> That governments skip the private sector coercion entirely and just add their own devices and logging in the middle, which came out of the Snowden leaks as no

> That governments skip the private sector coercion entirely and just add their own devices and logging in the middle, which came out of the Snowden leaks as normal 10 years ago. In the U.S, VPNs are not effective against targeted surveillance. But they very well may be effective against government passive surveillance programs like the President’s Surveillance Program. The Snowden leaks revealed many things. What stood out most to me about them was that the government _tried_ to stay within the confines of the law. It was a very twisted, contortionist, interpretation of the law, but they did try very hard to stay within the bounds of the legal theory that allowed the program to exist. Based on the leaks, if you’d have been running HTTPS over a VPN during the PSP, it’s likely a good portion of your traffic would have evaded the program. https://everytwoyears.org/2020/07/13/tactical-privacy.html https://everytwoyears.org/2020/07/13/tactical-privacy.html