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It won’t even work* *without resorting to complete Russian style government control The US is not (yet) Russia. The rule of law is definitely being destroyed

It won’t even work* *without resorting to complete Russian style government control The US is not (yet) Russia. The rule of law is definitely being destroyed as we speak, so who knows 5, 10 years down the road, but there are still several prerequisite institutions that need to be destroyed before the US could reliably enforce a VPN ban.

forgotoldacc 11mo ago
Every country that has slid into North Korea style total control begins with a "it won't happen here. And it'd stop before it gets that bad."
- jhrmnn 11mo ago
  Can you name some examples?
- vinay427 11mo ago
  From my reading, the GP comment isn’t claiming otherwise, but just that that sort of VPN ban isn’t enforceable in advance of some of those changes. They do directly suggest they don’t know how long this will remain the case.
  - LadyCailin 11mo ago
    Exactly. I’m not saying don’t fight this, you should, tooth and nail. But losing doesn’t mean VPNs will stop working.
- colechristensen 11mo ago
  >Every country that has slid into North Korea style total control begins with a "it won't happen here. And it'd stop before it gets that bad." This is a pretty bold claim and I'm not sure it matches up with reality. Karl Marx said that in the first stage of communism there would be a required period of dictatorial control in order to transition from and dismantle capitalist institutions. This is exactly what happened in China and the USSR... there just never was a phase 2. That's not quite "this will never happen here", more like premeditated dictatorship that never ended because the ruling class preferred being a ruling class rather than return themselves to "communist paradise".
  - mananaysiempre 11mo ago
    If we’re exhuming odious corpses, Lenin did say the first step would be to control the telegraph and telephone exchanges. Control over the spread of information was understood to be crucial even then. (Admittedly in Lenin’s case he was also talking about battlefield coordination inside a city, what with the absence of portable radios.) As far as Marx, well, he didn’t provide a recipe for phase 2 either—he just kind of assumed that things would fall into place naturally after the revolution (that needed to be global! the whole communism-within-a-country thing was a later invention / post-hoc rationalization, lampooned masterfully by Voinovich’s Moscow 2042). The entirety of the nascent social sciences field (which Marx was performing to the contemporary standards of, however disastrously that turned out) was rather high on the whole natural law thing around that time. Turns out that, if you created a power vacuum, it would be filled by people who had most ruthlessly optimized for capturing power, as opposed to fairness, your preferred ideology, or anything else. Which at first meant Lenin and then ultimately Stalin, in whose purges died the last true (if at that point very, very bloody) believers. (Notice also how there are very few mentions in history of the eponymous soviets, councils [of workers and peasants], deciding anything whatsoever.) Also most of the intellectual backbone of the nation and the national liberation movements of multiple peoples, but who’s counting.
  - Gud 11mo ago
    Not really, because pre-Soviet Union wasn’t a capitalist society. Russia and China were barely industrial nations.
    - Demiurge 11mo ago
      Russia was primarily an agricultural exporter, but it was most certainly a capitalist society prior to revolution. It bought and sold many things, and was an industrial nation, on par with many others in Europe, with a capacity to build war ships, tanks, artillery, trains and so on. It had other tremendous inequalities, but without factories, without lower officers in the navy and army, without the first revolution where the capitalists took over, there would be no second revolution of the bolsheviks, or soviets.
    - spwa4 11mo ago
- catlover76 11mo ago
  [dead]
- estimator7292 11mo ago
  That's a tautology, and not even an interesting one.
- nurumaik 11mo ago
  Every country that hasn't begins with same
mananaysiempre 11mo ago
Don’t exaggerate the level of control required. For all that things are bad and getting worse, Russia has not reached the North Korea percolation point where every facet of government control is tied to every other one. (Neither has Russia reached a NK-style total war economy, partly through bureaucratic dysfunction and partly by design; but I digress.) The things that it does are still pretty modular and don’t require $YOURCOUNTRY becoming Russia in its entirety. Hell, London had more outdoor surveillance than Moscow until after Covid. As far as Internet censorship, here’s what the playbook was: 1. Have a dysfunctional court system. (Not a powerless one, mind you; it’s enough that it basically never rule against the government. It would probably even be enough if it never ruled against any of the following.) 2. Mandate page-level blocks of “information harmful to the health and development of children” (I wish I were joking) for consumer ISPs, by court order; of course, that means IP or at least hostname/SNI blocks for TLS-protected websites, we can’t help that now can we. The year is 2012. 3. Gradually expand the scope throughout the following steps. (After couple of particularly obnoxious opposition websites and against an unavoidable background of prostitution and illegal gambling, the next victim, in 2015, was piracy including pirate libraries. Which is why I find the notion of LibGen or Sci-Hub being Russian soft power so risible, and the outrage against Cloudflare not being in the moderation business so naïve.) 