Re:Mozilla VPN
by closeparen on Thursday June 18, 2020 @04:33PM
(#23567687)
You should expect that the government can compel a VPN provider to correlate traffic to subscriber information exactly the same way it does with a residential ISP.
Sure, but the set of governments that can compel my ISP might be different from the set of governments that can compel my VPN. I don't care about all governments equally, and my own government has a disproportional impact on me compared to most other governments.
Re:Mozilla VPN
by r3trohack3r on Friday June 19, 2020 @12:44PM
(#23576170)
If they have a warrant a VPN isn't going to protect you. If you think you are under active surveillance, you want more than a VPN.
Write-ups of the 2013 leaks revealed they did not compel ISPs to correlate traffic to subscriber information. It doesn't seem like they had any subscriber information in their database, only enough metadata about the communications to later compel a ISP to provide the subscriber information _postmortem_ (i.e. who did this cellphone number belong to on this date?).
ISPs weren't even compelled to share that metadata. It was a voluntary program. Some ISPs said no. Others said yes and then later backed out. In the end something like 80% of the traffic the NSA was after was able to be collected through the ISPs that voluntarily shared their data.
But, again, this was 2013. 2013 was forever ago, things may have changed.
Thus we only have to establish that the VPN provider is at least as trustworthy as my ISP. That's a pretty low bar to clear in many places. I have no doubt some VPNs are operated by nefarious actors (no better way to collect high quality data), but I don't think that's a concern with Mozilla.