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.
This is a test balloon. One state is needed to overcome all the technical hurdles like clearing VPNs for work. Once that is done it will be roled out everywhere.
Without ruling out VPNs, all the other internet laws don’t make sense. So this step is necessary and almost inevitable.
Will it ban their Grindr access though?
Only for non-closeted gays. But for Republicans who only do it to remind themselves of the evils of gay sex it’ll be readily accessible.
All vpns including ones for work? Not a snowballs chance in hell
What, you got something to hide bro?!
Sure, lots of spreadsheets with sales data.
With a name like that I would have figured some sort of mind map or Gantt chart
Bro can we not?
I thought I got lucky to be born into a family that was able to leave China, and I could browse the internet freely in the US. What the fuck y’all? Just let me have my unlimited access to entertainment in peace mmkay?
So… fucking… cooked…
Blatent First Amendment violation.
I mean what even is gonna be the difference between fucking CCP and this BS.
(Canadaaa plssss lemmme innn? 🥺👉👈❓️
Australia? 👀)Can we get a list of the names of the representatives supporting this?
Any other identifiable information would be great as well.
Fuck this social contract.
What, and violate their privacy? Know your place peasant. /s
how about their browsing histories?
is it doesn’t address the issue of youth access to porn. I think any semi-intelligent person knows this is a parenting issue
There sure are a lot of stupid fucking people then, huh?
Unfortunately this is becoming enough of “A Thing” that the left is going to have to, once again, be seen doing “something”
Personally I think the left should hammer in on “The right are too lazy and incompetent to raise their kids. They want the government to do it for them. No one who’s too unwilling or unable to spend time with their kids should be in government” or something like that. Just rub their noses in how stupid, lazy, and incompetent, the right is. Because they are. They are the worst people.
There sure are a lot of stupid fucking people then, huh?
I mean… yeah? Seen any election results in the past few years?
The representatives proposing this bill must have some really embarrassing search history.
This fuck needs to be under a microscope.
It’s never been about the children, either. It’s been about reigning control and power which is why a lot of Liberals get on board with these bills too. One of the reasons i felt so disgusted to vote for Hillary Clinton was because of her stance on censorship in the 90’s. Today it’s succeeding in porn. Tomorrow it will start succeeding in literature.
The Clintons are actual shitstains who are part of this two-pronged approach to siphon as much power away from the people and into the hands of the ruling class as possible.
Um, how the actual fuck are businesses supposed to operate where some regressive dumbfucks have outlawed VPNs?
Also, never underestimate the ability of a set of dumbasses doing some damage to this country - for one thing, see the asshole in the WH right now doing all kinds of self-owns to this country.
Secondly, I’m old enough to remember things like the V-chip and the Clipper chip and the government going after Phil Zimmerman. All of these things were rather stupid. And that was during the Clinton administration, which, sure, they were right-leaning as well…were not fucking crazy right wing.
Oh, businesses will get an exception for their company owned hardware, I’m sure. Suck it, pleb!
VPNs (virtual private networks) are suites of software often used as workarounds to avoid similar bans that have passed in states like Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, as well as the UK. They can be purchased with subscriptions or downloaded, and are built into some browsers and Wi-Fi routers as well.
I don’t think the author understands what a VPN is, or is trying to legitimize the proposed ban… Or maybe both.
That jumped out at me as well. Like VPNs don’t have a legitimate use outside of shielding your porn traffic! I would argue they’re more often used for secure commercial traffic than for evading porn bans. I’m sure those numbers are rapidly changing, though!
From that excerpt, it sounds like they understand what it is… for the general public. Take anyone on the street, if they know what a VPN is, they’re likely to just know some brand name that sells “VPN” to end users. The same way to some people, github is git.
The idea that such ban/restriction would affect basically every business and a lot of individual out there doesn’t matter if you just open with “VPN are used for illegal things” and just, stop there.
Could they even ban VPNs? Is that even possible?
Legally? Easy. Pass the law, boom. Done. They see encrypted traffic from your house/phone? That’s a paddling.
Technically? Well, sort of. A lot of VPN uses TLS for the encryption between their servers and the clients, so from the outside it could very well look like regular encrypted HTTPS traffic. So, depending on how such hypothetical (I hope) law is worded, it could just make all encryption illegal. It would not prevent anyone from using it, because that’s just math. You can’t prevent people from doing math with a computer. But you can certainly prosecute them if the law says so.
