> Do you think ovh is any less beholden to GCHQ than Google et al are to the NSA?

OVH maybe a little more, because at least they're not under the direct auspice of the most megalomaniacal state in the world and will act according to their economic incentives in being a reliable and trustworthy service provider, which in a purely free market would align their interests with my own. However being as they are subject to various hostile state entities that have the ability to exert deleterious effects on that self interest, to the extent that they are forced to, they will cooperate with those entities.

I take action to protect myself from those threats to the greatest extent that I am able in either scenario whilst acknowledging that every theoretical threat model can never be entirely negated, coupled with the fact that at the end of the day, bothering to break through all of my measures and taking that trouble, they would find basically nothing that they were interested in.

I despise the state, sure, I'd like to see it dissolve into something like the system outlined in the machinery of freedom, sure. However in my view, taking any violent measures to expedite this process would both make me as bad as the enemy, and compromise the goal of a better world even if it actually contributed to the downfall of the state.

> Do you think your encrypted partitions and turned-off admin backdoors protect you much against people with physical access to the hardware?

"Much" more than non encrypted partitions and not turned off admin backdoors? Absolutely. Completely and utterly impenetrable to any attack by any means at all? Not likely, I can think of one off the top of my head that would work; freeze the memory, get an image, power off the system and extract the encryption keys from the image to re-mount the partitions. That's 1) not automatic 2) not easy 3) easy to screw up 4) not undetected

Great response - thanks.

Another question - have you done the thinking or got some advice about whether marginally trusting a potentially subvert-able hosting company in a jurisdiction you don't particularly trust (US, UK, and unfortunately for me, Australia) is likely to be a better or worse bet than trying to source a server/vps in a more trusted jurisdiction? (perhaps Iceland? Or am I fooling myself assuming there's anywhere "trustworthy"?)

I used to be Australian, too.

I think of it like trusting gangs in the thieves guild, there might be some gangs that are ethically more admirable than others, but at the end of the day if it comes down to it, the administrative board of the thieves guild is able to compel any of it's member organisations to act in accordance with its edicts.

So if you're going to take any action that might cause the administrative guild of that thieves board to attack you, it should be a foregone conclusion that the trust of intermediary parties beholden to that central authority is irrelevant.

Arrange your affairs accordingly. If you must deal with gangs of thieves, deal with the better ones, and if you can avoid it, don't. And if, heaven help you, you decide to take action that will paint crosshairs on your back from the central thieves guild committee, your opsec should take into account the full powers that committee is able to bring to bear upon you.

As a former employee of OVH, I can guarantee that law enforcement compliance does happen, I don't know to what extent, but having been there for the better part of two years I have seen requests from local government be held up and data handed over to authorities. Though in those cases it was child pornography accusations.

Which could mean that the only thing an unscrupulous government official needs to do in order to access one's data is hinting at implications on child pornography.