Comment by aeon_ai

I don't make many of the claims you seem to tease apart from my response. I've presented no false binary, and explicitly advocated for operating with more nuance there.

I'll elaborate.

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I'm pointing out that, in response to a seemingly innocuous post about a site, you've drawn attention to an unrelated issue, and subsequently framed the entirety of US-based companies as morally complicit with NSA surveillance.

I have no doubt that the NSA likely petitions Cloudflare, among others, for information. But, unlike you, I don't have any indication or context for relationships that would provide the NSA direct, unfettered access to all information processed by Cloudflare.

Further, I believe that the ever-holy north star of capitalism would suggest that Cloudflare, a company that operates globally with significant ties to large organizations outside the US, likely has a sufficient incentive to maintain at least a degree of friction in that access.

What I do know - - The company issues multiple transparency reports. They declare they have never: turned over encryption keys, installed law enforcement software on their network, provided feeds of customer content to law enforcement, modified customer content at government request, or weakened their encryption. - They are a public company, and have SEC filings which the CEO is on the hook for. - The CEO of the company stands to make a lot more money being successful at what Cloudflare does than serving NSA requests the US govt makes -- And the latter would pose great risk to the former.

The best move if the golden goose is at risk is to make an absolute shitstorm of noise, which would put everyone on high alert. In fact, the tranparency report says as much -- "If Cloudflare were asked to do any of these, we would exhaust all legal remedies, in order to protect our customers from what we believe are illegal or unconstitutional requests. -- Accurate as of October 8, 2025"

Cloudflare, like any CDN/reverse proxy, has the technical capability to view customer traffic. There's no evidence of systematic NSA access, and plenty of evidence that would suggest resistance to it.

Suggesting that because the company is US-based that they are somehow "evil" indicates, more than anything, an anti-US sentiment that is looking for reasons to villainize the company.

None of that is to downplay the issues the Cloudflare does, in fact, create. But, proposing that there's a massive conspiracy to "slurp up your data" requires a really, really big stretch that begins to stray into tinfoil territories.