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Comment by medstrom | Hacker News Reader

People making that argument basically assume you are not already stuck in the honey if you go with your default ISP.

If you know you're in honey then you act accordingly. If you think you aren't in honey then you're more likely to let your guard down and get into trouble.

For instance, an embassy with clear telephone and telegraph lines knows they're being listened to, and subsequently is very careful about what they transmit. An embassy who has bought Crypto AG (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG ) equipment thinks they are secure and transmits information they would never dream of sending if they knew they were being listened to.

You might get stuck in one or more foreign governments honey that you were not previously going to be stuck in.

A foreign government doesn't have the political authority or practical means to send armed thugs to kick in my door over petty dragnet crap.

Some jerk in a cube farm in Maryland does.

Who says they won’t be happy to trade it for something else with someone who does have those?

Sure, but that's orders of magnitude more effort, oversight, manpower and political risk involved than your typical "find a thousand people who have a paper trail saying they did X, pick the five hundred of those who you have an airtight case against, pick the hundred of those who juries will find least sympathetic, pick the 50 of those least likely to shoot back" type" operation that the fedcop enforcement agencies run fairly unilaterally every single day.

Yeah I don’t understand the argument because it’s like essentially vpns are bad but what alternative is good?

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