yeah, and? What are they going to do? Send the DEA after you for growing GMO titties? Gonna hit you with the ATF because you grew hormonally altered facial hair?

They’ve got shit like fentanyl to be worrying about. I think this is probably the least of concerns, especially considering this is less “drug addiction” and more “illegal prescription drugs” instead. Besides, they don’t get drug money from trans people.

It’s certainly a potential risk for procurement of the drug legally. But that’s already a problem.

At least that’s a more reasonable answer than trying to imply the NSA has backdoors everywhere.

My position is that it all depends on your threat model. The government isn’t likely to go after someone who torrents files and is hidden by a VPN. The government might go after someone running a streaming site, on the other hand.

And even that might wind up with a dead end. AirVPN (for example) is Canada-based, has no logs, and accepts both crypto and anonymous cash payments.

You’re going to connect to the seedbox at some point, which ties your IP to the traffic. If you are worried about a VPN attaching your IP to traffic, this is no different, no?

if you can’t connect to a vpn using only open source software, that’s a crappy vpn

That’s an interesting point, but I think the “if it’s high profile enough” is key. People torrenting files is probably low on their priorities. On the other hand, somebody organizing a terrorist cell is probably much higher.

Companies might have an interest in finding pirates, but it would not be as easy for them to get other companies to comply with their subpoenas.

The existence of the NSA and their activities is not proof that they have backdoors in VPNs. That’s bogeyman conspiracy theory shit—“they could be anywhere, therefore they’re everywhere!”

You still haven’t answered the question, and I’m beginning to think you are making shit up based on paranoia.

You didn’t answer the question. Your behavior is toxic.

Is your home machine, your phone, better protected than the VPN servers? I bet you’re not as good at IT security as the IT security staff VPN companies hire

If your threat model includes nation state actors, you’re best off not using networked computers

That’s kind of my thought as well. It’s certainly possible someone might go through the effort to find a single pirate downloading The Lion King, but that’s a lot of effort (read: money) to find just one person.

There’s certainly the possibility that an ISP could note that you connected to a VPN, but given that it’s not a remarkable event, since people connect to VPNs for all kinds of legal reasons, they aren’t likely to track your particular IP’s connection to a VPN apart from a court ordering them to care. They get paid their monthly internet plan price whether someone pirates or checks their email.

If someone was running the Pirate Bay from their home servers, however, more parties would likely be interested in finding that person, and that person’s threat model probably exceeds just using a logless VPN.