Man found guilty of child porn because he ran a Tor exit node

> What is the point of offering a bribe, to bully the system

Imagine your grandma needs urgent surgery and it is customary to give the doctor some money to 'ensure best results'. Will you refuse?

> descend all the way into mafia families and protection rackets?

You mean like some monopolized industries in the US have done?

> then you have to bribe, like the Soviets did.

Why Soviets, Bribing is the default way of society - Imperial Russia has no concept of bribery, if you wanted a government official to do their job, you had to pay them, and they set the price, thats just how the system worked.

Victorian britain was insanely corrupt too. Absence of corruption is unusual.

Then that is a service then which might be safe for people who's opponents are the police. But some people also worry about threats from the obscenely rich, from their own intelligence agencies, from foreign intelligence agencies, from organized crime, and/or from popular mob outrage.

Your experience doesn't indicate the safety of the service against those other threats, and not only may they not be correlated but they may be anti-correlated. E.g. I bet both CIA and mob run VPN services are really good at saying no to the police.

The fundamental thought that drives my opinion on this subject is this:

We already know for a fact that some state actors do broad scale full take surveillance of the internet. VPN services are even more attractive to monitor because the users are somewhat self-selecting as people who have something to hide, more intel bang per megabit monitored. Without surveilling VPNs these entities would have a blindspot in their expensive internet monitoring machine, so its important just for completeness sake. The VPN provider game is also a much lower barrier to entry, smaller players that don't have the power to push around AT&T can get in on it. Russia, for example, isn't in that much of a position to engage in world wide telecom monitoring (except perhaps that one fiber that goes through sibera and has really low latency between europe and china)-- but they sure can stand up some VPNs and get the worlds traffic to come to them.

Plus, if you run a VPN service people will pay you to run their secret data through you. It's a profit center even before you get to the potential revenue streams from abusing your position. Perhaps it becomes so profitable that you'd prefer to protect it and so you minimize your abuse, but the optimal amount of abuse will pretty much never be zero.

So, If you're the head of a clandestine service or serious organized crime group and you haven't launched at least one VPN service you should be immediately fired for grave incompetence.

The best reason to not run one would just be that you've already infiltrated many existing ones through operatives and backdoored hardware.

And also the heat you take running these services is much easier to deal with if you have 'connections' either of the run-by-a-TLA sort or the we-have-blackmail-material-and-can-break-your-fingers sort. And corrupt VPNs have a whole extra potential revenue/benefit source so they can afford to under-price any honest competition.

Given that, we should expect that many VPNs are honeypots. Probably not all of them, but by their very nature it should be hard to impossible to tell which.

Yes, which we've done, but if I go around talking to people in Seattle about "Geistige Brandstifter" I have exactly one friend who is going to know what I'm talking about because they're German.

Language doesn't really work unless there's broad social buy-in, otherwise you're just talking to yourself.

I think that there's a fairly standard distinction, that doesn't require any consideration of psychological mechanisms. Homosexuality can be practised consensually and nobody else needs to care, because nobody is harmed. Paedophilia can't be practised consensually because children are below the age of consent, and can be harmed.

Hence, paedophilia is classified as a mental illness, but homosexuality no longer is (in most Western countries, at least, I believe).