“If you’re an ExpressVPN customer, you shouldn’t be,” he tweeted. Snowden also shared a tweet from Joseph Menn, a cybersecurity investigative reporter, who spoke about the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of ExpressVPN being one of three former U.S. intelligence officers who agreed not to fight accusations of aiding UAE hacking. people.
ExpressVPN did not respond to Snowden, but said
in a statement that they knew “the key facts” relating to the employment
history of their CIO Daniel Gericke. “In fact, it is his history and expertise
that has made him an invaluable hire in our mission of protecting user privacy
and security,” the company said.
A virtual private network (VPN) mimics a
private network on a public network. It offers users online privacy by hiding
their Internet Protocol (IP) address so that their online actions are virtually
untraceable. It also protects against eavesdropping while sending emails,
shopping online or paying bills.
Earlier this week, the US Department of
Justice revealed in court records that ExpressVPN’s Gericke and two others were
working on Project Raven, a surveillance operation for the UAE government that
involved hacking personalities and heads of state. ExpressVPN is one of the
largest VPN service providers in the world.
In a blog post in July, Snowden warned that
smartphones had become the “most dangerous” things we owned. He had also
tweeted about the Pegasus software scandal about how software developed by
Israeli startup NSO Group was helping government agencies around the world spy
on citizens’ cell phones.
Snowden revealed secret documents in 2013 that
provided a public window into the covert mass surveillance capabilities of the
U.S. intelligence agency NSA and its international partners.