…because VPNs obscure a user’s true location, and because intelligence agencies presume that communications of unknown origin are foreign, Americans may be inadvertently waiving the privacy protections they’re entitled to under the law…
…VPNs might protect you against garden-variety criminals, but the intentional commingling of origin/destination points by VPNs could turn purely domestic communications into “foreign” communications the NSA can legally intercept (and the FBI, somewhat less-legally can dip into at will)…
Certainly the NSA isn’t concerned about “incidental collection.” It’s never been too concerned about its consistent “incidental” collection of US persons’ communications and data in the past and this isn’t going to budge the needle, especially since it means the NSA would have to do more work to filter out domestic communications and the FBI would be less than thrilled with any efforts made to deny it access to communications it doesn’t have the legal right to obtain on its own.
Since the government won’t do this, it’s up to the general public, starting with everyone sharing the contents of this letter with others. VPNs can still offer considerable security benefits. But everyone needs to know that domestic surveillance is one of the possible side effects of utilizing this tech.
Is it safe enough to use vpns based out of the US? I’m using nord which is non us.
Those are the ones that would cause them to surveil you.
The issue isn’t necessarily “the government will target you for using a VPN;” the issue is “if your IP makes you look like you’re outside the US because that’s where your traffic exits the VPN, the laws against domestic spying won’t protect you properly because you’ll look like a foreigner.”
Frankly, the headline is heavily spinning it to be anti-VPN fearmongering.
Yeah I reacted way too quickly. Then I realized half of X bot traffic spoofs everywhere. They’re intentionally doing a shakeup of everything and this one got under my skin cause I’m a daily user.
But before this was that outside US router ban that was pretty real. The DJI ban. So these types of news cascade and its worrisome.
Nord is owned by Tesonet, a data mining company which also owns SurfShark.
And Private Internet Access and ExpressVPN are owned by Kape, an Israeli firm.
ProtonVPN is owned by Proton, in Switzerland.
Mullvad is based in Sweden and is the main interest of its seemingly decent, also Swedish, parent company
Fan of Mullvad but just be aware its not what you want if you’re using a VPN for torrenting. They had to remove their port forwarding feature due to some bad actors ruining it for the rest of us.
What happens if you are torrenting via Mullvad?
they don’t allow port forwarding which nerfs the effectiveness of seeding, seeding is still possible, just not as effective.
You’ll only be able to connect to certain peers that do have port forwarding setup.
If a friend was interested in that, what should I tell them to use instead? Asking for a friend, obviously.
I switched to AirVPN when Mullvad made the change. I think Proton, PIA, and Windscribe have it too.
Thanks. Sounds good
CyberGhost I believe is also owned by Kape or a subsidiary.
Thanks for the extra digging, no true privacy but at least there’s some transparency with the vpns.
yes, just be aware that the gov could require the company to log you without letting you know, even if they have a no log setup. For the everyday person this is a non-issue, but if you are doing shadey stuff or have ties that may make someone super interested in your activities, you may wanna choose elsewhere.
The everyday person has political views that can be categorized as extremist. Freedom is more costly.
No. They will see that you’re using a vpn.
They might decide to record your traffic and save it until it can be decrypted.
In theory, I think all VPN usage is grounds to get you put on a list, but Nord is considered a relatively “normie” company by privacy aficionados. Everybody and their mother has seen an ad for it by this point. (The privacy aficionados will probably tell you it’s not good enough, but that’s a can of worms I won’t get into right now.)
Makes sense I should probably reframe it as is nord not going to sell their users out without a fight.
Only true privacy is like the tails stuff and some complicated routing stuff all the self hosting guys here probably know about.
AFAIK the one company that has been battle-tested is Mullvad, everything else requires (more) crossing your fingers.
Nord has subpar standards when it comes to logging now, and if that’s in line with recent Proton behavior, you might that interpret that as a potential willingness to cave to the US with minimal pushback