4. Make sure the court orders are for specific pieces of content not websites (as they must be if you don’t want the system to be circumventable by trivial hostname hopping), meaning the enforcement agency can find a particularly vague order and gradually start using it for whatever. Doesn’t hurt that the newly-blocked website’s owner will be faced with a concluded case in which they don’t even have standing. 5. Ramp up enforcement against ISPs. 6. Use preexisting lawful intercept infra at ISPs to ramp up enforcement even further. Have them run through the agency-provided daily blacklist, fine the offenders. Any other probe you can get connected to the ISP will work too. 7. Offer ISPs a choice (wink, wink) of routing their traffic through agency-controlled, friendly-contractor-made DPI boxes they will need to buy, promising to release them from some liability. (First draft published 2016, signed into law 2019.) 8. Mandate the boxes. 9. It is now 2021 or so and you’ve won, legally and organizationally speaking, the rest is a simple matter of programming to filter out VPN protocols, WhatsApp calls and such. Pass additional laws mandating blocks of “promotion” of block evasion if you wish, but the whole legal basis thing is a pretence at this point. For instance, you can de facto block YouTube absent any legal order by simply having the DPI boxes make it very slow, a capability not mentioned in any law whatsoever, then cheerfully announce that in the national press. See how very easy it is? How each legal or technical capability logically follows from very real deficiencies of the preceding ones so even a reasonable court would be disinclined to rule against them? Understand now why I’m furious when reasonable people on this forum defend the desires of their—mostly good and decent!—governments to control the Internet? (See also how most of this happened before “Russia bad” became the prevailing sentiment, and how most of it went largely unnoticed in the EU and US, aside from a couple of reputable-but-fringe orgs like RSF to whom very few listen because they cry wolf so much? The ECtHR didn’t even get to the cases, IIRC, before the trap snapped shut and Russia was drummed out of the Council of Europe to widespread cheering, making the matter de facto moot.) You know that road. You know exactly where it ends.
nirui 11mo ago
It's not just a VPN ban, the word VPN in the context means proxy, and you can setup a proxy with something as basic as a SSH command. It's basically a restriction on communication, i.e. the government decides who you're allowed to talk to, not just a privacy issue.
- Spooky23 11mo ago
  Not really, that’s just the type the EFF gins up. The problem is the regulation of speech and requiring verification. The VPN stuff is a misapplication of security “best practices”. Tech companies are amoral and happily facilitate the use of their technology for oppression in other places.
  - spwa4 11mo ago
    I would argue it's more accurate to say tech companies take the "old-style" US approach. It's based on the idea that propaganda doesn't actually work. There weren't many actual communists in Russia, it was a dictatorship with mostly prisoners/hostages who were threatened into lying, and knew full well that they were threatened, and after the teenage phase is over, actually start asking "why are we being threatened over this?". So as soon as they left with little intention to return, they suddenly become the problem that socialists really hate to discuss: ex-Soviets hate socialism. It's like cults, or, if we're honest, there's other repressive groups and repressive ideologies that have loooooooooong lost their any usefulness and really only the repression remains. In other words, if tech companies show Chinese that non-communist democratic states exist and how it is to live there, then no amount of CCP censorship will ever actually convince those people that the CCP has good intentions. Judging by my conversations with Chinese, it's working.
    - bccdee 11mo ago
      > There weren't many actual communists in Russia What's this claim based on? Hierarchies are fractal; at every level of an ideological authoritarian society, comfort and influence are only granted in exchange for affirming and regurgitating state ideology. Cognitive dissonance forces people who take that deal to choose between losing self-respect and accepting the ideology. I think you'd be surprised how well this works. People always want to believe that they deserve the things they have. > ex-Soviets hate socialism Naturally, they change their minds when they leave. There's no longer any psychological incentive to believe. Besides, people who choose to leave have typically already broken with the ideology. You compare it to a cult, but the thing about cults is that the members generally do believe. > non-communist democratic states exist and how it is to live there Life in many authoritarian states is fine for most people. It is what it is; if you don't make a fuss, you can live pretty comfortably. Obviously many dictatorships are not like this, but China is fairly stable. For almost all of human history, people have lived under authoritarian governments. It's unpleasant to think about, but authoritarianism can be stable and durable. There's no guarantee that democracy wins.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
Alex2037 11mo ago
[flagged]
- dang 11mo ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
  - Alex2037 11mo ago
    I'm sorry, comrade commissar. I'll go stand in the corner now.
    - dang 11mo ago
      No need! Just please use HN in the intended spirit. It's fragile and easy to harm without intending to.
pessimizer 11mo ago
> there are still several prerequisite institutions that need to be destroyed before the US could reliably enforce a VPN ban. Ah, the "institutions." I didn't think about those. Very convincing.

