Hacker News Reader

Comment by nurettin | Hacker News Reader

Vodafone runs a large vpn, and I know from the people who sell them logging services they are obligated by the governments of multiple nations to keep url logs for a number of months that vary depending on the target's information retaining laws.

View on HN

Mullvad on the other hand does not log anything at all (other than their Stripe payments where they try to keep data minimal). Is that in violation of the Swedish law? Maybe, but as long as one of the medium sized ISPs, Bahnhof, is still fighting the law in court I cannot foresee any court cases against small fry like Mullvad or any of the other Swedish VPN providers.

The difference is probably that Sweden isn't as privacy unfriendly as the USA, despite being part of the fourteen eyes programme.

I think it is more about us being culturally less friendly towards secret court orders, and with just handing over customers to the authorities without proper process. Does our sigint operations monitor Mullvad's exit and entry nodes in Sweden? Maybe, but I do not think Swedish authorities will be able to force Mullvad's staff to silently add a backdoor. I mean they have not yet managed to get Bahnhof to comply with the current law since Bahnhof argues that some EU directive makes the Swedish law illegal.

To their own citizens sure, but they have had absolutely no qualms about invading the privacy of those who are not their own citizens, which is the entire point of the 'Eyes' programs.

Unlike many countries includingany European countries the US does not require logs to be kept.

Also legally national security letters can not require monitoring of the contents of communications but only compel the recipient to produce existing records regarding the communications. For a VPN service that did retain logs a NSL could require them to be turned over; however, for one which doesn't there would be nothing to turn over and a NSL can't compel the collection of such information when it doesn't exist. A NSL which tried to exceed these restrictions can be fought in court.

>but as long as one of the medium sized ISPs, Bahnhof

An ISP named themselves "train station"?

Sure, there's also a city in Croatia (Pula) which means "dick" in Romanian. People don't usually verify what their brand means in other countries, especially if they have no desire to expand to said country.

I am 100% sure it is intentional since virtually all Swedes know that Bahnhof is German for train station. No idea why they picked that name though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com