Original page on the clearweb: http://vpnscam.com/tesonet-data-mining-company-owns-nordvpn-protonmail-protonvpn/
Offline archive (READ NOTES BELOW ON HOW TO OPEN): https://i.imgtc.com/FSzFXt6.png
TL;DR for those of you who won't bother reading:
NordVPN and Protonmail share a CEO. They claim to operate in Panama/Switzerland, but both companies are shell companies, owned fully by PROTONVPN LT, UAB, which is located in Lithuania, which has a law requiring 6 months of data retention (this matters, because, even though they tell you they keep no logs, they are legally required to maintain them). Finally, the headquarters of PROTONVPN LT, UAB, is in the very same building as TesoNet, a Lithuanian data mining service. ProtonVPN claims that the colocation is just happenstance, and they don't actually work with TesoNet, but researchers found NordVPN using privacy certificates signed by TesoNet in their official app binaries.
This also applies to DuckDuckGo as well, who was started by (((Gabriel Weinberg))) to capitalize on all of those wanting to jump ship from google, and does track clicks and links (though it claims not to). An article by the timesOfIsreal on Weinberg's site, which didn't have any traffic worth speaking of until the Snowden limited hangout, which pushed everyone even mildy privacy-aware straight into the dragnet.
Notes on "stealth archives": The archive is a zip file of the page as retrieved a few days ago by me via wget, renamed as a png so the imagehost would accept it. Rename to a zip file to view, or, if on linux, 7z can open it as is.
I call them "stealth archives" because the image host can't tell a download to view the content apart from a download by a browser to display the page, the ISP can only see the DNS resolves to an image host (which gives no hints), and it bypasses the (((internet Wayback Machine))), which watches who is interested in what sites and when, and will memoryhole 'dangerous' sites.
BTW, if the owner of imggoat sees this, your site crashes, showing a traceback, when uploading a not-png named as a png. Could be a security vulnerability, just throwing that out there.
Shoutout to @BloodAndHonour, whose recent recommendation of NordVPN prompted this post.
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Flour ago
Conspiracy hat: this is an astroturfing post used to discredit secure services
Conspiracy aside, looks pretty legit that they are both compromised. Also, always wondered whether or not it’d be better to just use the big tech services and attempt to be lost in the web of traffic using coded language and such.
RugerLCP_2 ago
might be better to use competing country's email service that would never let the cia spy on it.
Flour ago
To be honest, if you wanted to beat the snooping agencies, why don’t people just communicate in an online moba game or something in a coded language?
Runescape always comes to mind that it would be easy to do. VPN your connection to the game and yea?
alele-opathic ago
They thought of that - a half decade back or so, they claimed terrorists were using COD lobbies to shoot messages into the walls to each other. Given that this was raised as a national security threat, I am all but sure there is monitoring for this sort of thing now.
See also: https://duo.com/decipher/debunking-myths-do-terrorists-use-game-consoles-to-communicate-with-each-other Btw notice that they call it 'debunking', when all that they do is show it to be hard, vis a vis impossible. Some interesting info in the comments on their article.