Using a VPN May Subject You to NSA Spying

Democratic lawmakers are asking the U.S. intelligence chief to clarify whether Americans using commercial VPN services (tools that route internet traffic through servers to hide a user's location) might lose constitutional privacy protections. The concern is that intelligence agencies use a default rule assuming communications of unknown origin are foreign, so Americans routed through VPN servers could be treated as non-citizens and subjected to warrantless surveillance under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.