Yeah there’s a lot of questionable stuff in the vpn service security auditing “space”.

That’s why I think it’s important to look at the raid outcome to see how their systems handle a real world situation (interpol tries to get logs and install logging in order to bust an alleged global csam ring using mulvads port forwarding, user privacy and anonymity protections to trade files over windows cifs (yes, network neighborhood, pedos apparently have a reputation for lack of opsec) sharing). The raid was unsuccessful because there were no logs and the police were unable to install logging capabilities.

After that failed operation, Interpol began requesting cdns and hosts block mullvads endpoints by ip. The point of that operation was to either force mullvads compliance with the investigation, to get them to drop port forwarding, or to force them to close down.

Because at the peak even cloudflare was blocking mullvad, it became very hard to use the service when browsing or for pretty much anything that relied on internet like rss or podcasts, shoutcast or even updating your computer.

Mullvad dropped port forwarding after rotating servers for months to attempt to beat the block and giving users lots of warning.

In the months after the block request was lifted, using the service for normal browsing went back to usual.

I remember all these details so clearly because I was a user of mullvad then and it was a relatively high profile and well publicized test of a vpn services’ capability to withstand government pressure.

As it turns out, even having no logs and no ability to add logging into your system doesn’t stop government from telling everyone else to make your system unusable.

It’s also pretty much the best possible outcome someone could expect of a service.

The point of this long ass reply is not to defend a company, although I think a person who was doing so could be forgiven for it in this case, the point is to help you understand what happened to make users of that service put their trust in it and why people like me are saying “maybe consider not ditching mullvad” when you ask what to use instead.

I used a hypothetical, denoted by using quotations. I never called anyone specifically a fascist supporter. You made that final jump.

But, since you asked about it, let's look at brass tacks. What, by definition, constitutes fascism?

Merriam Webster

often Fascism : a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterized by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition

At the core of fascism is loyalty to tribe, ethnic identity, religion, tradition, or, in a word, nation. —Jason Stanley

Just to make sure we're not looking at a singular definition, let's look at Wikipedia too

Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/ FASH-iz-əm) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement that rose to prominence in early-20th-century Europe.[1][2][3] Fascism is characterized by support for a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived interest of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy.[3][4] Opposed to communism, democracy, liberalism, pluralism, and socialism,[5][6] fascism is at the far-right of the traditional left–right spectrum.[1][6][7]

And now, let's look at what the Örebro party's own stated platform, which recieved 72% of its funding from the Mullvad founder, which also amounted to 10 times their total funding in 2024:

Some of its key issues include strong secularism, a 30-hour workweek with retained pay, lowered wages for politicians, ending taxes on energy and fuel, ending taxpayer funding of what it sees as wasteful sculptures, monuments and art, large-scale remigration, expanded social housing, a stricter assimilation policy, and free dental care.[3][4]

And what's remigration?

Remigration is a far-right concept referring to the ethnic cleansing[1] via mass deportation of non-white minority populations, especially immigrants and sometimes including native-born citizens, to their place of racial ancestry.[2][3]

So fascism is about racial and national purity and hierarchy, as we defined, and the Orebro party supports remigration, which is a concept of forcing immigrants out of countries to preserve the purity of "culture" and the race of the nation.

But yeah, keep eating that burger my guy. I'm the extreme one. I bolded the throughlines to make it easier for you to connect the dots.

Mullvad has genuinely resisted government data requests in ways that matter and that's not nothing. But the premise that it's uniquely proven in a way alternatives aren't just isn't true and is doing a lot of heavy lifting. IVPN and Proton have both faced and resisted comparable legal pressure. The gap between Mullvad's tested track record and alternatives isn't as wide as your steel grade analogy implies, and that analogy only holds if you're treating the alternatives as unverified claims with no real world data behind them.

