Re: Vpn
I'll make one further point here. Do you think that your BT telephone line is a secure thing? Do you think it possible that people could somewhere along the many miles of BT cabling, hook in using some purpose built equipment and listen to everyone's telephone calls?
Obviously the answer is that they can. Phone lines have been tapped for many years now.
With VPNs the company apologists would say "Ah but the data is encrypted". It's obvious to me that the governments and home security/anti terrorism bodies WILL most certainly have their own equipment "Plugged in" to the key internet junctions. In fact I have no doubts whatsoever that they OWN all of the primary internet junctions through which all data flows. I'm talking about the physical boxes, the black boxes that route data around.
So the only question to be asked really is whether or not those authorities are able to force VPN companies to hand over their encryption keys.
I would guess that they do but on the basis that they are not allowed to publicly profess that they have the keys and equally therefore are not able to use data gained through spying in a court of law.
My previous post about the FBI using a Flash vulnerability hints at this problem.
Regardless it makes perfect sense to me that the governments and agencies would tolerate the existance of VPN companies ONLY on the basis that they were given the encryption keys and promised never to reveal that fact.
That creates the perfect snooping environment for them. Criminals flock to the VPN providers believing they are anonymous and the agencies simply spy on them without all the other normal internet users clogging things up.
Another example of a similar thing. Satellites orbitting Earth that are constantly taking pictures 24x7. This allows the agencies to replay any moment any time resulting in YOU having no privacy. Suppose I wanted to know what you did last week. I could bring up the photos of your house, and minute by minute watch you get in the car, see where you go to, watch you walk from the car, see who you are with, and so on.
This tech allows them to support crime solving hugely. When a crime occurs, say a bank robbery, they can bring up the photos of the bank, see the getaway car (for example) and then study BACKWARDS from that point all the photos to see where the car came from and where the driver came from before he got to the car and so on.
That's why when on the news you hear of a plane crashing and disappearing, you know there's a cover up. They can work through the photos of every plane from when it left the airport to when it crashed (barring cloud obscuring them).
Nevertheless they aren't going to publicise this ability as it creates public tension. So they would pass any information carefully between agencies imo.
There is no privacy. Never will be