Just curious about hypothetical and any known instances for governments coming after the physical VPN servers and if there are any legal or physical protections in place for the benefit of customers.
Some of our servers and networks are fully owned and controlled by us, while others utilize third parties as we don’t have facilities in every country. When we rent servers and network, we only rely on providers who provide us with full access to the server itself, and only use bare metal servers. All of our servers also utilize full-disk encryption so that no third-party can extract data off of them even if they have physical access to the hardware. If you would, however, like to ensure that your traffic passes through servers and network that we own, you can use Secure Core. You can read more about Secure Core servers here: https://protonvpn.com/support/secure-core-vpn/.
These are in Sweden, Iceland, and Switzerland.
If I had to worry about something like that. I wouldn’t use US servers at all. Because if they want/need to get to them, they’ll get to them. That’s just my opinion.
The US government would be wasting its time by confiscating or otherwise tampering with the servers. All content is encrypted.
I think people overestimate what VPNs can do privacy wise. It’s mainly for concealing from the ISPs. Tor is the better choice for anonymity across the board
There aren’t any secure core servers in the US. They’re only in Sweden, Switzerland, and Iceland.
There are exit servers for the secure core network in a lot of countries, including the US. When you use a secure core server you establish a VPN connection to a server in one of the three countries mentioned above, which then relays your traffic to whatever exit server you’ve also selected.
Say you choose a US exit server. To websites you visit, you will appear as if you’re from the US. To the US government, if they compel the data center the US exit server resides in to log the traffic, or if they otherwise spy on that server, all they will see is VPN connections back to the secure core servers in Switzerland, Sweden, and/or Iceland, and the sum of all the traffic from all users of that exit server. They can’t figure out which traffic belongs to whom until they compromise/compel logs of the secure core servers in Switzerland, Sweden, and/or Iceland.