• Fw: Protonmail and 'Swiss privacy' remind me of Operation Rubicon.

    From noreply@noreply@mixmin.net to news.groups on Sun Jun 2 18:51:12 2024
    From Newsgroup: news.groups

    On Sun, 2 Jun 2024 16:29:01 +0200 (CEST), A Remailer User <remailer-user@somewhere.invalid> wrote:
    Edward Teach <hackbeard@linuxmail.org> wrote:
    On Mon, 22 Apr 2024 07:05:43 -0500
    SugarBug <3883@sugar.bug> wrote:
    @firefly@neon.nightbulb.net
    Protonmail reminds me of Operation Rubicon.
    Propagandists and useful idiots routinely pump Proton Mail as a
    champion of privacy. They will post links to articles in which some
    agency or foreign government has requested Proton Mail to hand over
    user data. Then the article will position 'Swiss privacy laws' as
    saving the day. This smells of mockingbird media agitprop meant to
    generate interest in Protonmail. If enough such articles are
    circulated, the gullible will believe they are protected by 'Swiss
    privacy' then flock to Protonmail as their 'privacy savior'.
    Everything you need to know about so-called 'Swiss Privacy' we
    learned decades ago from Operation Thesaurus, AKA, Operation Rubicon.
    We learned that CIA operations and black budget banking are actually
    headquartered in the Swiss underground.
    Operation Rubicon
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Rubicon
    Crypto AG
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
    If you trust any third-party server to protect your privacy, you're a
    rube. If you trust Proton Mail to protect your privacy, you're a rube
    getting 'crossed' by the Swiss Rubi-con. Either you own your keys and
    your data on your computer or else you have no privacy. Someone
    else's promise that your data will be 'encrypted' so they can't
    decipher it is a hollow pledge. If you send any form of plaintext to
    a remote server, no matter how much they claim to encrypt it, you
    have zero assurance of data privacy. If you use an email server, even
    if you use end-to-end encryption, you have zero metadata privacy.
    Anyone can see WHO you are talking to even if they can't see the talk
    itself. Criminals and spooks are generally more interested in _who_
    you talk to over _what_ you say. The _who_ is the most important
    piece of knowledge for their operations.
    When using email for encrypted messages is always better for both
    parties to use their own email servers. Even better than that is to
    use a encrypted messenger through a Tor hidden service. The encrypted
    messenger must NOT rely on the Tor keys for the security of the
    encryption, but must first encrypt it using secret keys _before_
    sending the data over the Tor network. Even with Tor, metadata
    unmasking is possible through monitoring and traffic correlation
    attacks. If you are a whistleblower or an at-risk person it is still
    far safer to send coded messages by other channels.
    If you rely on Protonmail and similar services for high-risk
    communications you are taking a dangerous risk.
    Watch the phan boiz rage outlet!
    #Cryptography #Cryptology #Encryption #Crypto #Protonmail #CryptoAG
    #Switzerland #CIA

    @SugarBug
    Much of what you say is perfectly valid. That said, there are
    intermediate steps that people can take....not getting to complete >>anonymity or perfect privacy.....but a step or two better than nothing!
    (1) Anonymity. You can use mail addresses from MAIL.COM. When you do
    this you also need to make sure that these mail addresses are only used >>from public places (say internet cafes) so that both the email address
    and the IP address are not linked to a single person. Of course the >>RECIPIENT email address(es) might give the game away!

    For that purpose we do have nymservers, controlled through anonymous >remailers.

    (2) Privacy. I'm always amused when people talk about "public key >>infrastructure", say PGP and the like. Any group of people can set up
    a Diffie/Hellman protocol. With this in place EVERY MESSAGE gets a
    random throwaway shared secret encryption key. There are no published
    keys anywhere....the keys are calculated when needed and then destroyed.

    How will you implement DH key negotiations while preserving the
    anonymity of both participants?

    (3) E2EE. Any group using items #1 and #2 are giving the snoops MUCH
    more work. Of course, snooping will not be impossible......but it
    might be made very difficult, both on the privacy side and on the
    anonymity side.....and without huge amounts of heavy lifting for the
    users.

    Let each participant set up an anonymous mail account at a nymserver, >exchange public keys with the initial mail message and from then on use >Whole-Message-Encryption. Problem solved.
    Have a look at the Wikipedia section about anonymous remailing >(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_remailer), which currently is
    no more than an empty shell and urgently needs an update adding all the >software projects this still most secure and universally applicable
    method of anonymous communication bases on (Mixmaster, YAMN,
    Quicksilver, OmniMix).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixmaster_anonymous_remailer
    | Original author(s) Lance Cottrell
    | Developer(s) Len Sassaman and Peter Palfrader
    | Stable release 3.0 / March 3, 2008
    | Type Anonymous remailer
    | Website http://mixmaster.sourceforge.net/

    e.g. makes you think that anonymous remailing is dead, which is dead
    wrong. Mixmaster continues to work great, in addition we now have the
    YAMN network, and there's client software, that allows a seamless
    integration into your e-mailing workflow.
    There's a comprehensive link list at https://danner-net.de/omd.htm#d05.
    With these tools at hand implementing the Chaumian Mix network strategy
    and onion routing there's no reason to rely on the integrity of any
    service provider. So better stay away from all these dubious con men
    and their questionable promises.

    +1 . . . saved for reference and forwarding

    p.s. seems like mix/yamn reliability for posting to newsgroups
    has been every bit of 100% based on thousands of articles
    arriving via remailer chains over the past several months

    --- Synchronet 3.21a-Linux NewsLink 1.2