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Comment by consumer451 | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: Is there any reason to believe that PIA is a US intel operation vs, say a Russian one? I ask because my main privacy concern is state sponsored industrial espionage. I have often thought that if I wanted to gather kompromat on high level professionals, I would probably start an "anonymous" VPN service to further that effort. Say what you will about the NSA, but I am not worried about them in that space.

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>Say what you will about the NSA, but I am not worried about them in that space.

We know from leaks that the steal industry secrets.

> Honest question: Is there any reason to believe that PIA is a US intel operation vs, say a Russian one?

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 you're a spy using it to hide your identity from websites when you visit, it would be good for your VPN to have a mix of normal activity and spy activity. If you run your own, it's going to have a weird pattern of traffic that might stand out to a website with decent analytics.

This is exactly why Tor is publicly available.

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