Bitcoin Forum

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/26/technology/a-peephole-for-the-nsa.html?_r=0

[...]
Data transmission lines have a long history of being tapped.

As far back as the days of the telegraph, spy agencies have located their operations in proximity to communications companies. Indeed, before the advent of the Internet, the N.S.A. and its predecessors for decades operated listening posts next to the long-distance lines of phone companies to monitor all international voice traffic.

Beginning in the 1960s, a spy operation code-named Echelon targeted the Soviet Union and its allies’ voice, fax and data traffic via satellite, microwave and fiber-optic cables.

In the 1990s, the emergence of the Internet both complicated the task of the intelligence agencies and presented powerful new spying opportunities based on the ability to process vast amounts of computer data.

In 2002, John M. Poindexter, former national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan, proposed the Total Information Awareness plan, an effort to scan the world’s electronic information — including phone calls, emails and financial and travel records. That effort was scrapped in 2003 after a public outcry over potential privacy violations.

The technologies Mr. Poindexter proposed are similar to what became reality years later in N.S.A. surveillance programs like Prism and Bullrun.

The Internet effectively mingled domestic and international communications, erasing the bright line that had been erected to protect against domestic surveillance. Although the Internet is designed to be a highly decentralized system, in practice a small group of backbone providers carry almost all of the network’s data.

The consequences of the centralization and its value for surveillance was revealed in 2006 by Mark Klein, an AT&T technician who described an N.S.A. listening post inside a room at an AT&T switching facility.

The agency was capturing a copy of all the data passing over the telecommunications links and then filtering it in AT&T facilities that housed systems that were able to filter data packets at high speed.

Documents taken by Edward J. Snowden and reported by The Washington Post indicate that, seven years after Mr. Klein first described the N.S.A.'s surveillance technologies, they have been refined and modernized.

Get a VPN, problem solved

and which VPN does the VPN use then?  ???

Use the right one! Of course you won't be able to know which one is the good one , but when cops show at your door you can have an idea which not to use.

that, and VPNs usually are real businesses in known physical locations, even if they accept BTC. They will have to comply to more and more rules and regulations like logging etc...

sure, you can use the one decentralized VPN instead, which is Tor. But there's a reason why it won't exactly enter mainstream...

Yeah , a comparison that crossed my mind is VPN's and online wallets. Especially those ending with IO man!
It's the guy behind the interface and the service that can screw up real good.

Most VPN providers tell you outright if they keep logs, the country they're located in is key.  You can also jump through 2 VPNs for extra security, that way the first one just gets encrypted data for the second one, and the second one can't trace it back to you.  Also be sure to use one with shared IP's for this, or they could just figure out who was using which IP at what time and trace it back.

The secret court can tell them NOT to tell the truth. The only way for you to know something is wrong is to have a company shutting down its services instead of complying. That may be possible for a small company but harder for a bigger ones.

So much secret court and NSA bullshit recently, I miss the days when the 'justice' system was at least transparent...

Great idea! I'm sure the NSA doesn't have the capability to crack the encryption protocols if they wanted to ::)

It's not the encryption itself, but the implementation of it.  Just look at Bitcoin, a great example of well implemented cryptography.  The NSA is on the same playing field as us with encryption, but the key is having no software flaws, the VPN providers not giving backdoor access, etc.

It will just make the ISP richer , imagine everybody paying 10-20 extra $ a month. Part of those money will go to the major ISPs (which provide the bandwidth for those companies) , and who are the reasons you use VPNs. :)