vs "blind trust" is an arbitrary line.

The issues people bring up with Signal are very easy for anybody with a minimally functioning brain to understand, and none of these experts are able to provide a credible answer to them.

The key issues people point out over and over is that Signal is a central server hosted in the US that harvests people's phone numbers on sign up. The users are trusting server operators with their privacy at that point because there is no way to verify how this data is used. Since the server associates real identity with the account, it is in position to map out networks of people communicating. And if this data is shared with intelligence agencies, which they wouldn't be allowed to disclose, then those can trivially correlate the personally identifiable information with all the other data they have access to.

If there's a person of interest, and you map out whom that person wants to have private conversations with, that's very useful data. Once you know that, then you can start tracking all the activities of their associates, and map out a whole network of people. Say, people organizing unions, or coordinating labor strikes, and so on.

This is an obvious problem with Signal, one that doesn't take any significant expertise to understand, and one that has never been fully addressed. People talk about things like sealed sender, but that doesn't address the problem I just outlined.

The core issue is that you have to trust the physical infrastructure rather than just the cryptography. The protocol design for sealed sender assumes the server behaves exactly as the published open source code dictates. A malicious operator can simply run modified server software that entirely ignores those privacy protections. Even if the cryptographic payload lacks a sender ID, the server still receives the raw network request and all the metadata attached to it. Your client has to talk to the server and identify itself before any messages are even sent.

When your device connects to send that sealed message, it inevitably reveals your IP address and connection timing to the server. The server also knows your IP address from when you initially registered your phone number or when you requested those temporary rate limiting tokens. By logging the raw incoming requests at the network level, a malicious server can easily correlate the IP address sending the sealed message with the IP address tied to the phone number.

Since the server must know the destination to route the message, it just links your incoming IP address to the recipient ID. Over time this builds a complete social graph of who is talking to whom. The cryptographic token merely proves you are allowed to send a message without explicitly stating who you are inside the payload. It does absolutely nothing to hide the metadata of the network connection itself from the machine receiving the data.

This once again makes it very suspicious that Signal insists on running a single centralized server.

The fact that the US Government has adopted signal for it's own employees, suggests they have a backdoor.

good point

Wouldn't that suggest that there isn't a back door because any backdoor that exists could also potentially be exploited by their enemies?

You would think. But no. for decades now, the US government has been clearly willing to sell out it's own people to everyone else as long as they can also spy on them.

Do they have their priorities screwed up? I think so. Should they be executed for betraying their statutory duty? Yes.

But "it's own people", in this specific case, isnt the citizens of the US, it's the people running the surveillance state itself.

If they do have a backdoor then why would the people that run the surveillance state use that backdoored software themselves knowing with 100% certainty that it is compromised? They would be knowingly exposing themselves to their enemies.

Why Indeed? The Snowden leaks showed us what I thought was right. Because the people in charge don't give a shit about us, or the country. They believe in nothing.

Who are the experts, and who pays their salaries? Crypto AG wasn’t lacking in experts.

You'll have to make your own determinations I guess, but be careful if you find yourself dismissing expertise in favor of opinion or motivated reasoning.

Of course, nobody is going to have evidence here, if there was any the cover would be lifted. But one can guess chances here:

Proton: "Unlikely"... but there is a but. They never cater for the ultimate privacy and they make typical blunders of a company wanted to growth really fast. Now, that they want to be a behemoth in Privacy makes it more vulnerable to requests from law enforcement. Also, law enforcement and intelligence agencies have it easier to penetrate within Proton massive headcount growth.

Tuta: "Very Unlikely". The people behind started very young and had a sustainable growth. The people are very visible (unlike Crypto AG) so least likely to be working for an "agency".

Mullvad: "Very Unlikely". I think their story is similar to Tuta (haven´t followed it that much though).

GrapheneOS: "Very Unlikely". But in the last year I have raised some minor concerns, but I haven change my rating yet....

/e/: "Very Unlikely". I know the dude behind for 2 decades, he wouldn´t. However, /e/ never claimed full privacy and from the beginning says he would comply 100% with "lawful" requests, but it is not a honeypot, not that would make much difference to an intelligence agency if they wanted it.

Signal: "Potentially"... yes, yes... audited, solid privacy code... but still does not make sense to me many aspects; financially solvent from day one, the extreme unquestioned massive and vast support from launching till today... if i have to bet in all of these providers, this platform would have been my take as potential compromised one. I still use it to communicate with family since I trust better than WhatsApp, but I would not use it for critical journalistic info.

Signal requires to use phone number, which in many countries is legally required to be tied to your personal identity. Like the SMS provider must have a copy of your id card. You're basically naked to the CIA when using Signal. Even if not like in the US they presumably mass collect SIM and location correlations for ID. For the life of me I do not understand how anyone can promote that shit.

So the "honeypot" of Signal is that the mainstream promotes it as IF it was a privacy focused app when it's very glaringly obviously is not. So the effect is that it prevents market space and attention for other apps actually focused on privacy without requiring ID to sign up. It's a bit like introducing sterile insects to prevent the spread of unwanted pests (= actually secure communication).

Mullvad: “Very Unlikely”. I think their story is similar to Tuta (haven´t followed it that much though).

https://tmctmt.com/posts/mullvad-exit-ips-as-a-fingerprinting-vector/

Great catch, is this still default behavior?

Thanks so much, this looks worth a deep look! Iĺl need time to interpret this properly.

Oh what are your minor concerns with GrapheneOS? I heard the head behind it is a little weird and paranoid, but honestly i think you kinda need to be for a project like that.

Tor comes to mind.

