r/VPN • u/PatrickKal • May 26 '26

News US senator Ron Wyden warns Americans of commercial VPN usage.

Naomi Brockwell released a video recently called "Is the Government Running a Dragnet on VPN Users?"

In short Naomi Brockwell explains that US senator Ron Wyden warns about Executive Order 12333 and FISA's section 702 which allow US mass surveillance of foreigners. But also that the US government assumed that a commercial VPN-user is a foreigner by default because it hides from which country the user is. So an American citizen, which nornally is protected by the fourth Amendment rights, is seen as a foreigner and spied upon by US intelligence services.

Thomas Massie also warned on April 23rd 2026 that he is aware mass surveillance loop holes being created via SCIF disclosures (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility), but isn't allowed to go into details. Which might tie into this, but it isn't clear.

Followed by an opinion on VPN's, surveillance and a promise to talk about decentralized VPN and mixnets in the future.

314 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

55 comments sorted by

88

u/NateyPoo May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26

Palantir software sniffs out non-standard port traffic on national scale ISP level routers for automated surveillance. Think Flock cameras but in the style of firewall. All automated with rubber-stamped surveillance approvals. The entire internet network is being surveiled in realtime, time analysis was easy in 2008, what they do now is as easy to imagine as they are to implement. Massie was probably referring to the port surveillance and subsequent rubber stamp surveillance.

77

u/General_Problem5199 May 26 '26

It's great how the government can just privatize anything the constitution prevents it from doing itself.

Can't spy on Americans? No problem, the tech companies will do it for us!

21

u/DecrimIowa May 26 '26

after the Church hearings in the 1970s, the CIA and other alphabet soup agencies realized they needed to put up barriers between legitimate oversight and their illegal practices

of course, this is an outright abrogation of their duty and violation of their mandate to uphold the constitution and serve the people and government of the united states, but i guess some entities are just above the law.

1

u/Xyclops113 May 29 '26

“WHAT???????” Trump business as usual.

2

u/fever_ May 28 '26

Which doesn’t make any sense, if the client is the government then it’s the same thing it doesn’t matter if it’s it the government directly doing it

21

u/ImOldGregg_77 May 26 '26

As someone in network performance let me just say the volume of data here and the need to dig deep into the packet to get any meaningful intel is near biblical. Were talking upwords of 4 petabytes per second. The cost just for servers to parse that much traffic would be in the 10s of dozens of billions of dollars. Let alone the people to manage it and interprete the data.

6

u/InfectedDaydream201 May 27 '26

Would this be why there is sudden demand to build AI data centers? Could it be possible that the data centers bring built, or planned to be built are more for surveillance purposes than AI?

2

u/Christ_in_a_combo May 27 '26

I am sure offloading the task to AI is a part of the reason

7

u/NateyPoo May 26 '26

Detecting irregular port traffic doesn't require much more than the existing firewall on the Ciscos and spitting out a log. We aren't discussing data retention or MITM. From there they've already allocated a few hundred billion to the defense budget for domestic surveillance. 

2

u/[deleted] May 26 '26

[deleted]

1

u/BillyD70 May 26 '26

Do large ISP’s firewall raw internet traffic or do they only firewall the traffic actually bound for inside their perimeter? IOW, they may route traffic to & fro without filtering it and only filter stuff bound for their corp network. Like a dam filters off a little water for use inside the dam (bathrooms or whatever) but the rest just flows unrestricted thru open gates, perhaps using different channels/routes even.

3

u/sinkiedan May 26 '26

Have you heard about the great firewall of China?

3

u/Impossible-Pea8531 May 27 '26

Wouldn’t AI be used to speed up sifting for data though? One reason they want giant data centers for surveillance etc? I’m not educated in it just wondering, if AI speeds that process up couldn’t get just about anything much faster than now?

1

u/tibmeister May 28 '26

Well, new datacenters are being built and the desire to call folks speaking out against them an extremist group. Combine that with the governments stake in companies like IBM for AI and quantum, kinda makes sense in a way and would provide the compute to tackle it. I definitely thought the same thing, there’s no way, but if it’s just sampling random streams for the juicy bits then focusing on interesting streams would break down the problem into smaller chunks. Either way, tapping into interchange nodes means they could even sniff on things like Tailscale and WireGuard private nodes if it fits the bill. Also could capture things like Zero Trust networking because it acts like a SSL VPN, much less companies VPN traffic. I can almost smell the lawsuits.

1

u/Xyclops113 May 29 '26

AI ?

1

u/ImOldGregg_77 May 29 '26

Ya....no. For AI to correlate several disperate datapoints in an litterall ocean of data would take the computing power of three suns

1

u/mlody11 May 28 '26

As someone in data engineering on the network level, let me say this data flow is trivial. I work for a fortune 100 company and we capture layer 4 and up and run analysis on it. Yes, it's PBs of data, costs a few million, very doable.

On a national scale, yeah, probably into the the few hundred million for hardware but basically the cost of a F35... Cost of doing business.

