[jorvi]

Considering it was a LEA that put them in court, yes, I don't think they were playing word games. Otherwise the LEA would have just forced them in court to intercept.

However, I also think threat model comes into play here. If you don't want advertisers to track you or to download some torrents, a VPN provider works great. If you want to hack into NORAD, probably do that from a secondhand laptop on Tor over a public wifi.