forgotoldacc 11mo ago

Every country that has slid into North Korea style total control begins with a "it won't happen here. And it'd stop before it gets that bad."

jhrmnn 11mo ago
Can you name some examples?
vinay427 11mo ago
From my reading, the GP comment isn’t claiming otherwise, but just that that sort of VPN ban isn’t enforceable in advance of some of those changes. They do directly suggest they don’t know how long this will remain the case.
- LadyCailin 11mo ago
  Exactly. I’m not saying don’t fight this, you should, tooth and nail. But losing doesn’t mean VPNs will stop working.
colechristensen 11mo ago
>Every country that has slid into North Korea style total control begins with a "it won't happen here. And it'd stop before it gets that bad." This is a pretty bold claim and I'm not sure it matches up with reality. Karl Marx said that in the first stage of communism there would be a required period of dictatorial control in order to transition from and dismantle capitalist institutions. This is exactly what happened in China and the USSR... there just never was a phase 2. That's not quite "this will never happen here", more like premeditated dictatorship that never ended because the ruling class preferred being a ruling class rather than return themselves to "communist paradise".
- mananaysiempre 11mo ago
  If we’re exhuming odious corpses, Lenin did say the first step would be to control the telegraph and telephone exchanges. Control over the spread of information was understood to be crucial even then. (Admittedly in Lenin’s case he was also talking about battlefield coordination inside a city, what with the absence of portable radios.) As far as Marx, well, he didn’t provide a recipe for phase 2 either—he just kind of assumed that things would fall into place naturally after the revolution (that needed to be global! the whole communism-within-a-country thing was a later invention / post-hoc rationalization, lampooned masterfully by Voinovich’s Moscow 2042). The entirety of the nascent social sciences field (which Marx was performing to the contemporary standards of, however disastrously that turned out) was rather high on the whole natural law thing around that time. Turns out that, if you created a power vacuum, it would be filled by people who had most ruthlessly optimized for capturing power, as opposed to fairness, your preferred ideology, or anything else. Which at first meant Lenin and then ultimately Stalin, in whose purges died the last true (if at that point very, very bloody) believers. (Notice also how there are very few mentions in history of the eponymous soviets, councils [of workers and peasants], deciding anything whatsoever.) Also most of the intellectual backbone of the nation and the national liberation movements of multiple peoples, but who’s counting.
- Gud 11mo ago
  Not really, because pre-Soviet Union wasn’t a capitalist society. Russia and China were barely industrial nations.
  - Demiurge 11mo ago
    Russia was primarily an agricultural exporter, but it was most certainly a capitalist society prior to revolution. It bought and sold many things, and was an industrial nation, on par with many others in Europe, with a capacity to build war ships, tanks, artillery, trains and so on. It had other tremendous inequalities, but without factories, without lower officers in the navy and army, without the first revolution where the capitalists took over, there would be no second revolution of the bolsheviks, or soviets.
  - spwa4 11mo ago
catlover76 11mo ago
[dead]
estimator7292 11mo ago
That's a tautology, and not even an interesting one.
nurumaik 11mo ago
Every country that hasn't begins with same

