[parliament32]

>A subpoena would be required to reveal your source IP, and perhaps your VPN provider is telling the truth about not keeping logs.

Not to mention the legal trouble for an LEO to be granted a subponea in a different country. By the obstacle of "a different legal system protects this part of my data chain" alone a VPN is worth it.

Say you use a Russian VPN provider. Sure, they can see that you're connecting to whatever site, but the actual data is protected end-to-end by TLS (hopefully). Meanwhile your local ISP can see you're connecting to something in Russia, full stop. For someone to track you down, they'd have to get the compliance of both your ISP and your Russian friends... AFAIK, there are exactly zero cases on record where this has been successfully done.