- cross-posted to:
- shitliberalssay@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- shitliberalssay@lemmygrad.ml
cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/40877
Email is inherently insecure. If you want or need secure communications, that’s what software like Briar, Matrix, or Signal (yes despite some drama).
Secure emails can always be done manually with PGP and will be a lot hardier than trusting an organization that gives away subscriber payments to Western-backed coup attempts and color revolutions.
To be clear, this is not speculation. Protonmail actively collaborated with EUROPOL in a clear case of political repression against anarchists in Paris. It appears they were the ones suggesting to the french police that they make the request via EUROPOL, and that they did not try to delay/protest the request.
To be fair, Proton’s hands were tied. It was either give up the customer data for a few customers or their business would have to be shut down for all the users relying on it.
In reality the activists made a crucial mistake of not using a VPN. If they used the Proton VPN in conjunction with Proton Mail they would have been safe.
No, not really. I know you mean it as a metaphor, but i think it’s important to point out in some countries as a sysadmin you could literally have your hands tied and cops beating the shit out of you. Avoiding this is a privilege european sysadmins have and can use.
That’s definitely not so clear cut. Usually and to my knowledge the worst you can get for failing to keep logs (data retention laws) is a fine, which for a business like Proton is not really a problem as we’re not talking about a small hosting non-profit, and i’m sure people would be happy to take part in a crowdfunding for that.
And they could have just gotten away with it. As you can learn from other hosting collectives like njalla (or weirder “offshore hosting” companies) not answering to the cops is always an option, or even answering that you don’t have the information they requested.
Why always blame the victim? I agree it was preventable, but that’s no excuse for the way some of us tech people collaborate with those fucking fascists from the police who will do anything to protect the status quo.
Also worth noting, from what i gathered, Protonmail in fact setup IP logging just for this user specifically. So in this setup, Proton VPN would not have been safe either.
deleted by creator
Commercial VPN providers have proven time and time again to not be trustworthy. From VPNs handing over IPs they swore they didn’t have, to that one VPN getting hacked and the hacker leaking data they pinky promised they didn’t log, to the very real possibility of some VPNs being government surveillance honeypots. Using a VPN would very likely not have saved the environmental activist in question. Tor/Tails/Whonix might have, but when the Western State is this hellbent on ruining you because you undermined their capitalism/imperialism, you’re likely screwed no matter what/
Now if only they spent this much effort to catch rich sex offenders and not people who simply give a shit about the future of humanity on this planet.
To be fair, if they shut down it would be better because you’d have one less Western white knight funding terrorists on Hong Kong and Belarus.
Wait, what? How is Protonmail a white knight if they’re not standing up for anything? How are comrades struggling against injustice and domination in Hong Kong and Belarus terrorism? Sorry to be a little harsh, but you sound just like the nazis calling the French resistance, or the French calling the Algerian independence movement terrorists.
Here’s a short read about Hong Kong, and an entire anarchist blog from Belarus.
Dude, come on lmao. Don’t call rioters comrades and comrades nazis.
If your comrades are the riot cops and the intelligence services, i’m happy to call you a nazi even if that’s a stretch of the original definition. Fuck that shit! If you call yourself a socialist, think about it: which side are you on? Are you on the side of the people fighting against the elite? Or secret police detaining, torturing and disappearing them?
This is what no class analysis leads to. Your whole world is upside down lol. Other communists are nazis, but rioters that killed innocent workers deserve “socialist” solidarity? (Rioters, that literally waved UK flags and called for trump to annex them lol. Rioters that called for independence for HK, despite independence only having around 20% support. Rioters that returned to their luxury houses with their house staff afterwards lmao).
What do you want me to say lol. You instantly think I’m a nazi as well for… going against the state department line? Not thinking the same as you? idek. I didn’t even say anything lol, just that there is 0 point calling comrades nazis. In your benevolence you leave me with two choices: either I accept your point of view and thus purify myself (stop being a nazi) and then I can be considered a proper socialist, or I don’t and I will be your enemy. And thus I ask myself: how can you speak for all socialists?
No matter what the reasoning is, State power is always unjust and unjustified. If you find yourself building prisons and a police force, you’re on the wrong side of history. Socialism/Communism needs an armed population, not an armed Nation State. Like i said it’s a stretch to call you a nazi for supporting the State, because nazis had racial hierarchies deeply embedded into their worldview.
Also, i do have a class analysis. It’s precisely because i have a class analysis that i know that cops are always on the side of the powerful and the privileged. The only exception i know to this rule being the “community police” of the zapatistas movement, because they’re not a centralized power and don’t pretend to have legitimate violence for them.
Seriously, if as a socialist you cheer for cops beating up or murdering certain people, you’ll cry soon when they go after you. Communism is about dismantling capitalist structures which of course includes the police which as an institution was created by the bourgeoisie to maintain its privileges. Think about it: if there were no police, there would be no homeless and no hungry people. The police are the armed psychopaths making sure homeless people stay homeless when there’s millions of empty apartments. Are you really defending them?
