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.
Could they even ban VPNs? Is that even possible?
Legally? Easy. Pass the law, boom. Done. They see encrypted traffic from your house/phone? That’s a paddling.
Technically? Well, sort of. A lot of VPN uses TLS for the encryption between their servers and the clients, so from the outside it could very well look like regular encrypted HTTPS traffic. So, depending on how such hypothetical (I hope) law is worded, it could just make all encryption illegal. It would not prevent anyone from using it, because that’s just math. You can’t prevent people from doing math with a computer. But you can certainly prosecute them if the law says so.
Of course, a more complete answer is that it is possible to masquerade as something else, depending on your available bandwidth and your will to side step the (hypothetical) law. If your traffic looks legitimate (and seems to be in plaintext), but you embedded some hidden meaning that the recipient can decipher, then you’re playing cat and mouse, and you can get away with thing. Wrapping DNS queries inside TLS made it easy to avoid DNS spoofing at ISP level, for example. But the point remain; such law are not made to make something technically impossible. They’re made to make something prosecutable. After all, there are laws against murder, but they don’t prevent murder, they merely incentivize people to not do it.
edit: I ignored the whole lot of other issue with banning encrypted communication as a whole, because it would break every business that have an online presence, including banking and trading. But, exemptions are a thing. Law for thee, not for me, this kinda move.
And if they don’t make encryption illegal, I guess there’s no way to stop it?
I think encryption illegal is insane since so many people use it for everything (banking, other things). But it sounds like what they want is for you to not be able to spoof your location. Not sure how that would be possible to prevent or monitor.
I’ll remind you that using strong encryption was not exactly legal not so long ago. For the general public anyway. To this day, in some countries, exporting software with cryptographic capabilities requires some declaration to state services.
Laws and regulations don’t have to care about reality of feasibility, unfortunately.
Practically? No.
Sure. Just ban TCP and encryption. Easy.