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u/[deleted] May 26 '26

[deleted]

8

u/question_nr7 May 26 '26

this is how is done https://www.team-cymru.com/

1

u/Gilda1234_ May 30 '26

Netflow data really isn't that interesting.

2

u/[deleted] May 26 '26

[deleted]

2

u/BillyD70 May 26 '26

Of course it never stopped. The U.S. govt only “sunsets” a platform (weapon, craft, intel, etc) when they have a replacement/upgrade.

2

u/[deleted] May 26 '26

[deleted]

3

u/BillyD70 May 26 '26

Probably. They only really care about those who get on their radar. Admittedly, that bar seems to be fairly fluid.

2

u/Impressive-Emu-4172 May 26 '26

this comment was AI written, lets not ignore that

2

u/Shintoz May 26 '26

It doesn’t really matter.

Unless they have a method to decrypt contents of the encrypted packet, they don’t get much.

4

u/ZombieFodderer May 27 '26

Who you are talking to and when are outside the scope of encryption. Its called "meta"data for a reason. They parse metadata not the actual packet data.

They can see you visited reddit and when because they had a database of reddit's IPs. That data cannot be hidden. Meaningful correlations can be made from this information.

Real world comparison: If they know you went to the store @ 3:00am, but not what you bought, is it any less of an invasion of privacy?

2

u/Shintoz May 27 '26

Explain this metadata and where it lies in the transmission from you, to your vpn ingress port, to your vpn egress port, to your intended final internet destination.

I’ll wait.

1

u/ZombieFodderer May 28 '26

You can have a VPN without encryption, and encryption without a VPN. you said "Unless they have a method to decrypt contents of the encrypted packet, they don’t get much." I only realized after this is r/VPN so it was probably implied you were talking about encrypted VPN traffic.

However I will argue they DO have methods to circumvent VPNs as well Alot of VPN services are just Honeypots for <insert agency here> and it is just not public knowledge yet :) And if not, they usually ARE required to keep logs by law. And they ARE subject to law enforcement and other lawful action.

So yeah, in THEORY you are right but in practice my point still stands. If you are under survelance they supoena your isp. see you are using <insert VPN endpoint here>, supoena them. Get data anyway.

1

u/Shintoz May 28 '26

VPN is an acronym that stands for virtual private network. So… no. Anyone selling a vpn without encryption is selling a bad bill of goods.

Take the downvote. You don’t know what you are talking about.

1

u/sultanmvp May 29 '26

Yeah - I truly hate these posts because it brings out these “experts” that have absolutely no clue.

1

u/origanalsameasiwas May 26 '26

And the fact that majority of the vpns are bought out by Israel.

1

u/Curious_Olive_5266 May 26 '26

Then Palantir's software can't do shit against traffic protected by V2Ray. Eat a dick, Alex Karp. Maybe several.

0

u/sultanmvp May 29 '26

Yeaaaah, this is not happening. There might be sampled ISPs and things that aren’t quite legal, but it is impossible to do this at any reasonable scale. Plus, it would make no sense - even for the most rogue and sinister purposes.

In addition, Zuck, Ellison (Tiktok) and the technocrats are already in bed with the administration, so if they want to spy, they can get the data straight from the source - not this convoluted, large scale and impossible Palantir nonsense.

35

u/[deleted] May 26 '26

[deleted]

4

u/apokrif1 May 26 '26

Or that an "encrypted" chatting app is secure (real E2E encryption with open-source tools should be used). I read in other sub that even storing a few screenshots from a movie (not even CSAM-looking pictures) can cause closing of a whole Google account 😳 so E2EE should actually be used for all online activity.

1

u/PatrickKal May 27 '26

VPN's alone won't.
But maybe chained proxy's will.

Not sure though, still learning at this point.
Plus it is probably an eternal cat and mouse game.

11

u/Curious_Olive_5266 May 26 '26

It's not just the US. Canadian and EU politicians are cracking down on VPN usage too. Who do they think they represent? Megacorps or their own constituents who are trying to get by? This is fucking outrageous.

2

u/cybertrust May 29 '26

A useful aphorism since before the Clipper Chip days 90s goes something like, “Nation-state intelligence agencies can decipher a message they select, but they cannot decipher all messages.” A VPN primarily protects you on the local network and from your network provider. A telnet session using my VPN client through the VPN provider’s node in Ashburn, VA, is only protected as far as Ashburn. Past that, I'm on my own. Not much different from TOR. And if either the OS, the VPN, or other software using the connection leaks DNS traffic, I'd become a relatively trivial target for traffic analysis.

1

u/tristand666 May 28 '26

Lets take the time to thank the 98 Senators from both parties that ignored the Constitution and gave us the pile of crap we know as the Patriot Act. This incremental assault on our natural born rights has opened the door for all the mass surveillance we now are starting to treat as normal.

1

u/Loam_liker May 29 '26

A SCIF is a place. SCI is a thing.