mananaysiempre 11mo ago

Don’t exaggerate the level of control required. For all that things are bad and getting worse, Russia has not reached the North Korea percolation point where every facet of government control is tied to every other one. (Neither has Russia reached a NK-style total war economy, partly through bureaucratic dysfunction and partly by design; but I digress.) The things that it does are still pretty modular and don’t require $YOURCOUNTRY becoming Russia in its entirety. Hell, London had more outdoor surveillance than Moscow until after Covid. As far as Internet censorship, here’s what the playbook was: 1. Have a dysfunctional court system. (Not a powerless one, mind you; it’s enough that it basically never rule against the government. It would probably even be enough if it never ruled against any of the following.) 2. Mandate page-level blocks of “information harmful to the health and development of children” (I wish I were joking) for consumer ISPs, by court order; of course, that means IP or at least hostname/SNI blocks for TLS-protected websites, we can’t help that now can we. The year is 2012. 3. Gradually expand the scope throughout the following steps. (After couple of particularly obnoxious opposition websites and against an unavoidable background of prostitution and illegal gambling, the next victim, in 2015, was piracy including pirate libraries. Which is why I find the notion of LibGen or Sci-Hub being Russian soft power so risible, and the outrage against Cloudflare not being in the moderation business so naïve.) 4. Make sure the court orders are for specific pieces of content not websites (as they must be if you don’t want the system to be circumventable by trivial hostname hopping), meaning the enforcement agency can find a particularly vague order and gradually start using it for whatever. Doesn’t hurt that the newly-blocked website’s owner will be faced with a concluded case in which they don’t even have standing. 5. Ramp up enforcement against ISPs. 6. Use preexisting lawful intercept infra at ISPs to ramp up enforcement even further. Have them run through the agency-provided daily blacklist, fine the offenders. Any other probe you can get connected to the ISP will work too. 7. Offer ISPs a choice (wink, wink) of routing their traffic through agency-controlled, friendly-contractor-made DPI boxes they will need to buy, promising to release them from some liability. (First draft published 2016, signed into law 2019.) 8. Mandate the boxes. 9. It is now 2021 or so and you’ve won, legally and organizationally speaking, the rest is a simple matter of programming to filter out VPN protocols, WhatsApp calls and such. Pass additional laws mandating blocks of “promotion” of block evasion if you wish, but the whole legal basis thing is a pretence at this point. For instance, you can de facto block YouTube absent any legal order by simply having the DPI boxes make it very slow, a capability not mentioned in any law whatsoever, then cheerfully announce that in the national press. See how very easy it is? How each legal or technical capability logically follows from very real deficiencies of the preceding ones so even a reasonable court would be disinclined to rule against them? Understand now why I’m furious when reasonable people on this forum defend the desires of their—mostly good and decent!—governments to control the Internet? (See also how most of this happened before “Russia bad” became the prevailing sentiment, and how most of it went largely unnoticed in the EU and US, aside from a couple of reputable-but-fringe orgs like RSF to whom very few listen because they cry wolf so much? The ECtHR didn’t even get to the cases, IIRC, before the trap snapped shut and Russia was drummed out of the Council of Europe to widespread cheering, making the matter de facto moot.) You know that road. You know exactly where it ends.

nirui 11mo ago

It's not just a VPN ban, the word VPN in the context means proxy, and you can setup a proxy with something as basic as a SSH command. It's basically a restriction on communication, i.e. the government decides who you're allowed to talk to, not just a privacy issue.

Spooky23 11mo ago
Not really, that’s just the type the EFF gins up. The problem is the regulation of speech and requiring verification. The VPN stuff is a misapplication of security “best practices”. Tech companies are amoral and happily facilitate the use of their technology for oppression in other places.
- spwa4 11mo ago
  I would argue it's more accurate to say tech companies take the "old-style" US approach. It's based on the idea that propaganda doesn't actually work. There weren't many actual communists in Russia, it was a dictatorship with mostly prisoners/hostages who were threatened into lying, and knew full well that they were threatened, and after the teenage phase is over, actually start asking "why are we being threatened over this?". So as soon as they left with little intention to return, they suddenly become the problem that socialists really hate to discuss: ex-Soviets hate socialism. It's like cults, or, if we're honest, there's other repressive groups and repressive ideologies that have loooooooooong lost their any usefulness and really only the repression remains. In other words, if tech companies show Chinese that non-communist democratic states exist and how it is to live there, then no amount of CCP censorship will ever actually convince those people that the CCP has good intentions. Judging by my conversations with Chinese, it's working.
  - bccdee 11mo ago
    > There weren't many actual communists in Russia What's this claim based on? Hierarchies are fractal; at every level of an ideological authoritarian society, comfort and influence are only granted in exchange for affirming and regurgitating state ideology. Cognitive dissonance forces people who take that deal to choose between losing self-respect and accepting the ideology. I think you'd be surprised how well this works. People always want to believe that they deserve the things they have. > ex-Soviets hate socialism Naturally, they change their minds when they leave. There's no longer any psychological incentive to believe. Besides, people who choose to leave have typically already broken with the ideology. You compare it to a cult, but the thing about cults is that the members generally do believe. > non-communist democratic states exist and how it is to live there Life in many authoritarian states is fine for most people. It is what it is; if you don't make a fuss, you can live pretty comfortably. Obviously many dictatorships are not like this, but China is fairly stable. For almost all of human history, people have lived under authoritarian governments. It's unpleasant to think about, but authoritarianism can be stable and durable. There's no guarantee that democracy wins.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

Alex2037 11mo ago

[flagged]

dang 11mo ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
- Alex2037 11mo ago
  I'm sorry, comrade commissar. I'll go stand in the corner now.
  - dang 11mo ago
    No need! Just please use HN in the intended spirit. It's fragile and easy to harm without intending to.

pessimizer 11mo ago

> there are still several prerequisite institutions that need to be destroyed before the US could reliably enforce a VPN ban. Ah, the "institutions." I didn't think about those. Very convincing.