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Comment by readhn | Hacker News Reader

"The Five Eyes, often abbreviated as FVEY, are an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. These countries are bound by the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence."

Austrlia is spying on your email on Fastmail the same way NSA is reading your gmail.

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This is an often repeated fallacy, but Australia doesn't have the equivalent of the National Security Letter, by which they can coerce any company to do what they want without the right to disclose such breaches. The NSA is also the worst adversary you can get. I doubt Australia's agencies are as competent or as well financed.

Also, no security agency is above the law, but the problem with the NSA is that the US law does not apply to non-US citizens. Us foreigners, the ones that the NSA are supposedly targeting, have no way to fight this through the judicial system and we have no representatives to call or vote. But choose a service provider closer to home and things change dramatically.

> the National Security Letter, by which they can coerce any company to do what they want without the right to disclose such breaches.

National Security Letters can only be used to obtain metadata. Still bad, considering all that can be ascertained from metadata, buy not at all "coerce any company to do what they want"

What about lavabit? They were forced to shut up shop because of a secret order that was for much more than metadata.

FastMail's servers are in the US.

True, but Fastmail has addressed this. I'm not sure that their argument completely holds up, but here's what they have to say about it: https://blog.fastmail.com/2013/10/07/fastmails-servers-are-i...

#tinfoil hat on#

So the NSA could be spying on Fastmail and sharing that with Australia?

Anyway, you'd have to be crazy to expect privacy on cloud services with the way governments are ignoring laws left and right.

I don't think they are, as mentioned, Australia doesn't have the equivalent of a National Security Letter. FastMail has a very short and very easy to understand privacy policy: https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html

This is both true and important, but I think the author was aware of it, and is willing to sacrifice that privacy for convenience (note how they moved from a private mail server to Gmail, then FastMail).

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