That's a good effort, but unfortunately every second desktop app now bundles a browser (Electron), and most people now access the internet through phone apps, an environment which offers no such control. Furthermore, if your VPN provider is seized, hacked, issued with a warrant, or is a honeypot operation you're going straight to the top of the interesting critters list, and you've probably given them your identity with your payment information, or it's trivially available to multiple state or corporate actors through the crypto gateway you used to purchase the intermediary token. Either that or your IP will also provide your home address by extension, as well as your tax information, income level, telephone numbers, historic personal/family/financial network, employers current and past, registered vehicles, upcoming transport reservations, current physical location through either network activity or cellular network operator ping, etc. Just sayin'.

Echelon was known by the late 1990s and has now been running for at least a third of a century. The European Parliament report came out in '01. Snowden and co, which this IETF document was presumably issued in response to, was a decade and a half later, a time in which offensive population-scale surveillance and targeted penetration as a service became open market products, secret global state-sanctioned kidnappings and assassinations became nominally normalized, literal constellations of surveillance satellites have been launched at ever-decreasing cost with ever-increasing capabilities, US 'instant global strike' capability is declared, drone warfare has not only been realized but is constant and in the popular consciousness, and every state actor worth its stazi-salt started playing.

IMHO this document is therefore primarily of historical interest in demonstrating the apparent, unfortunate, well-meaning near-irrelevance of the IETF in the face of global internet commercialization and the ongoing shift toward normalized state surveillance. It could be seen as the conscience of the internet coming to terms with its failure. In Assange's words of 2012 (some 3 years prior): "The internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The internet is a threat to human civilization." This is all the more significant in mid 2024 as Assange has just escaped torture, China and Russia tighten their grasp after abandoning any open market pretense, Europe, at war, stands on the cusp of a popular authoritarian transition and the US election looms.

What's a regular citizen to do? A shell script certainly won't save you, but it's something. It seems humanity has some organizational problems - its political systems no longer seem fit for purpose, and all of this while biodiversity tanks and global warming accelerates. Post industrial revolution we've built a machine, and it's no longer under our control. To Mars then? Perhaps not.