I want to preface this by saying that I do not just want someone recurgitating something that they have read. I am well aware that excluding any countries will limit the amount of notes there are for you to connect to. However, wouldn’t it be far more preferable to not connect to any countries that share intelligence as opposed to relying upon the encryption across the three hops? Assume you are in a 14i country and are doing something that country wouldn’t like, such as whistleblowing in the USA, then wouldn’t excluding all 14i countries make it much harder for the adversary to set up a malicious node that is collecting everything? Sure, CIA/FBI/NSA could theoretically have a malicious node in a country that is not part of 14i, but the probability would be that they’d only do this in their own country or one of the partnered 14i countries. The argument for not excluding 14i countries doesn’t make sense to me. Saying it makes you less unique doesn’t matter IF it stops connecting to a malicious (logging) node.