The United States’ Internet Faces Growing Resemblance to China’s Great Firewall as the Crooked New York Times Acts as the Party’s Mouthpiece.
When Edward Snowden revealed that the United States government basically spies on everyone and logs their Internet activity in case they ever become interesting, it should have been a Five Alarm Fire wake-up call to Americans everywhere to do more to safeguard their privacy.
You could read anyone’s email in the world, anybody you’ve got an email address for. Any website: You can watch traffic to and from it. Any computer that an individual sits at: You can watch it. Any laptop that you’re tracking: you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world. It’s a one-stop-shop for access to the NSA’s information. … You can tag individuals … Let’s say you work at a major German corporation and I want access to that network, I can track your username on a website on a forum somewhere, I can track your real name, I can track associations with your friends and I can build what’s called a fingerprint, which is network activity unique to you, which means anywhere you go in the world, anywhere you try to sort of hide your online presence, your identity.
-Edward Snowden answers “What could you do if you would use XKeyscore?”
However, even as these shocking revelations became public information, the response was just like the RIAA v. The Internet era, where copyright lawyers working for filthy rich executives and multi-millionaires like Metallica, sued poverty-stricken single mothers over some MP3 files they found on KaZaa, and extracted millions of theoretical dollars, (due to driving someone who was already too poor to pay the damages into bankruptcy).
Americans hit the Snooze button yet again. “Remind me Later.” What did they do to increase their privacy? Nothing.
Now, the corrupt New York Times is backing Apple and Arkansas in their War on the Internet.
Apple is trying to use threats of being booted out of the App Store against Reddit, to force them to clean up the porn.
Even though Reddit’s porn content is not enough to make them covered by the Arkansas “card people to use this site” law (it has to be like 51% or something), Apple’s threats of booting them from the App Store carry serious weight behind them, as useds of the iPhone have no Freedom to simply go around Apple and install Reddit themselves, like Android users can with things that are not allowed in the Play Store, or when we want Free and Open Source Software from F-Droid.
Reddit’s business is advertising, so they will balance the threat of being booted from the App Store (where they can spy on people’s iPhones and gather tons of useful information about them for selling ads) with how many ads they can plaster everywhere around the pornography, and try to figure out which is the least damaging route for Reddit.
If they cave, which they are starting to, and delete the porn or make it difficult to casually access, then they’ll go the way of Tumblr, which gave into Apple’s threats and deleted the porn, and that’s the last anyone ever heard of Tumblr.
On top of Apple, which has this sick, almost clinical, fascination and disgust about porn on the Internet, the “Republicans of Gilead” in States like Arkansas have implemented laws that make porn sites (defined by arbitrary amounts of content) demand to see government ID to get in.
Only a few sites are even complying with the Arkansas law, but one of the ones that is, is PornHub, which detects if you have an Arkansas-based IP address and blocks you if you do.
Laws like this are stupid easy to bypass. If the person gets a VPN and uses a VPN server that’s not in Arkansas, they can see the site again.
If they don’t have $4-5 a month in their pocket for a VPN, they can just install the Brave Web browser, and open a Private Window with Tor, and load the site in the Tor Window.
Or even use the Tor Browser itself.
These laws are comically ineffective, because Tor is doing what it was designed to do.
“Route the victim of an oppressive regime around the censorship.”
Once these people “go dark”, the government will actually have a harder time monitoring them at all, and so will the sites that are tracking them all over the Web.
So the government doesn’t “clean up the Web”.
It just makes it so everyone who wants to do another legal thing on the Internet, without forking over their ID, goes encrypted and routes their traffic through something else.
The people using Tor and VPNs to get around the Arkansas law aren’t committing any crime.
The law doesn’t claim to make it a crime for the user to bypass the ID check. It just lays out penalties for sites that should know that a person is in Arkansas, who don’t check for IDs.
There’s really no strong incentive for the site to figure out if a Tor or VPN user is in Arkansas. The only thing they could do is ask the user.
For my part, I usually browse the Web through a VPN server in Sweden, Switzerland, or the Netherlands, where there are laws regarding privacy. It’s horrible, sometimes, trying to access American Web sites, because there’s no privacy laws to protect Americans, so they just shut out anyone with an EU IP address and say they don’t comply with the GDPR.
It also causes a lot of cookie screens, that I have my browsers configured to swat back down with the ad blockers, so that I can never consent. And then, just in case, my browsers toss the cookies and local site data, with limited exceptions for half a dozen sites or so, on exit.
Google kind of messes with you if you do that, but I don’t use Google search.
I use Searx Belgium, and here’s why.
