I was poking around a government website one day, noticed a security issue, later showed someone that vulnerability I found, this person proceeded to poke aroun

I was poking around a government website one day, noticed a security issue, later showed someone that vulnerability I found, this person proceeded to poke around with the website for hours (unbeknown to me) without causing any harm. A few weeks later I had the somewhat local police take a lot of my belongings and charge me with a multi felony crime. I had to pay an attorney 10s of thousands of dollars to basically have the whole thing go away. Now I have a felony arrest record that I still have pop up on background checks even 10 years later. If I would have been using a VPN, I think the barrier would have been too high for the local police to do this on their own. According to the warrants, the local cyber investigators literally emailed comcast and they just sent them over my physical address. With a good VPN, I think there would have been some red tape or at least a few more hurdles to complicate the situation. This probably isn't the normal use case... but I now try to use a VPN, not because I'm doing anything nefarious or that I think it's truly anonymous. I just know it will raise the effort required to ruin my life in this same way again.