So me and a buddy of mine are having a debate. He states VPN’S beyond USA are untraceable and not subject to our laws, then goes on to ask me to link him an article where a user in another country swatted someone in perhaps the USA and got caught. I however and telling him about INTERPOL , and that anonymous isn’t truly anonymous. He says he feels comfortable using VPNS from another country since they aren’t traceable as I tell him "if the USA truly wants you they’ll find you VPN or not.
True, but most governments will cooperate with the US willingly when asked to.
He says he feels comfortable using VPNS from another country since they aren’t traceable as I tell him "if the USA truly wants you they’ll find you VPN or not.
How are they untraceable again? If the US government truly wants to find you, there may be no escape. Your best bet at that point is to get off the grid and never go online again, but look how well that worked out for Osama bin Laden.
There are no absolutes or 100% solutions, such as “untraceable” or “anonymous”. You can make things harder to trace or harder to identify, but probably never 100%.
Much of this depends on what you’re doing online, and what costs you’re willing to pay. If you’re selling major amounts of illegal drugs, and willing to pay high costs, you probably want all kinds of protections (VPN, Tor, burner phones and computers, air-gapping, etc). That still doesn’t guarantee 100% safety, if many top govts decide to go after you. See the (non-techy) examples of Osama bin Laden, or El Chapo.
You probably can’t imagine what kind of tools are out there to track or trace you, if somebody really wants to (especially governments). Just see the precautions Edward Snowden takes at the beginning of “Citzenfour”.
VPNs can help you to some extent to obfuscate your online activities, but you are never really anonymous when being online, no matter what you do.
You are. VPNs are not intended to provide anonymity. Their primary purpose IMO is to protect communication from interception and snooping by a third party, such as an ISP.
Do you think you are anonymous without VPN? Of course not. Well, purely in terms of technology you are no more anonymous with VPN. All you are doing is trading your ISP for another organization that, on a technology level, present all the same privacy issues as your ISP. You are trusting them to not act the same as your ISP.
Trust is pretty much all you have. Maybe some VPN providers have transparent ownership and a veritable public track record of not keeping logs and/or defying authorities requests for data. So, more trustworthy. Many can’t be trusted, like any free provider. Many have murky ownership and are likely less anonymous than your ISP, like those owned and located in China.
Not bound by U.S. law can be bad, you’re up against the full power of the NSA. They could simply bribe an admin at a VPN provider to give them access to data.
I2P has bigger holes than randy’s donuts. Stick to a project with active development; I’d even say that emerging mixnetworks such as Katzenpost and Panoramix are preferable to I2P.
Tor itself is safe, unless some three letter agency has a zeroday (which they don’t have, since all the DNM are still online). These guys most likely got pwned through the browser (e.g. enabled JS, allowing webrtc etc), which is NOT an issue of Tor itself.