India Court Orders Proton Mail Block On Security Grounds

The Karnataka High Court on Tuesday directed India's government to block Switzerland-based email service Proton Mail, citing national security concerns and law enforcement challenges. Justice M Nagaprasanna ordered authorities to initiate proceedings under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act to ban the service, while mandating immediate blocking of "offending URLs" until final decisions are made.

The ruling followed a petition from M Moser Design Associates India, which claimed its female employees were targeted with obscene emails containing "AI-generated deepfake images" sent via Proton Mail. Petitioners argued Proton Mail operates servers outside India, making it inaccessible to law enforcement. The court noted several bomb threats to Indian schools were sent using the service, which has already been banned in Russia and Saudi Arabia. Additional Solicitor General Aravind Kamath, representing the government, said authorities would comply with the court's direction.

Sounds like a sales pitch

[Teun]

I'm happy with my email provider (Freedom.nl) but this sounds like a sales pitch :)

Can Proton Mail supply VPN services?

[Anonymous Coward]

We need to do whatever is necessary to break through national firewalls.

As always the word of the day is, "circumvention". *Tear down that wall!*

Stupid ruling

[Baron_Yam]

Sounds like they need to block all email traffic from crossing the border, that'll solve the issue. Because there's no way somebody using a particular provider to send unwanted messages would switch to some other set of servers if they got blocked, right?

And better block VPN traffic and hell, all other traffic too. Malicious actors will use any opening to bypass a firewall, so you really need to go all out to be secure.

Do it from Gmail and Outlook next

[xack]

I'd like to see how India copes when it bans itself from the entire internet.

How embarassing for India

[Paktai]

This is another of those stories where it quickly becomes obvious that the legal system has no idea what it's doing.
Also,

... the service, which has already been banned in Russia and Saudi Arabia

What august company. They're trying to deal with abusive emails to women and bomb threats. Saudia Arabia and Russia are well known paragons of women's rights and crusading against terrorism.

Re:

[flightmaker]

Also,

<quote><p> ... the service, which has already been banned in Russia and Saudi Arabia</p> </quote>

<p>What august company. They're trying to deal with abusive emails to women and bomb threats. Saudia Arabia and Russia are well known paragons of women's rights and crusading against terrorism.</p></quote>

I blocked all Saudi Arabia IP addresses long ago because of all the obscene spam originating from there.

ProtonMail gives information based on court orders

[firecode]

ProtonMail has given user information to law enforcement (to french police for example).

https://proton.me/legal/law-enforcement

Therefore it should be no problem to the law enforcement unless there is significant human rights violations in the country meaning ProtonMail don't co-operate with the that country's law enforcement (Swiss law).

Re:

[luther349]

isn't like everything encrypted on that platform so giving them data wont do much,

I don't understand the logic

[Murdoch5]

First off: "which has already been banned in Russia and Saudi Arabia", that's not an endorsement, that's a warning of what fascists do to services they can't control. Secondly, are they honestly going to claim the same hasn't happened from other domains like Google, Outlook, Yahoo or Hotmail? It's actually remarkable how many services can't accept ProtonMail email, without getting into issues such as bad P7M / P7S encoding. It's a rather frequent issue I deal with where a company, such as Microsoft, or the Ontario Cannabis Store (OCS), will incorrectly handle a ProtonMail email, and spit out the attachments encoding in P7M / P7S formats, without the infrastructure to support it.

Re:

[jenningsthecat]

It's a rather frequent issue I deal with where a company, such as Microsoft, or the Ontario Cannabis Store (OCS), will incorrectly handle a ProtonMail email, and spit out the attachments encoding in P7M / P7S formats, without the infrastructure to support it.

Could you explain the problem to a fellow ProtonMail user? I'm not up to speed on attachment problems, though I do know that an attached image in PM automatically gets converted to inline with no choice in the matter, which kinda sucks.

The reason I'm asking is that I'm looking at switching to Proton as my primary email provider, if I ever get around to making the damned Bridge software work on Linux Mint. (To me, their web interface truly sucks ass). I'd like to know about other potential problems before ma

Re:

[Murdoch5]

I'm not entirely sure what causes it, but if you email some companies and have the signing present on the email, the attachments show up as a P7M file, which most customer service people can't or won't open. I've had this problem repeatedly with Microsoft, the Ontario Cannabis Store, and Braun. Basically, their side sees you're sending "Secure Mail", and tries to handle it as "Secure Mail", but their systems aren't set up for it, and or it's getting mishandled.

You can run into this same issue if you en

Banned by Russia and Saudi Arabian?

[friedchikun]

Sounds like a win to me if your privacy oriented service ends up being private enough to enrage authoritarians.

Websites, not just Countries are blocking ProtonMa

[gOOIe]

Also noteâ¦. (if youâ(TM)re unaware)
Some websites are also starting to block or âoeBanâ ProtonMail.com email addresses.
(e.gâ¦. NZBplanet.net )