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Comment by overfeed | Hacker News Reader

I'll go out on a limb and say it: it's an American cybersecurity agency. Proton's CEO/Proton[1] loves the current US admin. I wouldn't be surprised if they comply now and ask questions later, if at all.

1. According to the now-deleted Reddit comment from the official Proton account glazing Republicans, so I assume they were speaking on behalf of all of Proton. https://theintercept.com/2025/01/28/proton-mail-andy-yen-tru.... I have zero evidence except for the CEOs questionable public statements, but I wouldn't be surprised if Proton turned out to be the 21st century Crypto AG.

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Proton is a honey watering hole pot. This has always been clear.

So clear that you can present the least evidence for it aside from the CEO's saying a thing or two that doesn't automatically spit on the current administration?

Please think a bit before posting. This feels like you didn’t stop to think that this could be seen as cheap and provocative by many.

And yes, some quotes, references, or a modicum of argumentation around a divisive point of view is also a good idea.

Proton has always been political, you see them supporting some protests, but not others.

Makes sense to me.

I wanted to try Proton out when they were having a sale, but I could not complete the purchase because I was on Mullvad's VPN.

I created a ticket, and when they got back to me 5 days later, they told me to disconnect from the VPN to sign up for Proton.

if I didn't knew better, that would sound plausible, but the truth is much more boring (for the better)

Don't go out on a limb, RTFA. But then you wouldn't be able to have your cake and eat it too.

> Proton's CEO/Proton[1] loves the current US admin

The CEO once expressed support for Gail Slater as head of antitrust and subsequently criticized lack of effective work towards tech regulation on the Democratic side in the same social media thread.

Calling that "love for the current US admin" (which hadn't even taken office when those statements were made) is pure disinformation.

Half the American tech landscape is either running toward Trumps bed or bending right down and making all the right mating signals in hopes of some interest, but a few pro-republican comments from the Proton CEO should be held as immediately and deeply suspect of this company being a honeypot?

People of all kinds can say certain positive things about the Republican Party for different reasons in specific contexts and not be fanatics you know. That's how using actual reasoning and nuanced discourse works in the world of not throwing your brain in the garbage through ideological rigidity.

For me, at least, it's less about the initial comments than how he handled the fallout from it.

Why should there be fallout from supporting the current admin? Tech companies colluded with the government during the biden administration to censor American citizens.

I never saw any outrage. Only memory holing and denial

> I never saw any outrage

You probably aren't looking hard enough. There was plenty of outrage, and congressmen excoriated tech companies for "suppressing right-wing voice"

Not in Liberal/Left leaning communities. They called for more censorship.

Yours is an entirely different argument to what gp was claiming, and undermines the crux of gps position.

> Why should there be fallout from supporting the current admin?

Well, why or why not doesn't matter; there _was_ backlash. And to my recollection, he made some rather bizarre defensive posts on Reddit that were later deleted and replaced with a corpo response.

Ideological rigidity or not, I'll bet dollars to donuts that Proton disabled the accounts at the behest of an American agency. All the highfalutin talk is missing my main point.

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