A nationwide firewall could always be bypassed (see: Russia, China, Iran), but what if they just went directly to the end user device and add a chip that constantly scans for anti-regime keywords? Especially when there is “AI” that could be embedded to just do basic OCR and close the browser when such “prohibited items” are detected.
Maybe for the aforementioned countries, its harder to create their own chips.
But I think an authoritarian USA definitely could.
Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, Apple Silicon, are all in the US; Couldn’t the US government just order those companies to add such “censorship chip” to devices sold in the US? Checks and balances seems to be not really a thing anymore…
This way, no amount of “VPN” is gonna work. The censorship chip is gonna block any negative mentions of trump. And with the US’s cooperation, Russia, China, Iran could also acheive the same in their jurisdictions.
Am I just worrying to much.
Is a “censorship chip” even possible?
Technically possible? In the strictest sense, sure I guess?
Practically speaking though, it’d probably be a mess to manage and likely trivial to circumvent for anyone with a little knowledge and an IQ above room temperature.
That hasn’t stopped them from making idiotic laws before, look at all the US states that are trying to ban porn on the internet.
Sure, there’s been talk of banning encryption as well, but practically speaking, that would be an unmitigated disaster in terms of security alone.
Of course it would but politicians are famously stupid, they have no idea and little care if something is actually feasible.
If your browser and device has a state sponsored CA certificate it’s not trivial to bypass. Transparently all certificate traffic could be intercepted by an ISP. Look at Europe already trying. Once someone malicious (to you) is a trusted certificate issuer you no longer can verify either the destination nor the privacy of the content.
Ssl based vpns are also decrypted. And vpns which use public key for identification would no longer be trusted.
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/eu-row-over-certificate-authority-mandates-continues-ahead-of-rule-change-602062
If anything like this becomes widespread, you can bet people will figure out all sorts of ways around it and if it becomes problematic enough, they’ll probably just stop using it entirely.