[eli]

Not necessarily. There's no need to break the encryption or have logs if the NSA can monitor all the traffic going in and out of the proxy server. They just have to correlate your incoming encrypted connection with the outgoing unencrypted data to remove the layer of anonymity. I'd frankly be a little surprised if they weren't doing this or something like it.

I would guess that using PIA makes you less secure against NSA snooping since it makes you more of a target and provides weak anonymity.

[r0h1n]

> I would guess that using PIA makes you less secure against NSA snooping since it makes you more of a target and provides weak anonymity.

So you're saying not using encryption and VPN services is a safer choice as regards Internet usage today? You seem to be going against the grain of most of what's been discussed around privacy & Internet surveillance on HN recently.

[eli]

I wouldn't make a blanket statement like that. Depends what VPN and how you're using it and what you're doing on the internet and (in particular) what threat you're trying to protect yourself against. PIA will do a good job of protecting the contents of your messages from someone sniffing your wifi hotspot, but is useless against someone with the ability to monitor all internet traffic. The data leaving the PIA proxy is just as unencrypted as it would be if you weren't using a VPN, except your attempt to secure it will likely draw extra attention. There's strong evidence [1] that the NSA has special rules that allow enhanced collection and analysis of encrypted traffic.

[1] "...the NSA is allowed to hold onto communications solely because you use encryption." https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/depth-review-new-nsa-d...