Google does a lot of annoying things to lean on VPN and Tor users to “log in” and identify themselves for searches. (Never log in to a search engine.) Then they’ll know it was you and record it, even if they can’t currently see your real IP address.
With Searx Belgium I can go to the Settings and persistently prefer United States -English results.
I also benefit from the VPN server in Europe because sites will tend to comply with the GDPR. It causes a lot of “cookie notice” pop-ups, but my browsers slap them back down again with ad blocking rules, so I never see them, and therefore can’t consent anyway.
And then I expire my cookies at the end of the session anyway, except for Searx Belgium and a few other sites.
The United States Internet is basically becoming unusable.
I don’t own any Apple devices. I certainly never consented that Apple could decide what I can see on my browser on my computer, because I’ve never agreed to any Apple licenses for any Apple software.
(Except for that one time I agreed not to make any atomic bombs with Safari on Windows, a long time ago. Seriously, this was in the license file.)
However, their corrupting influence is affecting what sites feel free to host.
Not that any of this is in defense of Reddit. They’re bad too. They have every reason to pressure people to sign in so they can track them. They’re an ad company.
If you sign into Reddit, you should put Reddit in a container where it can’t see your Web activity outside of this, or use Private Mode with Tor in Brave or browse over a VPN, give them a fake email you don’t use for anything else.
That way they don’t know who they watch.
For now, you can get around the “log in or get the app” nonsense with Old Reddit Redirect, but who knows how much longer they’ll let users opt out of the New Reddit mess.
Increasingly, the way to deal with the US Internet is “Don’t browse without a VPN or Tor.”
Bill Gates has lobbied for the end of encryption and privacy for everyone except rich criminals.
They’re finding it hard to control and monitor people when they disappear from the radar.
The government doesn’t belong in people’s homes. Especially not to decide what (otherwise legal) things they are doing or watching.
If parents really have a problem with things on the Internet, they need to step up, be a parent, and take control of the devices in their own home.
But increasingly, this issue is just a distraction to legitimize government spying, like the programs that Snowden revealed.
This is because they know nobody will dare say anything about it if they say it’s to protect kids.
Protect kids? Which kids and what are the government protecting, and from what?
In Illinois, where I live, kids tend to be habitual offenders by the time they’re 14 or 15.
There’s no career prospects in the State and only 70% of the kids where I live can even graduate high school. It’s almost like something out of Somalia.
In the news, every day, they’re shooting people, dealing dope, stealing cars, and mugging people.
Gangs in Chicago use kids as soon as they’re old enough to hold a gun and reach the gas pedal in the car they stole from you.
Maybe the government should focus on this.
I strongly believe they should bring back the electric chair, find the adults who are putting kids up to this crap, and have the adults ride the lightning for it. You turned the kids into monsters, you pay the price.
But no, the government isn’t worried about this or they would do something about it.
Instead, they have crooked Apple, “Conde Nasty” (Reddit), the corrupt New York Times egging on a moral panic about pornography.
When I was a teenager, I saw porn on the Internet. I think everyone I know did. We’re in charge of the world now. I mean, my parents’ generation is thinning out and can’t be blamed for everything.
We should never allow the government to become so tyrannical that they start mandating laws against privacy, encryption, and what software we are allowed to run, and I believe it’s sick that we’re allowing them to use children as props while they’re not cleaning up the mess in Chicago.
What the Crooked New York Times proposes is far worse than what we have now.
The article suggests not one, but two Supreme Court decisions (Reno v. A.C.L.U and Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union) should be reversed, and that instead of the essentially open access to the Web we have today, we would have something even more restrictive than the Arkansas law imposed on every American.
Under this proposal, any person who wants to access legal material would be forced to provide their driver’s license or credit card information, essentially allowing porn sites, credit card companies, banks, and advertisers to track exactly who is viewing what content.
In Russia, such information is frequently used for blackmail (they call it “Kompromat”), where they compile a list of a person’s online activities and use it to portray them as a demented pervert, even though a majority of the country views such content every day.
The fact that this idea is being discussed in The New York Times suggests that it’s on the Democrat Party’s agenda, although the Republicans may have arrived at similar proposals earlier.
The proposal by the New York Times is even worse than it sounds in yet another way.
Because part of the Child Online Protection Act that the US Supreme Court took issue with in their Ashcroft verdict, was that the law tried to censor things that could be considered by reasonable and logical people to have serious literary, artistic, or scientific merit.
If Ashcroft were to be reversed fully, then the entire law would go back into effect, having a chilling effect on our First Amendment rights. Far beyond what most normal people would agree is pornographic.
So you can also consider this another attempt by the Radical Left to gather around a bonfire of books.
Perhaps the liberals are hoping for what Darth Vader asserted, “There will be nobody to stop us this time!“ ⬆