Of course, a more complete answer is that it is possible to masquerade as something else, depending on your available bandwidth and your will to side step the (hypothetical) law. If your traffic looks legitimate (and seems to be in plaintext), but you embedded some hidden meaning that the recipient can decipher, then you’re playing cat and mouse, and you can get away with thing. Wrapping DNS queries inside TLS made it easy to avoid DNS spoofing at ISP level, for example. But the point remain; such law are not made to make something technically impossible. They’re made to make something prosecutable. After all, there are laws against murder, but they don’t prevent murder, they merely incentivize people to not do it.
edit: I ignored the whole lot of other issue with banning encrypted communication as a whole, because it would break every business that have an online presence, including banking and trading. But, exemptions are a thing. Law for thee, not for me, this kinda move.
And if they don’t make encryption illegal, I guess there’s no way to stop it?
I think encryption illegal is insane since so many people use it for everything (banking, other things). But it sounds like what they want is for you to not be able to spoof your location. Not sure how that would be possible to prevent or monitor.
I’ll remind you that using strong encryption was not exactly legal not so long ago. For the general public anyway. To this day, in some countries, exporting software with cryptographic capabilities requires some declaration to state services.
Laws and regulations don’t have to care about reality of feasibility, unfortunately.
Practically? No.
Sure. Just ban TCP and encryption. Easy.
Banning VPNs would be an unmitigated disaster and anyone who suggests that it’s a good idea has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about and should never be allowed to make tech policy again because they are a massive idiot.
Businesses, institutions, and even the government itself all require the use of VPNs to remain secure. VPNs are vital to functioning IT infrastructure everywhere.
Additionally, such a move wouldn’t even stop people from accessing porn (which isn’t even what VPNs are for), all it would really do is break IT security everywhere.
Banning VPNs would be an unmitigated disaster and anyone who suggests that it’s a good idea has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about and should never be allowed to make tech policy again because they are a massive idiot.
You’re right. Sadly, this have no bearing on the people actually deciding federal laws in the US, if I am to trust the news cycle from the last 10 or so months.
The damage that would stem from such things is guaranteed to span far and large :(
The problem is that influencers have shilled stupid VPN services so much that even legislatures think they know what they are and think the primary use for the technology is circumvention and privacy.
They have no idea about all the IPsec tunnels providing site-to-site VPNs for all their businesses. Or how VPN protocols like GRE, which while providing no security on their own, are still very useful for tunneling protocols through different network stacks.
Yeah but people are really stupid and the economy is going to implode any day now anyways. It has nothing to do with porn and everything to do with criminalizing privacy and making mass surveillance more easy. They do not care how it affects people, they are rich and completely detached from reality. They will go live on Epstein Island or move to Ireland or something when America explodes. They rather be rich and connected then do anything that would actually help anyone, and Americans for the past 30 years have voted consistently for mass surveillance, destroying the constitution and fiat economics. This is what your average American wants by their voting habbits. People are just too stupid and brainwashed by this point.
criminalizing privacy and making mass surveillance more easy
Bingo. They want to know your shopping habits, your political affiliations and how valuable you are to the economy (how disposable you are) so they can better predict what you’re going to do. It’s good for business and political ambitions alike, and ensures that you won’t do any inconvenient protests or strikes. (There’s a drone for that!)
I remember walking into work one day and some agitated co-worker wanted to know what I knew about Colorado’s libraries, because he knows I regularly use them. He was listening to hate radio on the way into work and became convinced that it was a huge problem that libraries were not tracking their Internet usage back to individuals. The idea of people doing things untracked (also, on “his” dime, LOL) was driving him crazy.
I had to laugh and try to calm him down by pointing out things like Tor (and i2p) and the fact that at that time anyway, you could wardrive and probably find a few dozen open Wifi connections within a few blocks, and use one of those if you were really up to something “nefarious” (whatever that might be). Not to mention go to some coffee shop.
He was much more annoyed that people might be watching porn at the libraries, though, as if all taxpayers have to endorse every single use of all things [1]…though I’m sure control freaks like this would be positively delighted at having the right people (read: Republicans) able to see all activity of all Internet users…
One guess what religion he is and what party he votes for…
[1] See for another example - how a certain type of person thinks they should get to decide what food stamps are spent on.
One guess what religion he is and what party he votes for…
MAGA and republican…
Because people this obsessed with controlling others sure as heck ain’t Christian by any logical definition.
That’s what revolutions are for when the government fails its social contract
That’s what they’re trying to get ahead of with this kind of mass-surveillance plan. Identify and mark everyone who may possibly want to create political disruptions. Just posting on a site like this will get you on a list and you will suddenly start getting pulled over and searched for no reason at best, you will disappear entirely at worst.
It’s not just the government. It’s almost the entire human race.
