Many people, institutions and VPNs claim many things doesn't imply they are true. also, why use 1 VPN when you can use proxy chaining??
If you connect to the internet, then your ISP can see everything that is in clear so at least see your IP address.
For the data, i am not sure for tablets and smartphones. If it was a magnetic hard drive the answer would easily be YES. But on flash drive i am not sure if wiping the disk is a necessity.
EDIT:
i just found this great paper on SSD (and Flash drive) wiping. https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/fast11/tech/full_papers/Wei.pdf
To resume, overwriting the full drive should do the trick but some dergee of rcovery is still possible.
How do I find out about proxy chaining?.
the feds never pulled anything from my desktop that had an SSD installed
I am thinking along the lines of SSD setup, with a virtual box, encrypt it, go through vpn & proxies
do this on a throw away 3G mobile broadband connection, spoof the mac addressed, spoof geo location
not use wifi but instead use a usb dongle. encrypt the hard drive and have a hidden partition.
the fact is that I am not in it to hack in to systems I am in it for freedom of speech and in this country freedom of speech is dead, people get arrested for posting their opinions online
one man got 24 months for posting on some train firms twitter account.
I do not have the knowledge the get in to systems or websites, the most I have done is play use ssl stip on kali over my own network to see it dump passwords
once upon a time I used to write virus, but not any more