I stay on the East coast. My Private Internet Access subscription gets me New York as one of my closest virtual IP locations. I do a lot of file-sharing and i like to maintain my torrent seed-ratio. Sharing with my fellow peers is caring, as they say. However, i am faced with an internal dilemma. I am a regular at the torrentfreak website, i see the crackdown and extraordinary measures been taken on behalf of the industry lobby. Sure, its their job. I think its my job to know how to secure myself from my ISP's packet sniffing and DPI. I already use OpenVPN with all the highest settings enabled. In the New York server the IP i am assigned is a shared IP. Meaning, it probably has over a hundred other users simultaneously using the same IP that i am using as my exit IP to make requests on my behalf onto the internet. i am sure, the NSA must just be hoovering up all this delicious data by sitting upstream from the N.Y. datacenter. Speculation, i admit. Question number 1) Wouldnt it be hard to really isolate my particular torrent traffic from hundred others? So am i protected in the crowd, or more vulnerable to targeting because some idiot decided to scam someone or send an email threat and now all of the other 99 individuals are under scrutiny by the Feds?
Question number 2) Should i just have an exit IP in Netherlands or Sweden? Sure, the torrent traffic will be slower but i can live with that if i can escape from teh clutches of this dragnet surveillance. Ok so both those countries are in the 14 eyes. Fine, lets say i exit in Romania. and decide to just use a Romanian IP to do my torrenting. Am i safer from the 3 letter agencies now? Or, because the encrypted traffic is still coming back to my physical location in the States, and since its coming from Romania, the NSA is even more curious??
You see what i am getting at guys? Help me out here please!
Edit: Question to user forest. forest, if you dont mind, i would like to pick your mind a little. I have carefully gone through the links you have posted, and i had a couple of followup questions if you dont mind indulging me.
question A) I never login to email or social media accounts when i use a VPN. Plus, thebank i use frowns upon customers using VPN's to check in to their accounts. Given that my external IP is shared by atleast 100 other customers of the PIA VPN, traffic correlation seems much harder, and infact it could be possible to mistakenly attribute my activity to some other user who simultaneously generates similar amount of traffic as i do right? It would be tough to be 100% certain would you agree? Question B) For browsing purposes, if i implement a SSL socks5 proxy on my browser on top of the existing Openvpn connection, i now have 2 hops from 2 different VPN providers. Would this not be more difficult to track realtime?