But if we're discussing harm, the deeper problem is the framing that ethics are a luxury position for people who aren't in genuine danger. By that logic you can never apply moral considerations to any purchase of critical infrastructure when the stakes are high enough, which produces conclusions that don't hold up under pressure. The gun in a war zone analogy assumes the gun manufacturer's politics don't affect the people in the war zone. But the people most likely to need a VPN to survive, dissidents, journalists, immigrants, minorities in authoritarian or ethnonationalist environments, are often the exact same people being targeted by the policies the Mullvad founder is bankrolling. A Somali refugee using Mullvad to stay safe is funding, through that subscription, a party that wants to forcibly deport them back to Somalia regardless of whether they were born in Sweden.

So no, I don't think pointing this out is harmful. I think pretending it's irrelevant because the product works well is the more harmful position, especially for the people most likely to be using it for the reasons you're describing.

I am not aware of any other vpn service that has been raided with a warrant for any information present and had the police come away completely empty handed.

That raid I’m thinking of served two functions: one was to get any information available, the other was to investigate mullvads infrastructure in order to evaluate if it was possible to get a warrant to install logging capacity.

While the inability to install wiretaps (logging capacity) has not been explicitly confirmed by law enforcement like the inability to get any data was, we can assume it was impossible because rather than pursue that direction, Interpol advised cdns and hosting providers to block mullvads endpoints instead.

The reason we are able to assume a warrant for wiretapping was impossible is that the action taken, making mullvad unusable to the point that the company dropped port forwarding, has the effect of flushing the target out from the service which is not what you’d want if you were able to install a wiretap.

It’s evidence of a type of trustworthiness borne out by the effects of actions surrounding the service, not just tests, audits or press releases. That is something unique and if it’s not I’d really like to know.

That’s not just rhetoric, I’m truly interested in other VPNs whose impact with law enforcement left only cloud chamber evidence of their trustworthiness.

Your idea that people should apply the strictest ethical scrutiny to their own purchases in the marketplace really seems like it’s based entirely on the liberal assumptions that the marketplace is frictionless and has many goods of equal quality on offer.

It’s also, on another level, patently ridiculous that a person who is choosing a battle tested privacy and anonymity focused vpn should choose something they’re less sure about because they need to somehow avoid any microfraction of blame flowing to them through the market from the specific currency units they used in the transaction.

It’s cool, I know the immigration police are kicking down our door, but at least I didn’t use the gross vpn associated with a person who donated to a fascist party.

At some point you gotta recognize that not only does your reasoning not hold up to theoretical interrogation (how could blame for the effects of transactions flow down to the purchaser if everything solid melts into air, huh? Explain that lieberuls!) but is absurd in the very real life situations you bring up.

It’s like some bizarre inversion of the old “they say the next drone bombs will be dropped by a black trans woman” joke.

Mullvad being raided and authorities coming away with nothing is a great proof of concept. But you also act like there's absolutely no other option, and you make tge incredibly ironic claim that if you use another product, immigration gestapo will be at your door to deport you...the same thing that the Mullvad founder supports. Make it make sense.

The question of whether Mullvad has the best proven privacy infrastructure and the question of whether ethical considerations are category errors in urgent situations are two different claims. You've made a strong case for the first one. The second doesn't follow.

Nobody argued that a dissident with a warrant being served on their door should stop and evaluate the founder's politics before connecting. The door kicking scenario is a real extreme edge case and in that case use whatever works, obviously. But that's not why most subscribers are paying for Mullvad and the existence of genuine emergencies doesn't resolve the question for everyone else making a less urgent choice.

The microfraction of blame framing also misrepresents what I actually said. I didn't argue Mullvad users bear personal moral responsibility for ethnic cleansing. I said I personally won't fund it when alternatives exist, and I laid out who specifically gets hurt by the policy being bankrolled. That's a statement about my own choices given my own assessment of the technical gap versus the moral one. If you assess that gap differently because the raid evidence is uniquely compelling to you, that's a legitimate position. It's just not an argument that the ethical consideration itself is absurd.