Technologically it's private, but if you're America and have the resources to create and control sufficiently many nodes you can undermine the protections.

Wait 'til you hear who invented it...

That said, considering how many illegal services continue to run on it, I don't think it's as porous as some make it out. Definitely has well-documented weaknesses but the project maintainers tend to address them fairly straightforward.

Of course, you're also just as likely to be buying drugs off an Onion market that the FBI seized and kept running just to catch more bad guys, despite it also hosting illegal content itself.

The tor rabbit hole goes pretty deep, but ya based on the evidence I'd have to say its more a US developed counter-insurgency tool, rather than a privacy tool.

Bluesky

Bluesky is like the furthest thing from a privacy app, which it doesn’t even claim to be.

i don't think anyone here considers it a private service at all, but i'm almost certain cloudflare is a honeypot

Why are you so certain?

the biggest part is they're doing way too much of the internet while being quite opaque. and their service is "too generous", with free tiers, no ads. and the whole MITMing every traffic and serving from CDN architecture seems ideal for a honeypot to me.

even if cloudflare themselves don't intend to be one, i'm pretty sure some three letter agency has backdoors to their systems.

fare I suppose

Look what autocratic(ising) governments don't do shit against. And what their opposing governments tell about the autocrat(ising) ones.

Those are more likely to be honeypots imho, as they claim to be one thing but likely work for another.


COINTELPRO (or as I'd rather label it, SOWTERROR), showed that the US government heavily opposed mutual aid and class solidarity, and combatted the Black Panthers, by defaming them, inserting gun control laws once they started police watching, bombing their homes and so on.

That said... let's take an example. Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm working from my memory here.

DeepSeek is open-source, while ChatGPT isn't. DeepSeek does however, participate in censorship (which Muskrat's models also do, just in a different direction). DeepSeek is much more efficient, threatening Western models.

And imho, the latter is why many Western governments oppose using it. They say it's spyware, but how can we be sure ChatGPT isn't? It's proprietary shit.

But both models are honeypots, just in their own ways. Sure, DeepSeek is open-source as it claims. But it also censors itself to unnecessary extents. Then there's ChatGPT, which claims to be secure... but how can we know that when it's proprietary and we cannot crosscheck its source code?

DeepSeek the service censors, but you can run it yourself uncensored.

beyond the obvious ones? signal.

proton is sus af with the fascist connections too, now that more of that news have come out lmao

Unpopular takes incoming.

Signal.

Way too many red flags.

  • Why ask for mandatory phone numbers? You could at least make it opt in.
  • Why we can't inspect the latest server code?
  • Why not make it easy for people to run their own servers?

Do you truly believe that a company that wants to preserve your privacy would take this direction?

And i don't care how secure the protocol is, how well the code is audited. They can still map your social graph.

Anyways, because of my threat model, i still use Signal. But if i were an activist i wouldnt touch it.

More unpopular takes:

Tor and Mullvad probably compromised too. If a service gets too mainstream, I dont believe for a second that they would let it run without care. They would take it down, or control it.

Now, these services are still usefull. For example mt threat model is to deny my shit to the big tech. So they are useful if you want to escape data collection for adversiment purposes.

I don't think they would burn the reputation of these services for low hanging fruit like selling data for ads.

Signal, I agree... it has flags for me in so many ways.

Tor. Unlikely though. For sure many nodes are controlled and now they are using massive power to unlock the traffic, but was not set up as a honeypot per se, it is now, probably, technologically quite compromised though.

Mullvad. Funny, your suspicions probably got enhanced when Mullvad makes a browser based on Tor's. But I still not highly suspect of Mullvad. Quite steady organic growth, profitable, no much pronouncements or catering to certain "targeted" groups... No mayor red flags for me.

Tor

Its public record that Tor was developed by the US Navy Research Lab. Its original intended purpose was to anonymize US Navy traffic. But this wouldnt work if only the US Navy were using it, because then it would be really easy to identify. So it was open sourced to the world to bury US military and intelligence traffic under a load of noise.

The fact that US military/intelligence use Tor themselves, and it being open source, makes it very unlikely to be a honeypot because any backdoor in the open source code exposes their own traffic to their enemies, defeating the purpose of it.

Malicious Tor nodes exist that try to deanonymise traffic, but anyone can set those up, not just intelligence agencies.

Just watch any def con with the tor guys. They are way too hardcore to be suspicious of.

Often ignored, online games. Non of the VPN which logs the history, TOR also isn't the panacea (network made by US secret service). Mandatory monitoring the traffic with Portmaster, PiHole or similar. FOSS from GitHub with a grain of salt. Good to have analytic tools in the bookmarks, eg Blacklight, Webbkoll, Exodus Privacy, Browserleaks, etc., preferable to use european alternatives. Using decentralized or /and selfhosted services. Common sense and always read TOS and PP before using the app or service.

DNS4EU and WiFi4EU.

Signal and Tor have both received huge amounts of US government funding, very suspicious.

The Crypto AG story shows that the location of a company doesn't matter that much. The US simply made legal what they were already doing behind the scenes. Intelligence services have always been and still are above the law.

Absolutely! Location does not guaranteed anything. The only case against US, four eyes... etc is that they have the power to shut it down easily so they can use it as a threat. Switzerland has, for years now, showed the same drive as any other country to do just that.

Now, I have seen very principled individuals in the US, I would say even more than in the Europe! It is not surprise that we see cases like Lavabit where a right owner chooses to close shop rather than compromise its customers. I hope GrapheneOS will do the same.

The Proton CEO did make suspicious US political statements despite being Swiss. That combined with their misleading marketing on social media.

If you're online then you're cooked.

Signal for one.