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.
yup. businesses, military installations, federal government offices. all need to relocate out of michigan. don’t even matter if it passes should assume it might come back up. Safer to get out and stay out.
Release the Epstein files
Won’t work.
[…] 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.
ban porn
Lol, good luck with hat
ban VPN
Lol, good luck with that too, maybe ban HTTPS while you’re at it?
Mind you though, this bill has diddly squat to do with porn. Republicans don’t really care about that especially since they’re usually too preoccupied with abusing their own children for their sexual needs. Blocking porn is just a cherry on the cake so that they have even more poetry and control
This is mainly about the VPN and encryption. Those are technologies that can be used to pass along true facts, true news, organize protects without them knowing.
You can’t really break all types of encryption with one bill, but many aimed at the same goal just might do the trick
I feel that encryption should be enshrined as a human right
Make all their grindr accounts public
The trans bit is key here. First that, then anything “promoting homosexuality”. It’s in Project 2025 that the porn bans are about criminalising LGBTQ people and allies.
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.
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.
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
How do you even define a VPN? Is SSH tunnelling allowed then?
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.
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.
yeah a vpn ban would fuck up networks
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.
That’s what revolutions are for when the government fails its social contract
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.
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 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.
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-on-one chance that language will be there.
Couldn’t a VPN service make a corporation and attain exemption?
Yes just treat everyone like children rather than parent your own children… Christ on a stick man
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.
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.
That could spell trouble for VPN owners and other internet users who leverage these tools to improve their privacy, protect their identities online, prevent ISPs from gathering data about them or increase their device safety when browsing on public Wi-Fi.
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.
Unfortunately this is becoming enough of “A Thing” that the left is going to have to, once again, be seen doing “something” about it.
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 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!
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
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.
“Give me six lines written by the most honest man, and I will find something in them to hang him.”
A massive database of likely voters with party affiliation + the ability to find something on anybody they choose = easy election interference.
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
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/
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.
suspicion of using a VPN or Tor
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
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.
Tor Exit Nodes
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)
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”
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.
deleted by creator
Someone check the browser history of the 6 GOPers pushing a “morality” bill.
no. children get shot and killed at school on a monthly basis here and all the government can think to do is age-gate porn
Interesting
With all threats that kids face world wide
With all threats that kids face in the USA
You focus on one of the lesser problems that should be fixed by the parents in the first place?
What’s the number one cause of death for children in the USA? I mean, silly me, I would have thought that is a low hanging fruit easy subject to pick up and run with. Fix that, and you will have actually made the country better
Then again, a huge swath of Americans don’t want a better country as they’ve been bombarded for two decades that they actually already live in the best country of the world whereas in reality they live inmonenof the worst
It’s also occurred to me that that DIY self-hosting is trending in popularity. To connect their self-hosted services to the internet more securely, people use VPN tunnels like WireGuard, etc.
The corporations want us to subscribe to all the things and own nothing, so they can’t be happy about this trend.
The anti-porn moral panic is clearly the main thing going on here. But it’s always wise to follow the money.
It’s also occurred to me that that DIY self-hosting is trending in popularity
Those anti-capitalist terrorists need to be reigned in though! /s
Let’s just shut the internet down then. Yet another face-eating leopard moment.
Why not going straight back to the 19th century? The good ol’ times when uncle Sam rode through the prairie with a double-barreled shotgun over his shoulder to shoot bears, buffalos and anything else he didn’t like.
