On Tuesday, Dan Bongino, the newly named deputy director of the FBI, continued to hold forth on his eponymous daily podcast, this time focused on defending President Donald Trump’s Oval Office attack on Ukraine’s president. But first, Bongino offered a word from a sponsor: “Big Brother is watching you,” he said, noting it had been 10 years since news broke that the National Security Agency was spying on Americans’ communications
FBI deputy director recommends ExpressVPN to “protect yourself from corporate and government spying”
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narrows eyes
No thanks, I’ll stick with Proton and Mullvad.
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People in government used to at least pretend that they weren’t bought by corporations. Meanwhile, this guy is flaunting his affiliate link for an extremely shady VPN.
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If this isn’t a sign to not use it, I don’t know what is. People need better critical thinking skills.
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That is some pretty next level sponsorship, fair play 
VPNs don’t even protect you from those kind of threats.
Business idea: TrumpVPN ($9.99 per month)
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me 2 I’ll stick to Proton and Mullvad
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Definitely not sus
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(again I expose my ignorance).
KevPham, I thought VPN’s like Proton and Mullvad DO encrypt the traffic and (hopefully) prevent “big brother” from snooping.
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It’s wild watching these loonies get positions of power. Just some context on who he is:
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue cited Bongino as one of the key right-wing figures pushing false claims of voter fraud leading up to the 2020 election. He continued to amplify Trump’s lies about the election being stolen, leading the human rights group Avaaz to name him one of the top five “superspreaders of election misinformation” in the weeks that followed.
Bongino also found himself in hot water over his stance on COVID-19 precautions. In late 2021, he threatened to quit his radio show over Cumulus Media’s vaccine mandate — despite having been vaccinated himself.
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/24/nx-s1-5306990/dan-bongino-fbi-deputy-director
So, yeah, the VPN encrypts traffic from the client to the VPN server, but the VPN itself can see your IP address and may or may not log that.
Where is the VPN server that you’re connecting to exist, and what are the laws there that the VPN provider would have to abide by for that country?
You can evade big brother, but in this case, if you’re trying to evade the US brother, you can pretty much only trust local open source and otherwise Swiss laws + no logs are your best bet.
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That makes sense. Thank you.
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Hey @Specter I have a feeling this will be plunging us into some political debates which though I personally like to entertain these discussions, it is not something PG wants to entertain on the forum as it distracts from the privacy discussion, in this case Bongino using his platform to promote a VPN with false claims.
Thanks for providing your vantage point on the character of Bongino but also just putting this here to neuter further political chatter.
I think this type of language also begs for political posts. I think having a discussion on the character of the individual is fine, but do so in good faith and understand that this language is adversarial and begs for political rabbit holes.
IVPN: exists
In my opinion and frankly, he said nothing wrong. E.g. the mentioned VPN service could be a solid choice for someone living in Russia, trying to escape the censorship of their government. Which raises an important question, from who are you trying to protect yourself? I believe everyone should consider this when picking a VPN.
Which raises an important question, from who are you trying to protect yourself? I believe everyone should consider this when picking a VPN.
Agreed yes, but
he said nothing wrong. E.g. the mentioned VPN service could be a solid choice for someone living in Russia, trying to escape the censorship of their government.
That is not what he said. (And even then, depends on the consequences if caught.)
He specifically talks about what are presumably the 2010s global surveillance disclosures which relates to the U.S. and other Five Eyes countries. He states that the VPN reroutes 100% of his internet traffic through encrypted channels (which is accurate but misleading as so does https) and that this keeps everything he does online private from ISPs, data brokers and governments, which is simply false. ISPs - sure, you are shifting trust from your ISP to the VPN, but not because of the encryption as the ISP can’t see the data transmitted anyway due to https. Data brokers - there are a lot of other ways they track you besides IP. Governments - VPNs do not provide anonymity.
But misleading VPN advertisements are plentiful on the internet. He’s doing these advertisements while being the the future deputy director of the FBI (a role which has different expectations and responsibilities than a political podcaster) potentially giving the impression that the FBI recommends ExpressVPN [1].
Ironically, to avoid the US government. “Big Brother is watching you,” says newly named deputy director of Big Brother. ↩︎
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I of course agree. However, criticizing people’s lack of critical thinking skills is counterproductive because one would need those very skills to obtain it. Our job should be to foster it in people slowly and help them obtain it, otherwise we (the privacy community) become a mere “tribe” or in-group and they (the people apparently lacking the critical thinking skills necessary for maintaining internet privacy) become an out-group of sorts.
Now of course this isn’t directed at your comment specifically, nor anyone else’s comment here. After all, this post deserves airing out complaints and annoyances, and it is not like you speak on behalf of Privacy Guides. But I just wanted to interject before that kind of culture arises in this forum.
Again, not directed at you specifically, but more for incoming readers: Just because we cannot physically see or do not interact with those who lack the skills needed (as in those who “fall” for this kind of stuff) does not mean we can intrude on their behavior. We instead guide them and empathize with them, as Privacy Guides is meant to do. They are, after all, the victim of privacy violations just as we all are, so whether they know they are victims or not does not matter much if our job is to combat the privacy violations themselves. @BadWolfe, for example was asking for information in this very thread, and @bitsondatadev gave what they thought was good information to them.
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I’m writing a blog post on open source right now and in it, I argue that one of the greatest roots of social ills is when the people fall behind in literacy and involvement in the information technology of the day (printing press/radio/television/computers/networks/cryptography/data + machine learning) the easier it is for power to evolve around it and suppress regulation and consumer habits.
Criticizing people today for lack of understanding how computers and network work, is like a scribe acting condescending towards the common folk of the middle ages for not being able to read themselves after they’ve seen him read the classics a hundred times over.
The digital divide was once written about extensively in academia and reported on in the news when it was early and we needed more people to get involved with computers. Strangely, this stopped receiving attention with the rise of social media and surveillance capitalism, and if you look up most digital literacy classes today, it’s more to do with teaching people how to use an iPhone or Android and social media sites. The dangers rarely mention surveillance capitalism and focus on bullying and hackers (not that those shouldn’t be included) but rarely large corporate incentives.
So, a lot of this stuff unfolded in a highly favorable way to the big tech goliaths today, and has resulted in less money favoring closing this divide, and people avoiding working together cooperatively because, we’re all tired, poor, and cranky and don’t have much time to slow down to challenge these notions.
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