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.
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?<p>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?
KGB is much better than NSA: they simply don't have money for data processing on that scale.<p>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
I'm russian. I've left Russia for good because of weather and politics. Now I'm laughing out loud.<p>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.
Didn't east germany have warehouses of piles of paper of records of everyone spying on each other?<p>It bothers me as a progressive that many liberals don't see how we are a hop, skip and jump away from that mentality.<p>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.
If you are that worried about FSB spying on you, make sure you are not running a Kaspersky product: <a href="http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/ff_kaspersky/all/" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/07/ff_kaspersky/all/</a><p>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.<p>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.
I imagine the NSA will still find a way to read your mail.<p>Remember how Google complained loudly about Chinese hackers breaking into a few Chinese dissidents' gmail accounts?<p>How pedestrian of them. The NSA is apparently far more efficient at that game.
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.
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.
"Trust KGB to read your mail (<a href="http://www.russianpost.ru/" rel="nofollow">http://www.russianpost.ru/</a>) "
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'"