We know from leaks that the steal industry secrets.
I would also like to know the motivation for a US intel agency to want to run a VPN. It seems to me like it wouldn't be worth the bother: VPNs aren't illegal in the US, so it would be too hard to convince everyone to use theirs. Spies, etc. could just use private ones they control. They'd just see a bunch of crap from unsophisticated people.
Seems to me like it would be more likely for US law enforcement to want to do something like that, but I'm skeptical they have the resources.
> If I had to guess, it would be PIA: the most popular, the most accessible, and the most affordable US-based VPN.
If I had to guess, the state surveillance agency-run VPN would be one that's still accessible from China. I understand (but I could be wrong) there are still a few that manage to evade the blocks and provide good service despite all the crackdowns. Chinese state security has many more reasons to want to watch domestic VPN traffic than the US does. Their motivation is proven by the fact that they've spent the effort to build and maintain the "Great Firewall," and crack down on VPNs that bypass it.
It would be reasonably clever for the Chinese to crack down on all the VPNs that they don't control, funneling all the "illicit" traffic to the few VPNs they do control. It would make spying, monitoring dissidents, etc. much easier for them.
The NSA and other US intelligence agencies probably don't care very much about anyone that's dumb enough to need to use public VPN. Seems like the only people who would care in the US are domestic law enforcement, like the FBI.
Where do you plan to announce when you're ready to name names? I may have some need in the future to use a VPN in China and would like to be aware.
Also props on your mail service, it's very impressive. If it had been released a bit earlier, I think I'd have been a customer.
I wasn't that familiar with your company before today but I can tell you that I won't be a customer at any time in the future based on your comments.
- ProtonVPN UAB lists Tesonet's CEO as a director
- ProtonVPN UAB is operated from Tesonet HQ in Vilnius, Lithuania
- ProtonVPN UAB uses previous Tesonet's technical employees
- ProtonVPN uses IP address blocks that belong to Tesonet
- ProtonVPN mobile app is signed by Tesonet
It seems, that ProtonVPN is a free VPN service by a data mining company from Lithuania.
Proton has also been thoroughly audited/vetted by third parties, including Mozilla: https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2018/10/22/testing-n... and also the European Commission which partially funds Proton: https://protonmail.com/blog/eu-funding/
Any data mining claims are categorically false, and doing data mining would also subject us to fines of 20 million Euros as discussed here: https://protonvpn.com/blog/is-protonvpn-trustworthy/
Like ProtonMail, the ProtonVPN team is distributed, split between Geneva, Skopje, Vilnius, and San Francisco. Tesonet (one of the biggest IT firms in Vilnius) was previously used as outsourced HR before we incorporated our own entity in Vilnius. We have similar arrangements for our staff in San Francisco, Prague, and Skopje. The above poster's intentions are a bit suspect, given that he's the co-founder of PIA...
But your entity's business address in Lithuania is still Tesonet's HQ. And Tesonet runs the entire technical infrastructure needed for a VPN service. So, are you partners or competitors?
If I had to guess, it would be PIA: the most popular, the most accessible, and the most affordable US-based VPN.
When a VPN is run by NSA, of course it will stand up in all courts. How would a state surveillance agency let its tool be so publicly destroyed? And it doesn't have to keep any logs at all. They can just be forwarded in real-time, based on a set of filters and rules ("URLs that are requested by <IP>", "IPs that are requesting <URL>").
[1] https://protonvpn.com/blog/threat-model/