A US American friend says of the VPN service she’s using on her visit to Shanghai that it seems legit, that they seem legit, as, you know, a little company, not — if I get her implied meaning right — something necessarily obliquely sponsored, facilitated, or even outright run by a covert arm of US-Western power. The company’s website felt legit to her because of several minor infelicities of English grammar — just enough to make it seem like a company run by edgy Asian IT guys who just want information to be free, not by slick operatives in the employ of a meddling Western NGO fronting for the NSA, working to undermine China… That kind of “kind of thing” thing, you know? At least that’s what I thought, later, misremembering. And though I didn’t follow the logic that seemed to suggest itself to me (would really bad English or professionally edited copy both cause more paranoia?), I could vibe with her feeling, because of course it was my feeling, too, or perhaps alone. You have to trust someone, after all, or you might go crazy, right? Especially in a country like this and from a country like that. What’s the mind to do?
If I were some relevant organ of the PRC — or any totalitarian-leaning state power, really — I’d run a bunch of shell VPN providers, ensuring their reliability and effectiveness while interfering with and even eliminating effectiveness of rival commercial VPN providers: Easy capture of high-value traffic. Those who I most wish to watch most closely — dissidents, foreigners, the casually and incompetently criminal-minded — would not only willingly route all of their traffic directly through my network, but they’d even pay for the privilege. And by eliminating all rival VPNs I’d likely disrupt services and networks that benefit my geopolitical rivals.
And it’s all real enough. Where I live, where I work, everything goes through VPNs. My work VPN is a large corporate-grade one that is, no doubt, compromised in its own way. Many people — Mainland citizens and internationals — have work-provided access to such institutional and enterprise pipelines. But for personal and independent use, PRC nationals and foreigners alike use commercial VPNs, many of which no longer work well or, often, at all. My old stalwart personal VPN, run by freedom-loving Québécois techies, hasn’t worked reliably for months. Another previously well-regarded brand failed another visiting friend to whom I’d recommened it. And yet, lately, I’ve heard by word of mouth of several new ones that do work well. One of them seems legit, from their website, and in that very seeming is profoundly suspect.
Paranoid systems work.