This shouldn't need to be said but use a VPN with these accounts.
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
49 points (100.0% liked)
Pulse of Truth
1478 readers
127 users here now
Cyber Security news and links to cyber security stories that could make you go hmmm. The content is exactly as it is consumed through RSS feeds and wont be edited (except for the occasional encoding errors).
This community is automagically fed by an instance of Dittybopper.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Fucking Jesus Christ, if someone is buying government email addresses on the dark web and then using a VPN to protect themselves against getting busted, they deserve what they get. Either use Tor or relay it through some compromised machine somewhere, or both. Or something. I don't really know how it works but definitely don't use a consumer VPN.
I mean it might be fine in the modern day, since anything in US law enforcement that might be subpeonaing the VPN company might no longer be functioning. But I still wouldn't really take the chance.
Lmao this is also horrible advice. Don't fuck with government accounts while in a jurisdiction they control.
Don't use Tor. If the FBI found ways to break it before, assume it could have other vulnerabilities to do it again.
When did they break Tor? Are you sure they didn't just exploit vulnerabilities on an onion site that was hosted on Tor or something?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/11/07/how-did-law-enforcement-break-tor/
FBI kept information to themselves of how they did it and this isn't the first time.
Also I wouldn't trust accessing a site administered by the government on Tor if onion sites can't keep me anonymous.
I dunno dude. I'll take "there are some research papers about theoretical attacks, speculation that similar techniques were used by law enforcement when after great effort they were able to take down a bunch of sites that were literally some of their highest priorities at the time because they were openly and flagrantly committing felonies in the open for years, and some vulnerabilities fixed in 2014 that might have been related" over "they would have to send a subpoena" any day.
Several VPNs claim they don't keep logs. I trust Mullvad. Mullvad got raided. The police found nothing.
I trust a trusted VPN over a technology created by the government and that has frequently been broken by them.
Compare the amount of arrest of Mullvad users versus Tor users, logically for me at least, I found my answer. If you trust Tor to access government websites illegally, I say go ahead. I wouldn't.
Compare the amount of arrest of Mullvad users versus Tor users
Okay. There are half a million total account numbers on Mullvad over the entire lifetime of the service. Tor has about 1.8 million daily users. That's part of why I trust Tor a lot more, is that it's been actively used for flagrantly illegal activities for long enough and by enough people to have developed an understanding of what the risks are (and it becomes news if someone gets busted.) Ring me up the next time a major drug ring is keeping its whole operation secure behind Mullvad, and the cops are helpless because they raided it and found no logs and so they had to pursue some other kind of operation to take down the ring.
So your logic for using Tor is because you can hide a server behind one and people understand the risk. And the only thing that prevents the government from busting people from illegally accessing their own servers is effort.
Why would you suggest using anything that you yourself considers a risk?
But this post is about accessing government servers, which aren't onion servers. Creating servers is irrelevant in this discussion. I'd rather use a service that hasn't failed it's users, which hides IP addresses. When Mullvad got raided, the police couldn't do anything. It was a dead end for them. With Tor, that has been far from the case over and over again.
I get what you're saying, people have been arrested after using Tor when that's not true of Mullvad. My point is that the domains are just not the same. It's like saying "body armor isn't as good as just wearing a baseball hat" because a higher percentage of people get shot wearing body armor than while wearing a baseball hat.
Uhhhh....where? For...science?