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.
“If you removed all the porn from the internet you would be left with one website, titled “Bring Back the Porn””
It seems quite obvious to me that this will, in fact, not work. I’d even argue that nobody wants it to work. Only to introduce a law that a lot of people will break at some point, to have an excuse to target them later in the future if the need arises.
No project like this will produce any significant results in any western country. It’s simply impossible to implement without full supervision and control over the entire Internet. China was able to block all online porn due to having such infrastructure. And that was possible due to a vastly different culture. We don’t.
In general, the issue of widespread pornography is very analogous to climate change. We’ve been warned about this for decades, and yet, have done nothing to prevent it. All we can, and in my opinion should be doing, is limiting its presence in our societies, especially in the context of children. This would no doubt involve online ID verification at some stage, though that can be done with respect towards privacy.
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.
Also, what’s up with targetting ASMR? It has no inherent relation to adult content. The transgender people part isn’t surprising and we know where that’s coming from.
It’s the GOP/Christians. It won’t work at first but they’ll come back and make it work once they get the Supreme Court to agree.
It’s happened like this multiple times. This don’t be different.
We need a steganographic VPN protocol, ideally with bonded heterogeneous multipath streams.
Hostile networks need to be exclusively treated as dumb pipes.
basically the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motion of conductors and fluxes, it’s produced by the modial interaction of magneto reluctance and capacitive directance
Like… tor? 🙂
Designed by the US Navy, and the bulk of exit nodes are run by the US federal government
The rule of headlines is that if it asks a question in the title, the answer is assumed to be no.
No, it won’t.
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.
Yup. It’s their strategy and they’ve used it multiple times with great success.
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.
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? 👀)You seem to be picking the absolute worst countries if you’re looking for freedom, especially online. Australia is already worse than the US in many ways, and Canada not too far behind. How about Europe?
I mean what even is gonna be the difference between fucking CCP and this BS.
Most notably, I’d say the fact that the CCP is a competent government leading the country into its golden age, while the Republican US government is driving its country into collapse. We can all have differing opinions about the CCP, but at least we have to give them credit where it’s due.
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.
Amen to your point about rubbing their faces in it.
The absolutely stunning level of hypocrisy from the Republicans who claim to be the party of small government has become such a laughing stock. Or at least I would be laughing if they didn’t have control of everything right now. Fuck.
There sure are a lot of stupid fucking people then, huh?
I mean… yeah? Seen any election results in the past few years?
The fact that Republicans get any votes past the year 2012 is enough to convince me that about 1/3 of Americans are dumber than a box of rocks.
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.
