Can the US Government "Mine" Email on my FastMail Account?

[janusz]

Originally Posted by Abydos

Mailpile $163,064, reached in 5 weeks.

Mailpile's home page says

Please help us reach our $100,000 fundraising goal by September 10th, 2013

[Abydos]

That's the original funding text.
Here are the links to their funding totals: Mailpile, Heml.is

[helios]

I used to be Gmail user since 2004 as well. About two years ago I switched to Lavabit, reading good reviews about it and wanting to get rid of Skynet aka Google slavery. Time passed and Lavabit was shut down due to Snowden case. As you have probably seen, there's ex-Lavabit CEO's statement still available on the website:

My Fellow Users,

I have been forced to make a difficult decision: to become complicit in crimes against the American people or walk away from nearly ten years of hard work by shutting down Lavabit. After significant soul searching, I have decided to suspend operations. I wish that I could legally share with you the events that led to my decision. I cannot. I feel you deserve to know what’s going on--the first amendment is supposed to guarantee me the freedom to speak out in situations like this. Unfortunately, Congress has passed laws that say otherwise. As things currently stand, I cannot share my experiences over the last six weeks, even though I have twice made the appropriate requests.

What’s going to happen now? We’ve already started preparing the paperwork needed to continue to fight for the Constitution in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me resurrect Lavabit as an American company.

This experience has taught me one very important lesson: without congressional action or a strong judicial precedent, I would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States.

Sincerely,
Ladar Levison
Owner and Operator, Lavabit LLC

Just search for "lavabit snowden" on the web and you will find A LOT more information and other interesting details.

Since then I looked for another alternative and not having many to choose from I switched to FM. I do not trust FM and there are reasons for that. Australia is in the "Five Eyes" list, this country didn't help Assange, Ecuador did. FM's servers are in the New York (and as Lavabit's CEO warned, it's not safe to trust data to anyone with physical ties to US). On September 26, 2013, FM announced that it had split from Opera (more or less trustworthy Norwegians) and became a privately held independent company - this news I do not like. My assumption is that Google/NSA evildoers obviously noticed certain segments of people started fleeing from their services, they analyzed the situation, found obvious alternative/s and absorbed them, through 3rd parties of course or via other secretive methods at their disposal. Who exactly is this "privately held independent company"? Who are their sponsors? Who invested into splitting from Opera and why?
So NO, I do not trust FM, I do not like having to pay for this absence of trust, but there seem to be no better alternatives to Gmail at the moment. As soon as there is new Lavabit, I will switch to it right away.

[Jacinto]

Originally Posted by helios

Since then I looked for another alternative and not having many to choose from I switched to FM. I do not trust FM and there are reasons for that. Australia is in the "Five Eyes" list, this country didn't help Assange, Ecuador did. FM's servers are in the New York (and as Lavabit's CEO warned, it's not safe to trust data to anyone with physical ties to US). On September 26, 2013, FM announced that it had split from Opera (more or less trustworthy Norwegians) and became a privately held independent company - this news I do not like. My assumption is that Google/NSA evildoers obviously noticed certain segments of people started fleeing from their services, they analyzed the situation, found obvious alternative/s and absorbed them, through 3rd parties of course or via other secretive methods at their disposal. Who exactly is this "privately held independent company"? Who are their sponsors? Who invested into splitting from Opera and why?
So NO, I do not trust FM, I do not like having to pay for this absence of trust, but there seem to be no better alternatives to Gmail at the moment. As soon as there is new Lavabit, I will switch to it right away.

Wow!

What a sad state of affairs we're in.

Not so long ago, a rant like helios' would have been dismissed as pure paranoia.

Nowadays, although the whole scenario does sounds paranoid and seems far fetched, there is always a remote possibility that some of it could be true.

Personally, I do not believe that Rob Mueller and company would participate in such a dastardly scheme.

--
Jacinto

[David]

All email services (and companies) and the people that run them, run them as businesses, that are intended to make money.......

When you go shopping (for an email account) you really do need to remember this. Principles (and personalities) do not really matter much, when you are spending your hard earned honest coin.

[17pm]

As someone who might be interested in joining FastMail, I've been looking for opinions and whatnot.

I've read this thread and created a similar one.. For posterity sake, the link is the following: http://www.emaildiscussions.com/showthread.php?t=69561

[Abydos]

Tutanota looks like an interesting privacy based alternative..
A zero knowledge service, where the company cannot read, lose or give away your data. End to end encryption from each device.

https://tutanota.de/ Free 1GB. Due to introduce paid accounts with more storage in a couple of months.

Android & iOS apps.

Emails between tutanota accounts are encrypted automatically. You can send unencrypted emails normally. One nice feature is you can also send encrypted emails to friends who insist on using gmail accounts. They are sent a link to a sort of guest tutanota log in. Recipients can read your email, away from google data mining and even send an encrypted reply from within this window, back to your account.

[mekitron]

Originally Posted by ChinaLamb

sorry for no caps... a problem with my tablet tonight.

Which tablet? macca or iPad?

[mekitron]

Originally Posted by Jacinto

Personally, I do not believe that Rob Mueller and company would participate in such a dastardly scheme.

--
Jacinto

Rob can rob you any time. He does business, man. He has to run a business. He is not your brother that you blindly trust him.........

[mekitron]

Originally Posted by skydart

Please advise, and offer helpful suggestions if you would please.

After Ohm's Law, I learnt this law and it's quite easier than Ohm's law to remember.

"When you are connected to network as known as Internet, you cannot be safe anyway." Not everyone but at least certain people know you.

[17pm]

Originally Posted by mekitron

After Ohm's Law, I learnt this law and it's quite easier than Ohm's law to remember.

"When you are connected to network as known as Internet, you cannot be safe anyway." Not everyone but at least certain people know you.

That's a stupid argument. Let's just give up on trying to make the internet a safer place then. Damn VPNs, damn SSL connections, damn fixing backdoors and buggy software. Who the hell cares right, when one uses the internet one should expect to have no security or privacy whatsoever.

[mekitron]

Originally Posted by 17pm

That's a stupid argument. Let's just give up on trying to make the internet a safer place then. Damn VPNs, damn SSL connections, damn backdoors and buggy software. Who the hell cares right, when one uses the internet one should expect to have no security or privacy whatsoever.

Virtual world is mirror to our real world.

[David]

Originally Posted by mekitron

Virtual world is mirror to our real world.

If you had to give up one of these, mekitron, which one would you choose

[mekitron]

Originally Posted by David

If you had to give up one of these, mekitron, which one would you choose

virtual one

[jamieb22]

Greetings

I'd just like to point out that Fastmail.fm is definitely not secure from the prying eyes of the NSA. There are a few reasons for this:

1) Client TLS authentication is not enabled. As a consequence its quite easy for the NSA to ease drop on the so-called secure communications.

2) In any case, the whole X.509 certificate system is broken as it is quite likely that the NSA has the private keys associated with at least one trusted CA certificate.