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Comment by brookst | Hacker News Reader

> Specifically, these service providers

I’m not a fan of this arrest and I don’t believe service providers have a duty to contravene their security promises so as to monitor their users.

But it seems pretty obvious that governments find the monitoring that Google / Reddit / etc do acceptable, and do not find operation of unmonitorable services acceptable.

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All right, what about logless VPN providers like Mullvad?

> do not find operation of unmonitorable services acceptable.

Sounds like something straight out of a dystopian surveillance state novel, very bad outlook if true.

VPNs don't pose an obstacle to monitoring any specific activity, and as many VPN-using criminals have found, even their ability to stop law enforcement from identifying you is limited. So they've been less of an issue. Having said that, I would note that Mullavad was forced to remove port forwarding in response to law enforcement interest, and I don't think it would be too surprising (or too dystopian) if in the future "connection laundering" is a crime just like money laundering.

There are several jurisdictions in the world where the government has the power to force a provider to keep logs, and actively lie about it. We simply have no way to know if mullvad or any other logless provider is actually logless, because they can be legally forced to lie about it.

Aside, warrant canaries have never been actually tested in court and the common consensus is that they wouldn't fly in reality if they were ever contested.

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