Some companies do fight court orders. I don't remember who described Twitter's lawyers back in the day by saying "they'd fight God." But if I was expecting a court order, I would not count on my email provider to defend me.
You may look at a problem and think "Aha! The solution is to run my own email server." Now you have two problems, Google is marking all of your email as spam, an unknown number of threat actors using your server to spread malware because you forgot to patch something, and a small pile of subpoenas.
As a person who has spent a lot of time as the admin of an email server, I would not recommend this to the vast majority of people.
This is not a situation in which using Tor would have preserved the account owner's anonymity.
There are people who use Proton Mail who are not aware that this is a risk and it is good for them to know.
If you pay Proton Mail for a service, they may hand over the payment data in response to a court order: www.404media.co/proton-mail-...
This is an issue I care about a lot and I keep a close eye on it.
It is more important than ever to find ways to rein in these companies and it is harder than ever because more states want to reserve the right to use their tools instead of rolling their own.
"For the first time since we began tracking zero-day exploitation, we attributed more zero-days to commercial surveillance vendors than to traditional state-sponsored cyber espionage groups."
Love to see the stats backing up my hunch.
cloud.google.com/blog/topics/...
Do you work in fundraising? Do you want a job that isn't evil? Signal is hiring a director of major gifts: jobs.lever.co/signal/68f75...
I aspire to one day have a fraction of the confidence of a mediocre white man sitting down to do an interview with Isaac Chotiner.
The data from your Meta Ray Bans is used to train Meta's AI, which most people don't understand means that humans are looking at the most intimate details of their lives. www.svd.se/a/K8nrV4/met...
I'm reading a bunch of Coruna reports after dinner because I am a cool person who knows how to party. Of particular interest: not only does Coruna not work against iOS in lockdown mode, but if it even detects lockdown mode running, it bails. This is why I talk about lockdown mode so damn much.
New from 404 Media: CBP tapped into the online advertising ecosystem to track peoples' movements, according to an internal DHS document. Shows for the first time DHS tracked phones via process for putting ads in ordinary apps—video games, fitness apps, many more www.404media.co/cbp-tapped-i...
Want to see me scream into this void this April? This is where I will be doing it.
I just scream endlessly into the void now. Sometimes I am invited to keynote the void.
I think that we are going to have to spend a lot of time creating new and more resilient institutions instead of recreating the ones that got us to this terrible place.
I work with an entire floor of civil rights litigators and they are having A Time.
What a stupid time to have a degree in International Relations.
Forced to choose between "Oops, I was being evil" and "Oops, I was being stupid," Sam Altman has gone with "stupid."
I look forward to seeing it!
This is the kind of work that I'm always hoping people will do so I can quote it extensively.
When we talk about the problems with Bluetooth-enabled physical trackers, we usually talk about AirTags, but let us save some rage for Tile, powered by this paper discussing Tile's privacy, security, and accountability problems: arxiv.org/abs/2510.003...
Both Trump and Netanyahu are "say the quiet part out loud" guys.
I have a whole file of these stories that I point to whenever someone responds to allegations of domestic abuse/violence with "If it was so serious, why didn't she call the cops?"
I am missing it because I have to be at another conference, but if I was in town, I would be there.
I have come away from my last conference cautiously optimistic about how useful AI can be in reversing malware and extremely scared about all of the new attack surface being created in the use and deployment of AI tools.
The NSA has a long history of word games, and it woukd be best to understand them before taking reassurances at face value. From 2013. www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...
The greatest joke that my brain chemistry plays on me is that every few years I get an idea for a novel, which I will outline, write several chapters for, and then never touch again.
“The court also referred the case back to prosecutors for further investigation of other crimes and more serious offences potentially committed, including #espionage.”
www.reuters.com/business/fin...
