Indian government moves to ban ProtonMail after bomb threat

Ramadhir Singh

Ramadhir Singh

Wasseypur
Adept
The decision to block Proton Mail was taken at a meeting of the 69A blocking committee on Wednesday afternoon. Under Section 69A of the IT Act, the designated officer, on approval by the IT Secretary and at the recommendation of the 69A blocking committee, can issue orders to any intermediary or a government agency to block any content for national security, public order and allied reasons. HT could not ascertain if a blocking order will be issued to Apple and Google to block the Proton Mail app. The final order to block the website has not yet been sent to the Department of Telecommunications but the MeitY has flagged the issue with the DoT.

During the meeting, the nodal officer representing the Tamil Nadu government submitted that a bomb threat was sent to multiple schools using ProtonMail, HT has learnt. The police attempted to trace the IP address of the sender but to no avail. They also tried to seek help from the Interpol but that did not materialise either, the nodal officer said. During the meeting, HT has learnt, MeitY representatives noted that getting information from Proton Mail, on other criminal matters, not necessarily linked to Section 69A related issues, is a recurrent problem.

Although Proton Mail is end-to-end encrypted, which means the content of the emails cannot be intercepted and can only be seen by the sender and recipient if both are using Proton Mail, its privacy policy states that due to the nature of the SMTP protocol, certain email metadata -- including sender and recipient email addresses, the IP address incoming messages originated from, attachment name, message subject, and message sent and received times -- is available with the company.
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link:- https://www.androidcentral.com/apps...ent-moves-to-ban-protonmail-after-bomb-threat
 
I'm quite afraid they'll move to ban entirety of Proton not too long from now for circumventing the VPN requirements, for not keeping logs and now for this. Any company offering good privacy solutions for netizens is probably not going to have a good time selling their services to India (directly) unless things change in a big way.
 
Im guessing this is because proton is not selling user data to the government? I mean props to proton if that is the case.
 
vivek.krishnan said:
Yeah, proton said they are working with the govt. However, seems like the govt is taking the easy way out.
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I’ve read somewhere that the only way is via Swiss govt since they still answer to them. There was also a mention of Swiss↔India info-sharing agreement but I can only find articles related to financial info sharing. I don’t think otherwise they can comply to such requests directly since Proton has historically not complied with such requests if it directly came from Indian govt.
 
whats alternative if not proton ?
hate google / outlook
dont want to share mobile or alternate email

tutamail is one but some day it might also get banned

not able to getin outlook.com today
Server Error in '/' Application.Runtime ErrorDescription: An application error occurred on the server.
 
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kartikoli said:
Few more cases and gov will have an excuse to ban all privacy related apps/protocols.
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If this continues, the government will end all privacy for its citizens, while keeping its own activities secret. Isn't there any technological solution to maintain privacy of the people and also catch people who make threats of violence?

How do the governments of other countries, where freedom of speech and expression still exists, deal with threats of violence from anonymous sources? If any of you know, please tell us about such solutions.
 
Tarantula said:
If this continues, the government will end all privacy for its citizens, while keeping its own activities secret. Isn't there any technological solution to maintain privacy of the people and also catch people who make threats of violence?

How do the governments of other countries, where freedom of speech and expression still exists, deal with threats of violence from anonymous sources? If any of you know, please tell us about such solutions.
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Privacy laws in the country are a joke. Phone numbers are taken at shops/malls for "generating bills" and then sold to call centers without repercussions. Digi Yatra is being done forcefully at airports without any sort of consent under the BS reasoning of "Jaago Bharat Jaago".

Try doing something like this in the EU with strict GDPR laws, and the organization concerned will be finished.
 
Tarantula said:
If this continues, the government will end all privacy for its citizens, while keeping its own activities secret. Isn't there any technological solution to maintain privacy of the people and also catch people who make threats of violence?

How do the governments of other countries, where freedom of speech and expression still exists, deal with threats of violence from anonymous sources? If any of you know, please tell us about such solutions.
Click to expand...
UK govt blatantly asked Apple to stop giving security updates to iphones in UK so that they can continue using the known vulnerability to spy on phones, this kind of behaviour is not specific to any Govt, but problem in India is average Indians don't care or not aware of these things.
 
Its takes a lot of coordinated effort from multiple monitoring agencies and many months to trace any persistent threats. But most of these email related threats are one-off & sent by idiots, they tend to leave their mark everywhere, so there is always a chance.
 
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