On Sept. 11, Michigan representatives proposed an internet content ban bill unlike any of the others we've seen: This particularly far-reaching legislation would ban not only many types of online content, but also the ability to legally use any VPN.
The bill, called the Anticorruption of Public Morals Act and advanced by six Republican representatives, would ban a wide variety of adult content online, ranging from ASMR and adult manga to AI content and any depiction of transgender people. It also seeks to ban all use of VPNs, foreign or US-produced.
Main issue I have with this article, and a lot of articles on this topic, is it doesn't address the issue of youth access to porn. I think any semi-intelligent person knows this is a parenting issue, but unfortunately that cat's out of the bag, thanks to the right. "Proliferation of porn" is the '90s crime scare (that never really died) all over again. If a politician or industry expert is speaking against bills like this, their talking points have to include:
- Privacy-respecting alternatives that promise parents that their precious babies won't be able to access that horrible dangerous porn! (I don't argue that porn can't be dangerous, but this is yet another disingenuous right-wing culture (holy) war)
- Addressing that vagueness in the bill sets up the government as morality police (it's right there in the title of the bill, FFS), and NOBODY in a "free" country should ever want that.
- Stop saying it can be bypassed with technology. The VPN ban in this bill is a reaction to talking points like that.
- Recognize and call out that this has nothing to do with protecting children and everything to do with a religious minority imposing its will on the rest of the country (plenty of recent examples to pull from here).
Unfortunately this is becoming enough of "A Thing" that the left is going to have to, once again, be seen doing "something" about it. So they have to thread a needle of "protecting kids," while respecting the privacy of their parents who want their kids protected and want to look at porn, and protecting businesses that require secure communications.
Is the extent of their knowledge on VPNs just what they heard from a NordVPN commercial? Not once in the article do they mention corporate VPNs.
I completely disagree with this sentiment and any Democrat that agrees with this isn't on "the left, but one more diet-Republican who exists solely to legitimize everything the right is doing at every turn.
I don't understand how OP can say that second part with a straight face when this bill doesn't even have the support of more than a handful of Michigan House Republicans and seems to have zero chance of making it out of committee there
That second quote is what OP is saying here. They're trying to frame this debate in a light most favorable to Republicans, as if internet censorship is the forgone conclusion and it's just a matter of figuring out how to do it.
Sorry, I didn't even realize OP was the one who said that. Will edit. And I agree, this sentiment is awful
15 years ago it was unthinkable that we would be in the situation we are right now. Don't wave this away as not having any support today. This is their goal. When they lose this time, they won't forget. They won't stop. The goal is complete surveillance, porn is just the vehicle.
They are testing the waters. Just because THIS bill won't pass it doesn't mean dismiss it. They really, really, really want to take away privacy as a concept, they want to get ALL up in your private life and they would love to make special camps to send you to if you don't conform to the picture they want for America.
After this we will see more and more vague and abstract attempts at carving away smaller slices of privacy. Regulations on SOME vpn's, the closing of a few major open-source software systems like any website hosting downloads of things like TOR ("it's a terrorist tool! Antifa coordinates with it!") and the like. Then attempts at defining what a VPN is, defining what "porn" is, and such moves to prepare for more sweeping legislation that will sound more appealing to congresses, both state and federal.
they don't understand it. How are you going to stop people from having a dedicated server outside the country and then setting up their own VPNs? Wireguard is free and easy to access, how do you stop that?
If I want to open up my personal VPN to a bunch of Americans to use for free then what? I'm not American, my server isn't in America, so why can't I just give access to a few Americans? Hell my server would be great cause it's located in a University so...student discounts!
I find this argument fascinating. The point isn't technological prevention. It's so they can punish you, if they choose to, if they find you using one. I'd wager they prefer that people doing illegal things do use vpn, so they can a) build and use tools to detect it, since then by definition only criminals will use it, and b) rack up criminal charges. And of course c) ignore it if they want (either for legit reasons, like corp vpn, or because the user is an in-group member or somebody they want leverage on)
“Give me six lines written by the most honest man, and I will find something in them to hang him". This just makes it easier to find something.
Tor won't be affected by this.
Tor bridges are virtually impossible for even major governments to detect, much less block.
Unfortunately it works like any other prohibition: when the regulated legal market goes away, the hard stuff takes over
The point still applies though. They can pick you up on suspicion of using a VPN or Tor, and if you can't prove you didn't they will punish you. It will be used to silence politically inconvenient people and prevent them organizing online. If you organize your left-wing protest online in cleartext they thwart your plans and maybe arrest you. If you organize it using encryption they arrest you and thwart your plans and imprison you and ban you from the internet.
All the "we can find a way around it" arguments duck the main point, which is that they know you'll be doing that and they'll have a perfect excuse to arrest you if they think you're worth stopping.
My point is that using a VPN is trivially easy to detect, and can be en masse, dragnet style
Tor usage (especially with a bridge) is difficult or impossible to detect, even for nation-states, and to the best of my knowledge is only tractable against specific targeted individuals/machines. It's not possible to "get a list of all suspected Tor bridge users", even if you are an ISP
They can't do that because we have the presumption of innocence
If using a VPN is declared as a tag for being a terrorist, innocent until prove guilty doesn't apply.
