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I doubt much will end up public, as most vpns have a zero retention policy, so that leaves the NSA being able to track things at a lower level.

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If it's a state actor, it's not unreasonable to think they'd spin up their own VPN

All you need a Raspberry Pi and some public Wi-Fi network to create a jump point and hide among the 100s of devices going on and off that one public IP. With projects like TailScale you could set it up and plant it somewhere in a matter of hours

If it is a state actor like China or North Korea, they own the gateways and firewalls and can ensure any traffic they do not want to be identified ever will be.

> most vpns have a zero retention policy

I thought most VPNs sold usage data to ad companies?

You would think they’d choose a good one.

I also recently wrote a single ephemeral socks5 proxy over a hidden service in Rust. Since they’ve probably compromised other machines in the past, they could’ve easily used something similar to proxy their connection through tor and to some random computer (access some vulnerable router through tor, proxy through it, etc). Hiding your tracks aren’t hard

I think we can safely assume they did not use one of those.

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