A VPN company says the Pentagon's own line proves there's no privacy left

A surveillance scoreboard, written by a company that sells the escape hatch

Mullvad's essay opens with a blunt claim: democratic and authoritarian countries are competing to see which can carry out mass surveillance most and best. The difference, it argues, is only style. Dictatorships build it in the open; democracies build the same capability and hide it.

The piece reads like a leaderboard. Britain's Tempora, run by GCHQ, processed 600 million telephone events a day by tapping roughly 200 fiber-optic cables, which Edward Snowden called the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history. The United States stacks Section 702 of FISA (monitoring without a court order), PRISM (direct pipes into Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple and others), Upstream (taps on the internet backbone), and XKeyscore, which an NSA analyst could use to search "nearly everything a typical user does on the internet." Snowden's documents put the daily haul at hundreds of millions of people, 200 million text messages, and 70 million French phone calls a month.

The authoritarian side of the board is larger and louder. China runs the Great Firewall over 750 million users, employs an estimated 2 million "internet public opinion analysts," links hundreds of millions of cameras through Skynet and Sharp Eyes, and, per the essay, holds half of the world's roughly one million surveillance cameras. Russia's FSB uses the SORM system and Moscow's "Safe City" pairs 600,000+ cameras with facial recognition. Iran's SIAM program filters and monitors mobile phones and can shut the internet off entirely.

Mullvad's strongest argument isn't a number. It's about metadata. The essay quotes former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker: "Metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody's life. If you have enough metadata you don't really need content." That undercuts the standard government reassurance that only metadata, not content, gets collected. And the line that gives the essay its bite comes from the Defense Department itself: a senior official telling Pentagon staff to "make no assumptions about anonymity. You are not anonymous on this planet at our existence."

The catch: this scoreboard is published by a VPN vendor

The first reaction in the thread was to check the byline.

"It is from a VPN Company, so YMMV. But I do agree there is surveillance happening, but the amount of data is way too much to fully examine." — a long-tenured commenter with 6.7k karma

That skepticism has a sharp edge, because Mullvad's own essay concedes its product is weak: it states that a VPN provider's home jurisdiction is irrelevant, since traffic crosses many countries regardless. One reader took that admission further and called the whole category a delaying tactic.

"Commercial VPNs are not a solution, they're merely kicking the can down the road… first by requiring strict accountability to providers and age verification, then outright banning any that do not comply." — a commenter tracing the one-way ratchet of internet centralization

The deepest cut wasn't aimed at VPNs at all. It landed on the essay's neat split between "commercial" and "state" surveillance. A reader with 21k karma argued the word commercial launders what is actually total monitoring:

"the intermediaries monitor all internet use, not only commercial use… Generally no one pays anymore for what these companies mainly produce: software. It is a sad state of affairs when software… is given away for free as bait to lure in surveillance targets." — a commenter who rejects the bank-tracking analogy for ad-tech

His point: a bank tracked your purchases but had a real business beside it; the ad-funded software companies have nothing underneath the surveillance.

Where the next round actually arrives: "protect the children"

Several readers pointed out that the competition the essay describes in spy-agency terms is arriving for ordinary users dressed as safety. Reddit had begun asking for identity verification the day before, one noted, predicting the same would reach even Hacker News inside two years "not because dang will want it, but because that's the direction the world is going." Another reduced the dynamic to a sentence:

"Mass surveillance is bad, until I'm in charge of it. -- Parents demanding 'age verification' laws" — a reader who put the hypocrisy in one line

One dissent cut against the whole genre. A reader asked for evidence rather than slogans: does surveillance actually fail to curb terrorism, and if so, "how do you propose catching terrorists then?" The essay's answer is implicit in its closing line: it isn't against targeted, court-supervised surveillance, only the dragnet kind. "Mass surveillance equals control and is the opposite of freedom." The thread's quieter verdict is that the marketing fix on offer, a VPN, buys time rather than freedom, while the bill for the rest is being written into age-verification law right now.