Yandex Mail

[api]

Actually you laugh, but being spied on by someone with no jurisdiction over you is better than being spied on by someone who can name you an enemy combatant because they misunderstand your e-mails that contain a plot synopsis for a book you're working on or that can label you a child pornographer because you have naked photos of your grandkids playing in your yard.

[tptacek]

So that's happened when, in American history?

[smnrchrds]

I actually think Yandex is a good alternative. Assume that all countries have similar projects like PRISM. Which one would you rather have: your country spying on you or a foreign country?

If your country is spying on you, it can use the data it gathers against you in a court, etc. If it's a foreign country, what could they possibly do?

[gyardley]

Use the information against your own country and the people in it, which likely includes the people you're closest to?

Since you're not a citizen of that country, use the information in your email in far less scrupulous ways? Perhaps they could blackmail you into being a foreign intelligence asset. Perhaps a corrupt employee could slip your information to a criminal organization who will then steal your identity.

All of these things seem rather unlikely, and chances are you're equally boring to both governments. But your assumption that the government of a country you're not a citizen of will treat you better than the government of a country you are a citizen of seems pretty odd to me.

[tptacek]

Technically, the FISA law being used by the NSA to capture phone records doesn't generate evidence that is easily used in court. If you're not a legitimate foreign target, you can suppress evidence that originates from FISA, and the NSA is obligated to destroy evidence it inadvertently collects on citizens.

[snitko]

Sell it to your country?

[g8oz]

How about an Indian provider? http://mail.sify.com/

[3pt14159]

The NSA spies on all major email providers.

[kpierre]

KGB is much better than NSA: they simply don't have money for data processing on that scale.

Yandex Mail is a great competitor to gmail, some things even work better -- you've got a separate list of thread's attachments, ability to unsubscribe from whole spam categories in one click, SMS (maybe only in russia) and so on

[ihsw]

That's a dangerous assumption to make, many world governments may have purchased intelligence from the NSA and now they'll have to re-allocate funds for locally-sourced intelligence.

[brown9-2]

A quick search found estimates for the FSB's budget in 2005 was over 60 billion rubles, which would have been about $2 billion USD back then.

http://www.agentura.ru/english/experts/safranchuk/

That seems like a very healthy budget to me.

[ivan_gammel]

FSB does not need the money for it, but they already spy on everyone for 15 years. In Putin's Russia, the ISPs purchase the necessary equipment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM

[Nekorosu]

I'm russian. I've left Russia for good because of weather and politics. Now I'm laughing out loud.

All jokes aside it's interesting to observe politics and technology interplay. But I'm not too excited I have to take part in some of the events.

[cadalac]

What about the low taxes you would have had there?

[ck2]

Didn't east germany have warehouses of piles of paper of records of everyone spying on each other?

It bothers me as a progressive that many liberals don't see how we are a hop, skip and jump away from that mentality.

From birth to death there is going to be a record of your child's phone calls, friends, dates, etc. It will never be deleted.

[buster]

Aye, and we're still at it deciphering shreddered papers :)

http://www.goethe.de/ges/pok/ddg/en2491168.htm

[runjake]

In case you hadn't heard, the KGB no longer exists. They've been replaced by the FSB and SVR.

[akiselev]

The FSB is still colloquially referred to as the KGB.

[eli]

So is this post just an excuse to make snarky comments or is there a point you're trying to make?

[tptacek]

I'm sure the FSB and SVR are only looking at the metadata.

[sologoub]

If you are that worried about FSB spying on you, make sure you are not running a Kaspersky product: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/ff_kaspersky/all/

But in all seriousness... it seems to be a rather unfortunate reality of using FREE email service, that the actual level of privacy afforded to you is minimal. Russia has a very stringent set of anti-extremism laws that curb free speech big time. If your content is labeled extremist, it has to be taken down by an ISP via a swift court order. Note that the "court" is either a single judge or a small panel of judges making the decision. Under that set of laws.

The hosted paid services like Google Apps is another matter all together. There the privacy expectation should be extremely high... but who knows if that's really true.

[huhtenberg]

If you are that worried about NSA spying on you, make sure you are not running Windows.

Because, you know, routine software updates is just what the doctor ordered for on-demand installation of backdoors.

[mtgx]

Because NSA cares about whether it's a free service or a paid one, or about the company's ad tracking technology?

[viveutvivas]

Verizon is not a free service. Where's our privacy?

[alan_cx]

Wasn't the KGB dissolved in 1991?

[dantillberg]

I imagine the NSA will still find a way to read your mail.

Remember how Google complained loudly about Chinese hackers breaking into a few Chinese dissidents' gmail accounts?

How pedestrian of them. The NSA is apparently far more efficient at that game.

[wcunning]

Slightly off-topic, but how do people here think Yandex search stacks up against Google? I mostly use DuckDuckGo at this point, but I like to have several alternatives and Google is not going to be one of them anymore.

[tripzilch]

It's pretty ok. It definitely crawls a different part of the web than G and DDG, so that's always refreshing.

I used to like it because it still had a lean, plain HTML no-frills interface, but I see they've added some JS interactivity to it (not much, though).

I thought they had an English version, but I can't find the link :) So all I'm seeing is Russian, which I cannot read.

[pentheus]

At least they still have an RSS reader. It seems more like a valid replacement for most Google Reader alternatives that have passed around here before.

[Ihmahr]

I don't think this would be a crazy thing to do.

Russia doesn't drone 'suspected' terrorists based on their meta data.

[Doublon]

"Trust KGB to read your mail (http://www.russianpost.ru/) "

[xentronium]

Nah, you're more likely to never receive your snail mail due to incompetence of the goddamn service.

These are not photoshopped:

http://cdn.trinixy.ru/pics5/20121123/mail_01.jpg

http://cdn.trinixy.ru/pics5/20121123/mail_02.jpg

http://cdn.trinixy.ru/pics5/20121123/mail_03.jpg

[kpierre]

more likely, trust KGB to steal your mail

[jmngomes]

We're going from "companies launching social networks so they can get your data to do better advertising" to "governments launching social web services so they can get your data do better 'threat monitoring'"

[dancryer]

In Soviet Russia, your mail reads the KGB.

[Jgrubb]

Reddit in-jokes will get you downvoted here, just a heads up.