Instead, reading through the allegations, Lin came off as abominable. Contrary to your conclusion that this shows the FBI takes cyber harassment seriously, it seems like law enforcement generally allowed Lin to publicly subject this poor woman to psychological torture for a couple years before doing anything about it.
Provided the allegations are true, whatever sentence he gets will not be enough...
He has already been sentenced to 17.5 years in federal prison (and federal time has no parole).
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/massachusetts-man-sentenced-m...
Also, this is not going to be some "white collar resort" prison!
Anyway, it's worth noting how Lin's behavior was not just criminal to the point of outright sociopathy, but also - like most criminals' - incredibly lazy and complacent. That anyone knowledgeable in a CS-related field could target a vulnerable individual in such an extreme, sustained and long-lasting cyber-abuse campaign and expect to get away with it, is rather surprising to say the least.
As for why my intuition went that way, I suspect it's because, from the title, I felt like Lin was wronged by the VPN company which misled him, I generally distrust the FBI, deanonymizing VPN traffic seems troubling to me, "cyberharassment" sounds more like being mean to people online than the things Lin did and I don't think sending rude words to people should be criminal, and I suppose that I personally am more likely to be (falsely) accused of cyberharassment than I am to be victimized by it which probably results in implicitly identifying more with the attacker than the victim.
Maybe we should think about how we act online if we feel that there is a significant risk of being accused of cyberharassment, even if such conduct should not be illegal (and I suspect we also disagree on where the line ought to be drawn here).
In the context of criminal behavior I'd expect harassment to be a campaign of intentionally bothering someone and invading their space. I'd assume someone like Lin might be guilty of criminal harassment if he waited outside this girl's house and lewdly propositioned her every day, bothered her at work, etc.
I think we should have a higher bar for what constitutes cyberharassment because it's so much less invasive and threatening than physical harassment and so much easier to ignore. It's also possible that it's easier to inadvertently participate in cyberharassment when you can't see how the other person is reacting to you or feel how inappropriate the behavior is.
What Lin did in this case is far beyond any of what I described above. I think of his behavior as transcending what I'd describe as cyberharassment - in my earlier comment I called it psychological torture and I think that's far more apt than cyberharassment which seems too milquetoast a phrase for what happened here.
> FBI arrests PureVPN user with log data that was said to not exist (justice.gov)
Nothing about cyberstalking. I too figured it was going to be something stupid like piracy.
Kindly remove or correct your comment. Thanks.
While Lin is undoubtedly a terrible person, I still think 17.5 years in federal prison is rather excessive unless you've actually killed someone.
"the fact that VPN's track activity with logs."
>As an aside, it's good to see another example that the FBI does actually investigate cases of cyberharrasment and takes doxing seriously, contrary to popular opinion.
Seriously, all this over a roommate found on Craigslist. I did like the part where his victim repeatedly smashed his computer monitor with a hammer, though.
Ally countries usually have extradition treaties, and have a greater chance of sharing intel.
NSA has your international traffic logged and timestamped. If you're doing nefarious activity from a non-MLAT country's IP, and you're the only one connecting to it from the US, it's a simple matter of parallel construction for domestic law enforcement to pop you.
This is more just putting some circumstantial evidence together. Parallel construction refers to going out and getting evidence a second time, because you don’t want to reveal how you got it the first time. Usually because the first time it was collected was without a warrant, or collected from a sources or via a method you want to keep secret. So the evidence is reconstructed in parallel.
Couldn't that be countered by using two foreign IPs for your VPN, one for your inbound connection and another for your outbound traffic? It would make it more difficult to correlate your US IP with the outbound VPN traffic without extra information.
No offense or anything, but it sounds like you actually have very GOOD reasons for not trusting them.
We have something known as Secure Core VPN that offers additional protection if our Brazilian ISP starts monitoring our connection: https://protonvpn.com/support/secure-core-vpn/
All of what is claimed in the statement would be possible even if we assume no logs are stored for the VPN Server they run, which makes no guarantees about access to their HTTP properties.
It’s still an open question afaik
edit: I've worded this weird. I was typing on my phone at lunch stuff I'd just learned this morning[0] which referenced this[1] article saying running a log-less Wireguard might not be possible.
AirVPN in [0]:
> "Wireguard, in its current state, not only is dangerous because it lacks basic features and is an experimental software, but it also weakens dangerously the anonymity layer."
and Perfect Privacy:
> "WireGuard has no dynamic address management, the client addresses are fixed. That means we would have to register every active device of our customers and assign the static IP addresses on each of our VPN servers. [...]"
Things may have changed, but it appears that running a log-less vpn provider is actually more complicated with Wireguard than at first glance. Namely the issues around DynamicIPs.
[0]: https://restoreprivacy.com/wireguard/ [1]: https://www.perfect-privacy.com/blog/2018/10/10/wireguard-vp...
This is a really bizarre misunderstanding of the events.
Wireguard does not generate any log entries by default.
zx2c4 wrote a rootkit which makes it more difficult to retrieve connected users IPs from a running wireguard instance.
But the parent post is wrong, the defensive rootkit is not to prevent logging, it's to prevent extracting the configuration from the kernel. It effectively makes the WireGuard configuration write-only from the perspective of userspace. WireGuard does not do any access logging by default as far as I am aware.
[0]: https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2017-November/00...
Probably cos they investigated certain cases and found nothing, to the great dismay of certain people who wanted to be seen as victims and others who wanted to be seen defending them.
>Further, records from Pure VPN show that the same email accounts Lin's gmail account and the teleportfx gmail account-were accessed from the same WANSecurity IP address. Significantly, Pure VPN was able to determine that their service was accessed by the same customer from two originating IP addresses: the RCN IP address from the home Lin was living in at the time, and the software company where Lin was employed at the time.
Also, it seems Lin knew or suspected this at least, seeing as he doesn't believe in a VPN service that doesn't keep logs:
>For example, on June 15, 2017, Lin ... re-tweeted a tweet from "IPVanish," that read: "Your privacy is our priority. That's why we have a strict zero log policy." Lin criticized the tweet, saying, "There is no such thing as VPN that doesn't keep logs. If they can limit your connections or track bandwidth usage, they keep logs."
This will be a useful .pdf to keep on hand because I also don't believe in VPN's that don't keep logs. At a minimum they'll keep 30 days worth and in many countries may actually be required by law to keep them longer than that even (60-90 days usually).
As an aside, it's good to see another example that the FBI does actually investigate cases of cyberharrasment and takes doxing seriously, contrary to popular opinion.
E: A few typo fixes and the last 4 words.