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Comment by smeej | Hacker News Reader

The end of the article was the most surprising to me, because in spite of their favorable self-comparison to Proton VPN, I had never heard of them before. I've spent the last 7+ years neck deep in the privacy and security space, working alongside hundreds of others doing the same, so it surprises me a lot that this is the first time I've ever heard of this company.

It's possible I've just missed them, but not even to have heard of them in passing is weird.

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Do me a favor.

My interpretation of the VPN space is that if you're a signals intelligence agency you'd have to be insane not to want to control that layer. As a big publicly funded entity, you can also subsidize a level of service at prices that entrepreneurs can't even begin to compete with.

Is the market likely comprised exclusively of NSA fronts competing with each other, and with GCHQ, and with Spetssvyaz, Guóānbù, etc?

> Is the market likely comprised exclusively of NSA fronts competing with each other

Nah. Clandestine spook fronts are low profile entities. When they've been pervasive, it was in a niche market.

> Do me a favor.

What's the favor?

Why own the space when you can buy legal mandated secret access to all its data (which also subsidizes the industry)

They don't do much advertising and don't "take themselves seriously" which usually leads to a smaller, tighter community.

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