Comment by nextaccountic

3 years ago

> The Swedish national police attempted to search Mullvad once, but since there was no data to seize they left empty handed.

They were just unprepared. There was plenty of data to seize, but it was in RAM. They just needed the right equipment to do a cold boot attack [0] [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_boot_attack

[1] https://wootconference.org/papers/woot23-paper3.pdf

"just needed" is a simplification. Very few organizations outside the US federal 3-letter agencies have the resources to spend on volatile data recovery in practice. Even the FBI isn't going to bother unless they're confident some extremely valuable evidence is involved.