You haven’t seen the difference between HK police and US police, that’s all I can say lol.
What makes you think your “community police” will not harass homeless people? What about an anarchist commune makes it Inherently good, impervious to gentrifying and petit bourgeois elements?
If you want police to be better in HK then support the city’s reintegration into China, which started with the bill to get a murderer tried for his crimes. HK police might have issues due to how HK is structured. In the PRC police does not intervene when workers kidnap their bosses due to unpaid wages. They don’t intervene to break up strikes. This is the class character of the state; seeing that capitalist police act like capitalist thugs and theorizing a constant truth out of this is not a class analysis.
The implication that all of history is on its own wrong side (because all of history is the class struggle and all of history has had prisons and police in some capacity) is a very large claim.
Where is that the case? Here in the Netherlands there is an actual shortage of living accommodation. The shortage is even more severe in places like Hong Kong (look up cage and coffin homes, please). Abolishing police won’t do jack sh*t to fix that issue, but building more homes where they are most severely needed will. Yes, I get that police officers are often thinking they are better than other people (esp. in nations like the USA or Nigeria) but that does not mean that your comment was keeping it real.
Hong Kong is already free, and became free when the Brits were driven out of it. The recent Hong Kong protests were nationalist/separatist. See here: https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/6d22ace49a8605ff1915577f9d992b37315e7618/socialism_faq.md#what-about-the-hong-kong-protests Some protesters were literally begging Trump to annex them.
I know less about Belarus, but https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7328 and @CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.ml’s answers in this comment thread https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10554/comment/18109 seem to be pretty useful resources.
Also see @savoy@lemmygrad.ml’s comment in this very thread for more info on both: https://lemmy.ml/post/90607/comment/93083
Oh well if the ministry of truth said so then i guess there’s no alternative interpretation?! I’d still like to point out that just because a country has some level of administrative autonomy doesn’t mean people are free: nationalist independence is not popular freedom.
That link you gave lists a lot of broken resources. First they assume China is a communist government, which is factually false: have you seen a classless society in China? Abolition of work and State? Then they assume just because some corrupt imperialist US media gave voice to one or two “leaders” (a figure they probably fabricated themselves) that all people supporting the movement are like them. It’s such a strawman argument that reeks of political police propaganda it’s a shame: it’s just like when the french government tried to paint the whole gilets jaunes movement as an antisemitic or royalist movement because you could find one or two of these in the demos, despite them being in the minority and getting kicked out of demos when they were spotted.
Also, i think it’s important to point out that just because some people appealed to the US and “international scene” doesn’t mean they actually support US imperialism. For example, the Kurdish revolutionary movement strongly relied on military/diplomatic intervention from USA and France to resist ISIS and Turkey… which of course failed to some extent when the interests of our respective empires were not aligned with the kurdish interests anymore. But as a strategy it has taken them so far (instead of being wiped out in the aftermath of the siege of Kobane back in 2014). Today the Kurdish liberation movement has strong(er) ties to the Zapatistas and other liberation movements across the planets: we can’t really say the Zapatistas are really friends with the USA. It’s easy for you to judge from your armchair that asking for help from this or that person is wrong: the day you face extermination by a government we’ll see how you react.
The linked mastodon post has been deleted. But according to other links, it seems on lemmygrad.ml it brings you upvotes to advocate for death penalty for people you disagree with, and to say the people being detained and tortured by political police are liars. Then to say because one nazi paraded a flag (where?) the entire uprising is a neonazi movement. Oh, and that the government of Belarus is leftist somehow? This sentence especially makes me laugh:
So you’ve got “socialized institutions” yet people living in misery and you need permission from the chief supreme to establish trade unions? Is that what you call socialism? Does that sound like a compelling argument to you as a leftist?
OK so a few hundred thousand dollars thrown in by an imperialist org, and suddenly an entire popular movement has been bought? This makes no sense. When the US wants to fund a coup, they spend millions if not billions, and their PR machine works a lot better: just look at what happened in Venezuela, or back in the day with the Contras movement in Nicaragua. Or with the “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan (hello Ben Laden).
As a leftist, think about it: which side are you on? Are you on the side of the riot police and secret police? Or on the side of the people? Are you on the side of the Cheka or the Cronstadt soviet and Makhnovtchina peasants? Are you defending the established order of economic privileges of the ruling class, or siding up with the people burning shit down?
Seeing I wrote the comment you are responding to, I’ll allow myself to bring a clarification about this point:
In 2020, Lukashenko met with the chairman of the Federations of Trade Unions of Belarus and said the federation should put forward requests to all businesses (or as many as possible) to have a union represent their sector. He then added that all businesses that did not comply with this request would be shut down.
Source: https://eng.belta.by/president/view/lukashenko-urges-to-set-up-trade-unions-at-all-private-enterprises-by-year-end-134890-2020/
The context in which I wrote this was soon after he said this, and iirc it was a popular topic on lemmygrad at the time.
So no, you don’t need approval from Lukashenko to be unionised or form a union lol. He even said workers don’t have to join it if they don’t want to.