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?
They could be, but I assume say like an apple device won’t install a ccp root authority unconditionally. Huawei and xiamoi probably could be forced, but the browser too, like Chrome, Firefox and safari need to also accept the device certificates as trusted.
But the pressure in Europe would likely be to trade within Europe, you must comply.
It fundamentally destroys the whole trust of PKI if this did go ahead. We just need to hope it does not.
They already removed VPN apps from the Mainland China version of the Apple App Store. In capitalism, profits are above everything else. China is a very large market with 1.4 Billion people, I doubt Apple is gonna be willing to lose access to this market.