VPNs have become a huge market in recent years, with all of them offering essentially the same service but branded differently.
I’ve talked about VPNs before and how you likely don’t need one if all you care about is “privacy”. Otherwise it has some usecases for like downloading torrents or accessing geo-blocked content but that’s about it.
To synthesize, the VPN owners can see what you do instead of your ISP when you use a VPN. You better trust that they don’t keep logs and encrypt your traffic.
Who do you trust more, some VPN company, or your ISP? That’s a personal question only you can answer.
Privacy and “security” is what VPNs advertise heavily on. Security is nonsense from their part; there is no additional security to using a VPN. NordVPN for example likes to talk about the evil hackers in starbucks that will hack your wifi, but that literally never happens (not never never but not enough to justify paying them money for it).
In any case, all VPN rankings omit one very important fact: fed involvement. that’s security 101.
The CIA controlled an encryption company for decades (established after WW2): Crypto AG. They sold encryption machines to embassies around the world under this name, and it was only found out they were CIA in the 2010s.
We’ve known since Snowden about backdoors in Windows that allow the NSA to bypass encryption and spy on anyone they want.
And it’s a very glaring issue. Look at any of those rankings and they’ll talk about privacy and encryption protocols, and never once mention potential fed involvement or other causes for concern.
Even worse, if they do talk about it, they often talk about “Chinese” involvement. How the fuck did the discourse get so bad in just 10 years? They don’t even have anything to back it up. Meanwhile we have evidence of NSA and CIA involvement in encryption and surveillance.
NordVPN especially is strange. They advertise a LOT and always sell at a discount (which makes the VPN cheaper than most competition). ProtonVPN too, I don’t trust anything Proton ever since they surrendered info to the feds about one of their clients (an eco-activist). Secondly they are a “Swiss” company like Crypto AG, but were not founded by Swiss people.
So again, who do you trust more? Some VPN company trying to sell you a product under false pretences, or your local ISP company?
I cannot promise, however, what I want to do is enough research to cover the political parts in this respect, before I do write. This is a very tough one to crack, because you have to lay out not just how Anglo surveillance apparatus works, but also the surveillance that exists in socialist or AES or such countries. The privacy part is easy for me, so is operational security, the political part and how to lay out such a writeup is hard. I am already currently working on another writeup exposé.
I appreciate whatever you do. I know that theoretically mass surveillance is used to suppress reactionaries within a socialist country and preventing external enemies of socialism from disrupting the governments’ good work. Practically when you are working in enemy territory and organizing, it is sensible to cover your tracks for plausible deniability.
I’m not sure what you mean by the “political part”. I don’t think it is wrong to criticize AES countries for dragnet surveillance if you think that it is ineffective in those aims. Discussing what to do to build socialism in your country requires different actions than what countries that have a socialist government need to do once they achieve power. Perhaps surveillance, police, and prisons are 20th century tools that socialist states only copied from bourgeoisie states without considering better alternatives.
I’d like to know the effectiveness of surveillance for suppressing dissidents in countries with consent of the people vs countries that work against the consent of the people. I suspect (maybe idealistically) that you don’t really need to keep tabs on everyone around you if everyone around you trusts you to work in their interests, and that the general citizen can and will protect the country from external threats coming in from outside of their country.
I think it is good for everyone to have as much privacy as possible as a general paradigm. Ethnic, sexual, and political minorities are harder to target in such a system of general privacy. This also helps with labor organizing. If good work needs to be done for the good of all In AES, we can stop reactionaries by meeting people’s material needs. In bourgeoisie countries, workers live in enemy territory. The further the contradiction of power and wealth between the bourgeoisie state and the workers, the more sensible it is for the state to surveil the populous, and socialists should know how to do important work without that state knowing.