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Comment by crawfordcomeaux | Hacker News Reader

Hello, I'm an organizer for a system to coordinate multiple mutual aid networks, many of which are only organizing by Signal & Protonmail exclusively because they think they're secure and private.

People who are doing work to help people in ways the state tries to prevent (like giving people food) rely on this tech. These are the same groups who were able to mobilize so quickly to respond to the LA fires, but the Red Cross & police worked to shut down.

This impacts the people who are there for you when the state refuses to show up. This impacts the future version of you who needs it.

Most people aren't disabled, yet. Doesn't mean they don't need us building infrastructure for if/when they become disabled.

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What groups did the police and Red Cross shut down? Any links?

In any geopolitical crisis, you tend to have victims on both sides be prevented from getting relief, except when the one side is imperial.

The powerful entities tend to prohibit relief to the oppressed side, even making it illegal.

I’m thinking as well more “mundane” things as well, like red states with “charitable feeding” laws that in effect make it illegal to feed the homeless without large amounts of red tape.

But, truly, I think you’re right to highlight wars.

https://www.salon.com/2023/08/07/criminalizing-the-samaritan...

Someone should tell anyone who seeks confidentiality that no email is secure. Use Signal and enable the data retention (i.e., automatic message deletion) feature. By itself that is not perfectly secure, but it's a start.

The people involved are likely all using Protonmail. So that would mean TLS for the connection to Protonmail with E2EE for messages passing through Protonmail.

Not sure that encrypted email in general would be less secure than, say, Signal. Since Signal is an instant messenger on a phone it might actually be less secure[1].

[1] https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:emailvsim

This is why I say that it's overly binary, not incorrect. Some people do have such needs, and Signal can and should fix this for those people.

people who think protonmail is secure it's to the same level as mail.yahoo.com :)

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