this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Depends. There are varying levels of opsec and you need to tailor your precautions to the level of your opponent. In my country ISPs must deliver data if asked by a court. They can only ask for a specific IP address at a specific time. And then they would get my address. A VPN provider outside of my country doesn't give a crap and ideally also doesn't have any data to begin with. There is no way for the content industry to collect data beyond the ISP. First, because there is no legal right for them to get that information and secondly because it's too expensive. Now, if you are trying to hide stuff from the government, then I'd argue that a simple VPN is not enough.
Like I said, if you're trying to hide from your government, your opsec requirements are on a whole different level than those of someone trying to download a torrent. You don't need to use TOR over a public wifi while booting Tails from USB on your laptop if you want to download Fast X. A VPN that is either not required or even better just cannot provide information to the content industry is quite sufficient in that case.
The five eyes stuff is dumb. For starters, this is is a technical question, not a political one. If your OPSEC relies on guessing where the CIA does or does not have resources, you fucked up.
I can assure you, the CIA is perfectly capable of buying colo racks in Slovakian datacenters.
Well, your VPN knows your address so this advice is pointless. Unless you only access your VPN through a totally anonymous ISP at a totally random location on the planet each time, probably impossible due to KYC laws, you are certainly not anonymous.
For piracy purposes its irrelevant. The VPN provider won't send you a complaint or give your details to a copyright troll. If you are hiding from the governement then maybe its a different story, but a copyright holder doesn't have the ability to force a VPN to do anything.