ZeroHedge noticed this a while back and wrote an article about the people involved with the company.
“The VPN Empire Built By Intelligence Agents”
Now, Kape themselves have posted on one of their front companies, Private Internet Access, which was, I believe, the first to be quietly taken over, in 2019.
They have a “Get the Facts” style campaign going about why there’s absolutely nothing to fear about US-based VPNs (after years of making it seem like they were based in the UK), and why Five Eyes is nothing to be concerned about.
Which is, of course, bullshit.
There’s a saying in politics. When you’re explaining yourself, it means you’re losing.
(It’s an odd saying, in that the politicians don’t take it to heart more often. I mean, consider the Democrats going around and around in public about a spending bill when they admit they have no idea how to get it past a couple of Senators.)
Kape has drawn more attention to their seedy practices and the shadowy figures behind the company than they want to, and it’s devaluing the assets that they purchased, because their customers have been canceling their accounts and fleeing. I did.
This is damage control, plain and simple.
When your VPN provider starts telling you why the NSA, CIA, FBI, MI5, MI6, etc. are “good” and how being based in a country where they can be compelled by those agencies to target you for spying and not even be allowed to inform you is fine, you really have to consider if you want to be with a company like that or just cancel and give up your remaining time.
I mean, presumably if you wanted your ISP to be compelled to spy on you by court order, or by “secret courts”, or whatever it is we have going on now, you could save your money and just not use a VPN at all. It would be faster, even.
Really, this post by Kape on PIA’s site reminds me more and more of the kind of nonsense that Andrew Lee was posting on Freenode as their remaining userbase dwindled. Pretty soon, they probably won’t even have enough users on PIA (and hopefully ExpressVPN, which Kape also took over) to even be worth running them anymore.
They’ve been turning over the actual VPN server hosting to companies that are not configuring the servers properly and which don’t give you any real throughput. At least, that was the case when I last bothered to sign into my PIA account several months ago. The best I could get was 6 Mbps on a server in Seattle.
After seeing the original tech support people disappear and then the site redesign, I suppose I should have known something was up, but then the reliability problems started and I began to look into what was going on.
I should have left sooner, but I’m certainly glad I did.
After Roy Schestowitz brought my attention to this post, I double checked to make sure my PIA subscription was, in fact, canceled. ⬆