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.
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
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)
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/
A massive database of likely voters with party affiliation + the ability to find something on anybody they choose = easy election interference.