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by thaumaturgy 5382 days ago
And if the U.S. decides to assist with some other country's pursuit of a political dissident? Do you help then, too?

> You run this website, the US govt. comes knocking at your door looking for records - what do you do?

You truthfully say that you don't have any records to provide, because responsible privacy services don't log their customers' activities. I think that's the one part of this situation that I don't understand: why were there records in the first place?

Regardless, a lot of his customers -- the ones providing half of his revenue for this business -- are now aware that the service monitors their activities.

1 comments

He states that only two things are recorded - the time you start using the service, and the time you stop.

I assume the FBI pieced that crime together based on this data. I honestly don't know much more than that, or what he has been up to in the past 2 years. I just know him from previously doing work for him, and thought I could give some insight to who he is and what he's like.

Three things would have to be recorded in that case: the "you" part of the start & stop times, as well as the times themselves.

I'll take your word for it that he's a decent person. I certainly have no reason to think otherwise. But that doesn't change that his service is recording information that it ought not to be.

The way you typically record this is start time, end time, and IP assigned. It's still not enough to identify what sites or traffic was visited, but when you get a spam email forwarded to you by your upstream provider, it's enough to identify a customer.
I'm sort of interested how you plan to make profit by billing unknown sources for use of your services...

A responsible business that wishes to comply with tax law and other important parts of making a living needs to have record of income.

The service charges a monthly or yearly fee for unlimited data transfer. They don't need to log when you actually use the service.
http://hidemyass.com/vpn/

HMA does not bill by the minute. Nice snark, though.