Proton Mail compromise, Hannah Natanson (Washington Post) police raid & Debian
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
20:30 Wed, 14 Jan 2026
A few days ago, the JuristGate web site published a few words about how Debian has tried to use Swiss police against Proton Mail.
Proton Mail is based at CERN in Switzerland.
In recent years, activists have tried to reassure journalists and NGOs that Proton Mail is somehow safer than other web mail and cloud services.
When I saw news reports today about a police raid on the home of Hannah Natanson, a Washington Post journalist, I thought about the possibility that more journalists are going to be prompted to migrate from Google Gmail to Proton Mail. They may simply be jumping from the frying pan and into the fire (but not the Large Hadron Collider).
Anybody who has any doubts about where this is going only has to read the evidence published in the JuristGate report.
For those thinking about using the Tor network to protect their privacy, it is a good moment to read about the falsification of "harassment" claims against Dr Jacob Appelbaum.
Remember the Marion County Record. I was very fortunate to visit the community in Marion, Kansas on the first anniversary of the raid.
For decades, the American and German spy agencies operated a fake security company called Crypto AG in Switzerland. They used the Swiss company domicile to obfuscate the real ownership of the crypto software. Many other companies and countries were fooled and put their trust in it. Could Proton Mail be another example of the same trick? █
