How much would it cost to create a city-wide VPN service? Has it been tried?

VPN
1

For some background, I’m from an area where poor people and minorities are viciously targeted by the police and other government agencies. I don’t know of any cases in my area where police departments have successfully subpoenaed an arrestee’s ISP yet, but I can’t imagine it’s too far off.

In order to cut such a scenario off at the pass, I was wondering if it would be possible to create or contract from a VPN service for an entire city. In the US, this solves not only the problem of local officials being able to subpoena ISPs, but also state and federal entities not being able to issue subpoenas.

Hopefully, the program would be publicly funded, with wealthier people paying more to offset the cost for those who are less well-off, or paid for through some kind of local tax.

I know there are already some solutions for this problem, like using Tor or passing laws to limit local subpoena powers, but Tor isn’t always the easiest thing to use and limiting laws could be passed in conjunction with funding for a public VPN.

Does anyone know of such a publicly-funded program being proposed or implemented? How much does it cost or how much would you estimate such a program to cost?

2

At this type of scale, you’re probably better off creating an ISP that doesn’t log over a VPN, which adds multiple layers of complexity and costs.

3

Depends on the size of the city. How many citizens are we talking about? The cheapest way will probably be just buying them all personal subscriptions.

4

If you want to set up a free-VPN service for an entire city, yes that would be possible and a very nice project.

Does anyone know of such a publicly-funded program being proposed or implemented?

I’ve never heard of one.

How much does it cost or how much would you estimate such a program to cost?

It would not need that much, just a few quality servers in a data-centre doing their thing – all of the software is open-sourced.

Making the internet more ‘anonymous’ has been a goal for many, that is the origins in the IPsec (internet security) project in the 1990’s. Their goals were to ‘encrypt the whole internet’.

5

vpns are able to be broken if you correlate traffic, it isnt hard and is fast so it wouldnt do anything

6

You could just start a ISP and not keep records if doing so is legal it your country. That would offer the same protection as a VPN,

7

tor can be plenty easy to use.
use a tails VM or boot usb, and done.

8

You could try to host your own and see how it scales.

9

Idea: build yourself a VPN router and place them around the city for people to use the internet through a VPN

I made mine with a raspberry pi… Basically it’s a router that forwards all traffic through a VPN.

10

This being a guide for starting a Wireless ISP, which helps you avoid a lot of the capital intensive infrastructure requirements.

That being said, running an ISP versus running a public-access VPN service requires a lot more know-how and knowledge.

A VPN service could be setup with a simple front-end, some knowledge of LDAP/FreeRADIUS and working knowledge of Linux. You could probably work through enabling no-logging through reading through VyprVPN’s security audits, setting up RAMDisk servers and doing constant meta-searches for data/self-auditing.

An ISP requires a heavy initial investment, among other things.

11

I don’t think this scales very well. It’d probably be cheaper to rent a /24 block, colo a server as close as reasonably possible to the city and setup a simple access system once you hit 30+ users.

12

we should make a new search engine(basically tor but fewer security breaches) that we will make more mainstream, so the average user isn’t deterred because they heard that the “darknet” is bad/evil/any biased statement

13

VPNs were not made to make you anonymous. This is not breaking anything.