<story><title>Justice Dept. Seizes Times Reporter’s Email/Phone Records in Leak Investigation</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/us/politics/times-reporter-phone-records-seized.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>snacktaster</author><text>Reminder to NOT use any 3rd-party VPN service if you truly value your privacy.  ProtonVPN, PureVPN, Private Internet Access, etc.  Do not use those services if you&amp;#x27;re intending to do some &amp;quot;shady shit&amp;quot;.  I know first hand that Google has a (semi)-automated web-based process for law enforcement to submit their subpoenas and get the entire access history of a particular Google&amp;#x2F;Gmail account.  They don&amp;#x27;t get access to the contents of the account, but they get to see IP addresses and user agents that accessed that account in the last N days.  A warrant to see the contents of the accounts would be trivial if the investigators wanted to pursue it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>lightbyte</author><text>Private Internet Access has been subpoenaed by the FBI before for user logs and they were unable to comply due to not saving any [1].  That&amp;#x27;s probably the best reassurance you can get for a VPN.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;torrentfreak.com&amp;#x2F;vpn-providers-no-logging-claims-tested-in-fbi-case-160312&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;torrentfreak.com&amp;#x2F;vpn-providers-no-logging-claims-tes...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Justice Dept. Seizes Times Reporter’s Email/Phone Records in Leak Investigation</title><url>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/07/us/politics/times-reporter-phone-records-seized.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>snacktaster</author><text>Reminder to NOT use any 3rd-party VPN service if you truly value your privacy.  ProtonVPN, PureVPN, Private Internet Access, etc.  Do not use those services if you&amp;#x27;re intending to do some &amp;quot;shady shit&amp;quot;.  I know first hand that Google has a (semi)-automated web-based process for law enforcement to submit their subpoenas and get the entire access history of a particular Google&amp;#x2F;Gmail account.  They don&amp;#x27;t get access to the contents of the account, but they get to see IP addresses and user agents that accessed that account in the last N days.  A warrant to see the contents of the accounts would be trivial if the investigators wanted to pursue it.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mirimir</author><text>That&amp;#x27;s going too far, I think. Sure, you can run your own VPN server, on an anonymously leased and managed VPS. But then, how do you anonymously lease and manage that VPS? As far as I know, your options are pretty much limited to VPN services, Tor and I2P. Also, VPS traffic is readily logged by providers, so your &amp;quot;anonymity&amp;quot; is pretty fragile.&lt;p&gt;Your best bet is distributing trust among multiple parties, such that no one of them can compromise you. VPN use is common, so start with nested VPN chains. Then Tor. If either the VPN chain or Tor resists compromise, then you&amp;#x27;re still safe.&lt;p&gt;After that, you can use any PM or email that you like. Because it&amp;#x27;s not connected to your meatspace identity. If content is end-to-end encrypted, the provider has nothing useful to share with adversaries. You and correspondents must, of course, avoid leaking metadata through account names and subject lines.</text></comment>