Proton Mail, CERN and Swiss privacy laws
Those people have foreign government security clearances for top secret classified information and we do not. Do we trust them?
It could be useful and reliable, possibly, but I don’t have a Swiss lawyer or any effective access to the Swiss court system with respect to “laws” on the subject of privacy. Nothing is private when it shows up in court, and people who are “at law” about privacy consequently cannot be trusted with it. The United States in fact has the strongest possible legal privacy protections in the Fourth Amendment, and while the Constitution is the law, to wit, the supreme law of the land, that is not to say that government officials, judges, police officers and jailers have any respect for the law when they so easily get away with making arbitrary searches, seizures, detentions, abductions, disappearances and arrests on false or fabricated charges.
Constitutional Convention
Proton was born in Switzerland in 2014 when a team of scientists who met at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) decided to build a better internet where privacy is the default.
Who are these people and why would U.S. persons want to use this particular email provider?
The CERN facility lies on the international border between Meyrin, Switzerland and Saint-Genis-Pouilly, France within a kilometer or two of the Geneva International Airport.
The United States was awarded CERN observer status in 1997 for significant in-kind contributions to CERN's accelerator complex. The US-CERN collaboration is governed by international cooperation agreements, which are prepared and agreed upon jointly by the US Government agencies and CERN. ¶The United States and CERN. ¶More than 2100 users from US institutes are registered at CERN, making the United States the lab's largest user community. ¶US scientists are full members of the experiments hosted at CERN and hold many leadership positions within the scientific collaborations.
The scientific “outsider” or “peer review” observing and reporting role is very important to realize the maximum possible benefits of the experiments performed, especially with respect to the collection and curation of raw data recorded by various instruments. European scientists have ideas, they want to play or have fun and explore, but we need hard data with hard accountability, for the results that we expect to derive.
It’s also an attitude that should be consistent with developing a sane reliable email system, but I really don’t know anything more about it than that. Get to know the people you are dealing with on this system. I have strong reservations about any modicum of privacy in a system caught up in a nexus of international intrigue and espionage with nuclear arms races and nation-state cryptanalytic resources fully deployed against it.