Governments in the West Are Turning Their Sights on VPNs

”After the UK implemented its Online Safety Act the country’s VPN usage surged as teens sough [sic] to skirt age checks on social media platforms and pornography websites.”

The report they link to presents no evidence that the surge was from “teens”.

Practically, it’s also wrong to categorize all popular sites that opted into the geo-block as being social or adult. For example, imgur.com is by all sensible definitions a general purpose image upload site with 3M DAU worldwide. It is as much a “pornography website” as YouTube or Reddit.

I would suggest this article be corrected to instead say “usage surged as netizens sought to avoid online ID checkpoints and mandatory facial recognition”, but that’s bordering on inflammatory in the other direction.

I wish these articles would highlight the very real dangers these types of laws present to children. How they often create the very harm they claim to prevent. Surveilling children only makes it easier for the creeps to track them too.

This has been one thing I've liked about how Benn Jordan has been handling the Flock issues. How he shows that the very cameras used to protect children can also be used to harm them. And uses this to walk into the conversation about wider privacy concerns and authoritarian turkey tyranny.

But with the article, we've been using the same rhetoric for decades. There's nothing wrong with it, per se, but we need to iterate on it if we're to communicate these dangers more effectively. Those trying to get that authoritarian control are iterating and they're effective. The dangers are only becoming more real and the current rise in global authoritarianism should make many realize how dangerous it is

>> a considerable chunk of the market — including three of the six most popular VPNs — is quietly operated by an Israeli-owned company with close connections to that country’s national security state, including the elite Unit 8200 and Duvdevan Units of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).”

What are those VPNs? Asking for a friend...

Does this impact people who work from home and connect to the corporate VPN? I have to do that to access production servers, as I assume most people here who WFH do as well.

Reading TFA it seems that use case would be allowed, but would I be a criminal for checking social media on my work PC when connected to the corporate VPN?

I'm sure the Chinese, Russians, and other adversaries of the west will welcome any intentional weakening of network security to "protect children".

Any back doors, crippled encryption, etc, is a way in for their intelligence services. I find it baffling that politicians are so careless with their national sovereignty. It's especially worrying that a lot of populist support for this nonsense is indirectly supported by the before mentioned adversaries. There's a well documented history of especially Russian and Chinese propaganda aimed at supporting fringe populist parties. The agenda with that is complex but it isn't necessarily with friendly intentions.

Both Russia and China have isolated their own populations from the normal internet and effectively their countries run on centralized infrastructure where private VPNs are no longer allowed and traffic is monitored, filtered, and analyzed. Additionally, especially China has long targeted academic and enterprise network security for industrial espionage reasons. Weak government security has caused a few embarrassing situations across especially EU governments (e.g. Germany) with scandals related to over reliance on Chinese technology for telecommunications (huawei) and components for energy, auto motive, etc.

The point here is that those countries calling for this the most are also the most at risk of being compromised like this.

It's always the same pattern. Point to a genuine evil and then use that as justification to strip everyone of their rights.

in Michigan there is a recently proposed piece of legislation that aims to ban content that "corrupts the public morals“ (which includes pornography, manga, and talking about trans people). It labels VPNs, proxies and encrypted tunneling methods as "circumvention tools" and would make it illegal to use them to access such content.

I hope people will start to see these blatant censorship proposals for what they are, but honestly I'm not too optimistic...

Pretty sure a ban on VPNs would simply collapse society overnight. I think lawmakers vastly underestimate just how prevalent and necessary they are to ordinary business functions, including by ISPs themselves.