traffic analysis attacks on VPNs explained simply — because the wyden letter is getting misread everywhere.

what traffic analysis actually is: your data is encrypted, but the size and timing of packets is visible. if an adversary watches traffic entering your VPN server AND traffic leaving toward a destination, they can correlate the two. your content is hidden. your behavior isn't.

mitigations that actually exist: multi-hop VPNs (proton and mullvad both have this), tor (adds more hops), mixnets like nym. not magic, but meaningfully harder to correlate.

for normal use cases: irrelevant. for journalists in hostile countries: very relevant.