they were all owned by the same company and sold to Kape, which has ties to the Israeli intelligence service, a few years back.
The issue is who he sold it to – the notorious creator of some pernicious data-huffing ad-ware, Crossrider. The UK-based company was cofounded by an ex-Israeli surveillance agent and a billionaire previously convicted of insider trading who was later named in the Panama Papers. It produced software which previously allowed third-party developers to hijack users’ browsers via malware injection, redirect traffic to advertisers and slurp up private data.
I personally use perfect-privacy, which didn’t turn up any red flags when I did research a few years ago. it’s a little lacking in features but openvpn isn’t that hard to set up on linux & android. no clue how well their desktop app works.
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What made you raise your eyebrows at mullvad? I know they had a search executed on em but it ended up being a big nothing burger iirc.
I wouldn’t worry about the eyes-ness of a providers operations based on your concerns. What’s most important is having a fallback for when your main vpn isn’t available and making sure you’re using the fallback when that happens.
The thing you’re worried about isn’t a particular agency targeting you in particular, but being swept up in police action and mass surveillance. To that end it doesn’t really matter as much that your vpn have the lack of interpol cooperation or even the obfuscating effect of using the same exit node as a bunch of other people but instead that you be always using one, understand what it does and who or what your devices are communicating with and practice the best possible security you can when dealing with the cops.
Look into securing your devices against intrusion (and keeping secure backups) and how to deal with the police when they take you in. For example: an iPhone is put in a special state when it’s powered on that requires strict authentication before any kind of peripheral will be recognized. If you can’t turn the phone off then just grabbing the two buttons that put it in the “slide to power off” screen drops all peripheral connections and needs an authentication before it’ll let anyone use it.
Drill that interaction so that no matter how gassed, beaten and dazzled you are, you can put your devices in some kind of secure-ish state.