…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.
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.