If 3 years is a long time then sure but only a handful are serving much more than that. Really they should all be serving much much longer and got off with a slap on the wrist. Americans have been executed for treason for less
With Usenet there's no real reason to have any of your services behind a VPN unless you're using torrents as a backup method to grab files. Even then, you should only be putting your torrent client behind a VPN.