My understanding is that it is not actually easy to subpoena records from all the VPNs cloaking traffic to a specific site. In fact there could be a significant cost attached to doing that. So while it might make you look guilty in some situations, it can protect your innocent behaviour from being snooped until you do something to justify appropriate suspicion.
As stated
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The approved subpoena requires the company to turn over “documents reproducing all server logs, IP address logs, account information, account access records and application or registration forms” tied to Hotz’s hosting.
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I'm pretty sure they would need to apply for another subpoena in order to uncover any IPs coming from a VPN. Now this could be done if it was warranted, but most of the time I doubt it would be pursued and it might even be hard to prove it was warranted for each VPN?
Now just for fun, let's say you're tunneled to a VPN that's tunneled to another VPN, to another, etc. While you could still be chased down, it probably not practical in most situations like this. I wonder if one company could provide a service that uses multiple routings like this through different registered entities requiring the authorities to request records for each of the different entities in order to track down just one account. Then implement this on a large scale...
As stated --- The approved subpoena requires the company to turn over “documents reproducing all server logs, IP address logs, account information, account access records and application or registration forms” tied to Hotz’s hosting. ---
I'm pretty sure they would need to apply for another subpoena in order to uncover any IPs coming from a VPN. Now this could be done if it was warranted, but most of the time I doubt it would be pursued and it might even be hard to prove it was warranted for each VPN?
Now just for fun, let's say you're tunneled to a VPN that's tunneled to another VPN, to another, etc. While you could still be chased down, it probably not practical in most situations like this. I wonder if one company could provide a service that uses multiple routings like this through different registered entities requiring the authorities to request records for each of the different entities in order to track down just one account. Then implement this on a large scale...