Would your relationship with your wife improve, or deteriorate, if you were deprived of the TV shows you watch? Maybe for you, losing TV would be a bad thing. Maybe. But for many, being entertained more easily is not necessarily an improvement to life. And that's kind of the point of the article. Technology is good... except for when it's not. We need to get better at evaluating it for what it really contributes to life.
One notion is that it reduces the time available where you can be more deeply involved together in activities that are more life affirming and relationship sustaining.
Anyone remember HushMail? The end-to-end encrypted email service that didn't have the ability to decrypt your emails? They were eventually coerced to change their code and record passwords in order to gain access to an encrypted email account. ProtonMail is the same thing, give or take, just in Switzerland. They can be coerced just like anyone else.
People whose lives are dependent on secure communication still need to manage their own PGP keys. Once protonmail makes it possible to use your own email client with your own keys, then I'd say it's worth trusting.
I'm not sure there is a legal mechanism to force ProtonMail to add a backdoor...
> "Nearly every country in the world has laws governing lawful interception of electronic communications. In Switzerland, these regulations are set out in the Swiss Federal Act on the Surveillance of Postal and Telecommunications Traffic (SPTT) last revised in 2012. In the SPTT, the obligation to provide the technical means for lawful interception is imposed only on Internet access providers, so ProtonMail, as a mere Internet application provider, is completely exempt from the SPTT’s scope of application. This means that under Swiss law, ProtonMail cannot be compelled to backdoor our secure email system."
IANAL, but that just seems to say that under that particular law (SPTT), Internet access providers have to provide the technical means for lawful interception. It does not say that no other entity has to provide the technical means for lawful interception.
In other words, the law does not say that ProtonMail is exempt for having to provide lawful interception. They might still have to do so, based on some other law.
Further, it's quite conceivable that unlawful means (such as blackmail, threats, or bribery) could be used to coerce ProtonMail. That's not to mention perfectly lawful means of enticing them -- like appealing to their patriotism, willingness to help in a critical investigation, or demonstrating some credible threat.
Not all governments restrict themselves to legal means. Turkey for example has recently started abusing Interpol search warrants to go after people outside their jurisdiction. The country of citizenship is usually clued in and is resisting but dare to go on vacation in a another country.
Not all actions of the US government have survived legal review and some may argue the latest administration is more prone to such accidents.
But then it becomes more a question of politics instead of (inter)national law.
Heck, the EU and US are already not on good terms on the subject of privacy/intelligence gathering, so i doubt this would be done so easily. Especially with the current US administration.
