A vpn at best just increases the costs for multi-country collaboration, but doesn't prevent it. This is the federal government, not some local municipality.
Even your favorite swiss bunker vpn can be subpoena’d or tapped extrajudicially and you would never know
I think that's wrong on a couple counts. First, the main concern with this type of collection based on search terms is that it has a high likelihood of picking up users who are totally innocent. If many of those users are obscured by VPNs, that raises the bar considerably for law enforcement to de-anonymize each of them (most, if not all, of whom LE knows will be total dead ends).
Second, concerning a VPN being tapped by US law enforcement agencies, I think depending on the country in which it's being operated, that is more or less likely. These companies' entire businesses rely on the perception of security, so government interception of their communications would be an existential threat to them. I think it's also likely that interception (and crucially, use of intercepted materials as evidence in criminal prosecution) would probably get out sooner or later, just as it has in the above story. The idea that federal law enforcement has access to everyone's communications everywhere all the time probably overstates their capabilities.
As I understand it, there still remains a pretty big difference between the government's active/targeted vs passive/dragnet surveillance. A VPN is probably still useful for defending against the latter.
Everything you wrote requires ignoring the entire last decade.
But fine, for an illustrative example lets use this article as an example. The government asked Google for IP addresses, then the government did an additional thing to determine the phone number was tied to the person they indicted, whether that was due to a Google account or requiring them to go to the cellular provider.
Nobody in this thread is arguing about the false positives snatching innocent people, just the VPN part.
With a VPN the same government would have gone to Google, then to the VPN company, then to the cellular provider.
VPN didn't help the customer, just slowed the government down.
You also wouldn't know if passive surveillance was being done on the VPN provider, which has been shown to happen to ISPs before from the Snowden leaks 7 whole years ago, which was about things that were even older. The NSA and FBI used National Security Letters to directly tap the servers indefinitely, and the CIA would just pay companies to directly tap the servers. They can be more easily coervice domestically, but other countries, even countries without automatic cooperation treaties are eager to help US investigators and have.
You wouldn't know if Proton/ExpressVPN/Nord you name it were passively sharing data, if they began keeping logs if at one point they say they didn't, if you were the active target, etc.
