| At best, you can hope to make surveilling you more expensive or more inconvenient. But if Snowden taught us anything, it's that whatever you needed to do to get yourself tangled up in the 5/14 eyes trip-wire, you've already done, long ago, and continue to do. VPNs don't mean shit. You're leaking data everywhere you go. Browser fingerprinting, WiFi/BT signals, cell tower signals, GPS. If you own a smart phone and a credit card you're already fucked. Let's not confuse things for people by making them think if they plop a 5 Euro VPN between them and their yahoo! email account that this does anything at all to deter state level actors. VPNs are good for a few things: (1) Evading state-sponsored censorship (which uses technology minted in good old Silicon Valley) -- where the state doesn't really care unless you're really bothering them (2) Marginally disrupting the pan-opticon that is surveillance capitalism by mixing the signals a bit, where your ISP can't sell you out to data brokers. But even then... DNS leaks, etc still happen and still fuck with the plan. (3) Maybe not getting scooped up as badly in the state dragnet, and maybe not being accused of something you actually didn't have anything to do with. But brother, if you think you're gonna be the next Ross Ulbrich with your Mullvad VPN, then you better be memorizing your recipe for toilet wine because you're gonna land in a fed pen. |