Thats what revolutions are for just make sure you dont let the power dynamics of an economy dictate your future again or it is never going to change because you will just become the rich people inhibiting our species.
It’s hard to have a revolution without the global powers interfering and trying to steer you down the path of international corporate pseudocapitalism, or authoritarianism. The history of communist revolutions is very interesting in this regard. The good communists always got crushed by the bad and authoritarian and well funded communists.
I want to see one state pass this (not mine ofc) just to see the carnage of an entire state full of companies that suddenly cease operations.
I mean. They’d only enforce the ban on VPN providers that don’t provide logs to the government. I get what you mean from a technology standpoint. But, in actual implementation of the law it would do exactly what they want. They’re not gonna ban your work VPN. They just want to track what everyone is doing online.
That in itself introduces numerous security problems, still incredibly stupid and all this surveillance data makes for a hacker goldmine. Not like governments have a great IT security track record.
It’s not government. It’s about passing tech infrastructure entirely into the hands of the tech Oligarchs. Forcing VPN companies to sell or integrate Palantir/CIA/FBI backends in order to keep operating in the US.
You’re thinking too much about how the legislation is worded. It doesn’t matter when the actual implementation will just be to increase the ability for tech oligarchs to spy on all citizens. That’s the material goal. Your security doesn’t matter. The oligarchs will implement it to protect their own security and monopoly on data. That’s it. That’s all that this is meant to do. The old fucks in the legislative branch don’t have to actually understand it or write that down. They will just pass it off to tech companies to implement how they see fit. And enforce it on providers when they are told to by the Oligarchs. It’s not smart. It doesn’t have to be. It’s malicious handoff to tech oligarchs to handle and enforce as they see fit.
This is exactly the color of the issue. Everyone should read this.
Most VPNs do not use a separate VPN provided. What about places that host their own? My employer would never open their logs to the us government (hosted outside the us). I would never willingly open my own logs to the government - they have to not only physically invade my house but have to decrypt my drives, and hope they did it quickly enough that any incriminating logs haven’t been purged
It’s not about stopping random people hosting their own VPN. It’s about collecting data on the majority of the population. You’re thinking too hard about it.
Businesses, institutions, and even the government itself all **require** the use of VPNs to remain secure. VPNs are vital to functioning IT infrastructure everywhere.
This is the first thing I thought about. Bills like these always allow for vulnerabilities that would affect the entire nation, themselves included. It’s extremely short sided.
How do you even define a VPN? Is SSH tunnelling allowed then?
For that matter, how do you define porn?
10 hour video of a woman encouraging you to be a better person.
yeah a vpn ban would fuck up networks
Just like world-wide tariffs will disrupt supply chains.
They don’t care, they are dumber than rocks and twice as corrupt.
What the hell are rocks up to? Whats next, youre gonna tell me stones are up to no good.
So what you are saying is this is a fantastic RTO strategy. /s
But yeah, I work for an international company, setting up the IT infrastructure so that each of those individual offices have a standard security policy and connection whitelists, and then requiring an on-site IT person to manage each of those sounds horrible.
VPNs is not just for remote workers. It’s used by corporations who don’t want to pay for a direct connect to federate with their work sites.
The only way a VPN ban is going to work is if they make a carve-out for corporations.
Which, let’s face it, it’s Republicans so there’s a one-to-one chance that language will be there.
Couldn’t a VPN service make a corporation and attain exemption?
VPNs are needed for way more than people working from home. It’s hard to understate how spectacularly stupid banning VPNs would be in terms of business alone, never mind all the other problems it would cause.
[…] would ban a wide variety of adult content online, [… including] any depiction of transgender people.
Obviously will fail. Not because it blatantly violates the first amendment, or because banning VPNs is absurd: but because it would hinder republicans from secretly jerking it to femboys.
The love to crash grindr. Every convention, they have the servers glowing. Not a gay butthole unfilled. That should be their slogan.
Considering how many people need to use VPNs to telecommute, this seems like it would be a non-starter. But you can’t discount the sheer stupidity and hubris of Republicans these days.
Companies like L3Harris have to use VPNs just to access their emails because the securities required on government contracts. Whoever suggested this bill is just an idiot.
This is the right answer
Many countries are trying to figure out how to ban VPNs. I expect it will end up with big corporations and rich people being able to
pay a bribebuy a licence to use encryption and VPNs, while ordinary people will not be able to afford it. Or they will just require ISPs to block suspected VPN traffic from home connections. If people find workarounds it’s still a pretext to arrest anyone inconvenient to the government and ban them from using the internet to organize.
“Anticorruption of Public Morals Act”
Fucking 1920s
1984
