Hard to believe any VPN company provides serious protection from the American government. In the highly unlikely event that the company won't cooperate they can just comprise you outside that channel. See everyone who thought Tor was enough to evade the US government.
I trust Mozilla to not cooperate with anyone less powerful than Uncle Sam which is a lot more than most shady fly-by-night VPN operators.
If you're using your VPN as protection against your ISP, wifi provider (internet Cafe, school, workplace, home), or some other MITM you're better off with a service run by a serious company, with a lot to lose from a scandal and a long track record of not lying and being technically competent.
If you're looking to hide your browsing from the US government you should a) give up or b) definitely not use a commercial VPN.
NordVPN is a security nightmare. I usually recommend either Mullvad or TunnelBear depending on whether you care more about quality of service or ease of use.
The problem with NordVPN isn't that they had a breach and their keys were leaked (ok, well that is huge fucking problem) due to a forgotten KVM but that they didn't fess up till 18 months later when some independent researcher brought that to light.
Given all the shilling and backstabbing in the online VPN recommendation industry, it’s hard to trust any advice now, not even comments here. God knows who’s a shill.
But those geoblocks and the occasional need to anonymize activities... Really hard to solve. (I know Tor. Tor is too damn slow.)
Actually, far worse than the shills are the cancelling virtue signallers who have nothing better to do than 1) quit a service because someone tells them to; 2) go running to that forum looking for approval by telling them "I cancelled!"
In the UK you can buy a "travel card" with cash at any Post Office counter, they are just regular MasterCard cards and can be used like any other debit card, including online purchases. They are even reloadable and contactless too.
I don't recommend ProtonVPN - tried it and if you're torrenting they throttle you to 20Mbps. Shady past connection to NordVPN / Tesonet also a concern.
Paid "Plus" plan and connecting to their dedicated P2P servers in Switzerland and Sweden. Definitely getting throttled by them to ~20Mbps while torrenting. Tried a competitor VPN - no throttling, torrenting at full speed. Glad I only paid for a month - they won't be seeing any more of my money once the month's up.
I can vouch for Mullvad. They don't do paid promotions like Nord or Express and enjoy a fairly good reputation. You can actually even pay them cash by mailing a fiver to Sweden with your account number on a note lol.
That's another plus. You don't actually have to register an account with them, but instead their website generates a random number for you that you use to log in. All in all they appear to be very transparent.
Looking for alternatives now. Is NordVPN any good?