NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden still lives in Russia. The whistleblower received Russian citizenship in 2022.
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“Never use Reddit again”
Snowden says he misses his homeland and wants to go home, but is anxious about prosecution and his own safety. Now he’s putting the spotlight on, in this case Reddit, and users trying to gain access to the service with tools like VPN and Tor. Why use such services and why is he critical of what Reddit does? Because people in countries where the service is blocked or partially blocked will risk being told to log into their Reddit account or use a developer token. The use will then be logged by the service.
This seems to affect everyone who connects via Tor or VPNs, i.e. risk groups who need privacy.
Edward Snowden
Snowden warns Norway against the surveillance law
Also blocks quick IP changes
Fortunately, there is a thread about the matter on Reddit itself, where the thread starter reports that the person in question tends to check out the content without logging in: “I opened a post to read about various things, and left it unattended for a couple of hours while I did some errands. When I came back and tried to read more comments, Reddit blocked me.”
Another “redditer” reports that the same thing happened to them “a few days ago,” and that clearing the cache might work. The theory is that the IP has been flagged for some reason. Another user claims that the message popped up, and that the username and password no longer worked: “the same username and password worked on the mobile.” To us, it sounds like Reddit is testing out one or more new security systems in the backend – what they are intended to stop, it is not known at this time.
In a larger thread about Snowden’s notification, almost everyone agrees that they don’t want a trend Reddit may be about to start:
This is a possible future across the entire network if the authorities get their way. People should notice how all these different governments, from all the different countries, practically think the same thing about these issues.
ConsciousRun6137/Reddit
To investigate, we connected to a VPN server in Algeria, as a random country. When we opened Reddit in our existing logged in session we were not blocked, but when we opened a private browser window (ie without cookies) we got the following message:
