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news media claims Proton mail helped FBI unmask anonymous stop cop city protestors:
(www.404media.co)
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2026
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No. Proton followed Swiss court orders to hand over data from a user, and the user had used his own credit card to pay for Proton instead of any of the available anonymous methods.
You say no, then explain exactly how it's a yes.
You force me to give you a gun, you give the gun to terrorists. Have I supported terrorism?
You certainly "helped" the terrorists.
I don't know if you support them. That's not even the question here.
paranoia-level anonymyty doesnt happen by default. this guy failed to due his due diligence to utilize a anonymous payment method, and that was literally the only piece of data it took 2 governments to get out of proton.
how any of that equates to proton doing something wrong is baffling to me.
Who said Proton did anything wrong?
It's the clear assumption people have in nearly every comment in all of these threads. Because no one ever reads the articles, and the headlines are certainly implying people make that assumption.
"Helped" is a very proactive term, they didn't even comply to the FBI request, the FBI had to get a court order from the Swiss government. The title could as easily say it was the user that helped the FBI unmask him by giving personal information that wasn't required.
Is it proactive? Sometimes doing nothing can be helpful to someone.
Nobody disagrees with what the literal events were. It just seems like some people feel like helping the FBI collect evidence against a suspect is a bad thing, and don't want to frame Proton that way.
That's crazy of course. Proton never sold itself as a tool to protect criminals. Nobody want's them to be that. They need to comply with all legal requests for information. That's what they're supposed to do.
If they didn't they'd be shut down. And the rest of us would loose the reasonable privacy protection we want and they offer. That would be very bad.
It wasn't proactive at all. It was in response to a Swiss court order. Which they are required to comply with since they are based on Switzerland.
PiraHxCx said "helped" is a very proactive term. I was asking about the implications of the word helped. Pointing out that it doesn't necessarily imply anything active. I wasn't talking about any specific example or event.
It's not a yes. The headline makes out that Proton told the FBI who the activist was. When the reality is all they did, per a court order from the Swiss government, was hand over receipt information. Information that of course is going to be documented because payments are taxed.
Had the Activist used a valid Crypto Currency or paid in cash (with delivery through a burnable alias) he probably wouldn't be found out.