Encrypted email meets the oldest surveillance tool on Earth: billing records
You can encrypt the message all you want. Your credit card company still knows who you are.
Proton Mail markets itself as a privacy first alternative to Big Tech email, but a new case involving a “Stop Cop City” activist reminders us that encryption only protects the messages.
Payment records are a different story. Swiss authorities used a mutual legal assistance treaty to pass credit card data tied to a Proton Mail account to the FBI, revealing the identity behind the supposedly anonymous email address.
Proton Mail provided Swiss authorities with payment data for defendtheatlantaforest@protonmail.com — the account linked to Stop Cop City protests in Atlanta. The FBI obtained this information through a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty request on January 25, 2024, identifying the activist behind the anonymous account through their credit card identifier.
One moment you’re trusting Swiss banking secrecy; the next, your Visa statement is exhibit A in a federal case.
You can encrypt the message all you want. Your credit card company still knows who you are.
They could have at least told us if the account led to someone in the United States or a foreign provocateur couldn't they? Would revealing the country of origin compromise further investigations?
Anonymity is the illusion the internet has fed us for decades now-never really there, but we begged in it, the way we believe that LLMs are “intelligent”. And we have been told for years about the ways in which our privacy was being abused for corporate greed, and chosen to ignore the information.