That's not true
Tor bridges are blocked in China
Source for this assertion?
China blocks old style bridges like obfs-4. They recently managed to detect some snowflake bridges, but again only against individually targeted users -- they can't find "all Tor users in Shanghai" for example.
I suggest some background reading
https://harpia.pages.torproject.net/support/censorship/connecting-from-china/
https://pastebin.com/ZLb7YaQe
I was able to access only one webpage before it stopped working, just the google page that said it detected suspicious activity
now nothing is loading
almost half an hour later I loaded the google front page, but after searching for something the next page won't come up. Maybe not true that it's "blocked", but it's not usable in any way
A lot depends on your Tor circuit. There are lots of very slow Snowflake nodes (FWIW I operate on an a VPS with high bandwidth and ~98% uptime)
It's not slow, 90% of Tor connections just get terminated so nothing loads. Maybe the DNS finds the site, but the SSL handshake gets terminated before anything loads
I'd be interested to see accessing .onions versus using exit nodes. I'd bet the latter is where most of the issues are. ie, I bet you the BBC onion works a zillion times better than https://www.bbc.com/
Only if configured correctly. Public Tor Exit Nodes are detectible and I got some alerts about a user checking his email from Tor the other day.
Good point. The moment you leave Tor, you lose a lot of its protection.
In theory, exit nodes should completely hide the connection between you the end user and what goes thru the exit node. In practice, exit nodes can leak metadata/side channel info. And they are always susceptible to global network analysis that nation-states are able to use (albeit as far as I know only against targeted individuals, not in mass-surveillance mode)
A massive database of likely voters with party affiliation + the ability to find something on anybody they choose = easy election interference.
You ever tried setting up such a server anonymously in a way that can't be tracked by American authorities? It can be done, but they've already made that difficult and/or expensive.
Just buy a VPS with crypto? It's not expensive, it's a few bucks a month
Yeah it does look like maybe that's got easier since I looked into it, although the prices I see are maybe 3x the cost of the average VPN and of course being securely anonymous is still beyond the abilities of most of us.
I don't know about 3x, I run my VPS on $5 a month but there are even cheaper options around even paying with crypto
Bear in mind that paying with crypto doesn't make you anonymous unless you're careful about it and use monero or something. If you did that and avoided giving any other identifying info to the provider, I'd be curious to know where to sign up for that.
So... Use Monero and a fake name?
Right, that's the question — where can you do that and get a VPS with sufficient bandwidth for $5/month?
I just use AWS because it can max out my home connection anyway
Yes, that's because I'm bypasssing non-American censorship
It's quite possible they will make an exception for corporate VPNs while banning them for the rest of us. There will be a big fee to buy a corporate encryption licence, unaffordable to the peasants.
If you can block access to commercial VPNs and render anyone else using VPNs liable to prosecution you achieve what they want.
You can't block commercial VPNs. I can put a commercial VPN website up right now, it takes like a second. All I need is a crypto payment address and I'll share my VPN servers
Ok, and how are you going to tell people that it exists? Not through YouTube sponsor slots, because you'll get deleted quicker than you put it up.
So only a tiny number of people will know that your VPN exists. That's "good enough" for the censorious.
On Lemmy, of course!
Lemmy doesn't have that many users... How are you going to reach the people who aren't arch users ;)
Seriously though, tech enthusiasts live a technological solution but a ban is a societal thing and it doesn't have to be perfect. Look at China.
I'm using a VPN in China
Jesus.
As far as I can tell, you are arguing that it won't become impossible to use a VPN. But no-one has said that it will be, and what I and others are trying to point out, is that VPN usage will become more difficult and rare. The vast majority of people will be restricted from viewing the content that the government objects to, whatever that is.
If you have anything to say about that rather than repeating the point that, yes, for the knowledgeable, for the tech-literate, for the people with the will and the spare time and the energy, VPN usage will still be available, feel free to. Maybe you think that actually everyone will use a VPN - why? why won't a massive reduction in marketed options not reduce usage massively? Maybe you think that actually it doesn't matter - why? why does it not matter that the average person will be unable to get information censored by the government?
Everyone learning about VPNs out of necessity might be an overall benefit
Right. Everyone. But only a minority of Chinese use vpns, and it's a fraction of those who use them for anything other than work, from what I've found.
Everyone who watches porn uses one. A "fraction" could mean 500 million people.
It's about 3% according to Wikipedia, meaning that government internet censorship works on 97% of people in this way. That means the 3% also can't discuss what they learn with anyone except online.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/china-starts-issuing-145-fines-for-using-a-vpn
This article claims 30%
Presumably the difference is how many people are using one for work.
Anyway, you imply you're completely fine with 70% of the population having no access to the uncensored internet?
I'm not fine with it, I want that percentage to be 100% whether a government has other ideas or not
No shit, if you want to use a corporate vpn all you have to do is contact Barron trump, slip him 50k cash and he will have your vpn certified "Christian Morals Approved"