How the CIA Owned an Encryption Company for 50 Years (And Why Your VPN Might Be Next)

<p><strong>For 50 years, 130 governments trusted Crypto AG to protect their most secret communications. Every single message was being read by the CIA and German intelligence. </strong>Operation Rubicon was the longest-running espionage operation in history. The CIA secretly bought a Swiss encryption company in 1970, installed backdoors in every device, and sold “secure” communications to governments worldwide. Nobody suspected a thing – until 2020.</p><br /><p><strong>Now it’s happening again. But this time, they’re buying your VPN companies. </strong>Kape Technologies – an Israeli company founded by former adware criminals with ties to Unit 8200 (Israel’s NSA) – quietly bought ExpressVPN in 2021. They also own CyberGhost, PIA, and Zenmate. Plus all the VPN “review” sites that conveniently rank their products at the top.</p><br /><p><strong>In this episode of The OPSEC Podcast, you’ll discover:</strong></p><p><br /></p><ul><li>Why Chinese VPNs like Turbo VPN are 51% owned by the Communist Party (and why they target American teenagers on TikTok)</li><li>How Russian VPNs like Kaspersky are legally required to give the FSB access to all your traffic</li><li>Why “free VPNs” turn your computer into a botnet zombie (the Hola VPN scandal)</li><li>What VPNs actually do vs. the anonymity BS they claim in their marketing</li><li>The only 3 VPN companies that pass the trust sniff test: ProtonVPN, Mullvad, and NordVPN</li></ul><p><br /></p><p><strong>A VPN does not equal automatic privacy.</strong> It’s outsourcing trust from one party to another. If you take trust from your ISP and give it to a malicious actor, you’re worse off than having no VPN at all.</p><br /><p><strong>Free VPNs make YOU the product.</strong> Israeli companies inject adware. Chinese companies feed data to the CCP. Russian companies hand everything to the FSB.</p><br /><p><strong>Check who owns the VPN – not just where the servers are located.</strong> Because if the CIA launched a VPN service promising “guaranteed privacy,” they’d sell exactly zero subscriptions. So why trust companies with the same intelligence agency connections?</p><br /><p><strong>Your privacy is your responsibility. Do your due diligence or accept the consequences.</strong> </p><hr /><p> Hosted on Acast. See <a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://acast.com/privacy" target="_blank">acast.com/privacy</a> for more information.</p>