4 ms·

Governments in the West Are Turning Their Sights on VPNs

103 points by indigodaddy 10mo ago

godelski 10mo ago
I wish these articles would highlight the very real dangers these types of laws present to children. How they often create the very harm they claim to prevent. Surveilling children only makes it easier for the creeps to track them too. This has been one thing I've liked about how Benn Jordan has been handling the Flock issues. How he shows that the very cameras used to protect children can also be used to harm them. And uses this to walk into the conversation about wider privacy concerns and authoritarian turkey tyranny. But with the article, we've been using the same rhetoric for decades. There's nothing wrong with it, per se, but we need to iterate on it if we're to communicate these dangers more effectively. Those trying to get that authoritarian control are iterating and they're effective. The dangers are only becoming more real and the current rise in global authoritarianism should make many realize how dangerous it is
- spencerflem 10mo ago
  Sadly, I think the unspoken point is never to protect children but to control them. If you look at the many “think of the children” arguments from this angle it becomes a lot more consistent
  - godelski 10mo ago
    Maybe, but that doesn't mean this side of the argument won't be impactful. Even if people want more control over their own children I very much doubt they want others to have similar control. Especially those that wish to do harm. Take for example the age verification via camera we're seeing be suggested in some places. I can't think of a more endangering technology than putting a camera in every child's bedroom. We know how bad security is and how even making it a lot better still makes this a highly valuable target for these people. People want control because they're scared. But what they need to be taught is that these people are leveraging that fear to turn those nightmares into reality.
- woleium 10mo ago
  it being that time of year, this reminds me of how children are being indoctrinated into the surveillance state by the “elf on the shelf” Christmas “toy”. My point being, these things creep up on a society in ways you don’t anticipate
  - yareally 10mo ago
    I understand where you're coming from, but how is it different than parents telling kids that Santa is watching them?
    - gs17 10mo ago
      If anything, I think it might help kids understand real-world surveillance better. Knowing that there's a device in their environment spying on them as part of a system versus magic man can see everything at all times because he's magic.
    - godelski 10mo ago
      They can see the elf
galleywest200 10mo ago
Does this impact people who work from home and connect to the corporate VPN? I have to do that to access production servers, as I assume most people here who WFH do as well. Reading TFA it seems that use case would be allowed, but would I be a criminal for checking social media on my work PC when connected to the corporate VPN?
- flipped 10mo ago
  They can't do jackshit. They are totally clueless and run by a bunch of extremely incompetent boomers. Next, they will try to ban Tor but guess what that can't happen as Tor is censorship-resistant!
  - godelski 10mo ago
    > Tor is censorship-resistant I'm not sure that's actually accurate. Using Tor or even many VPNs you get hit with a lot of block lists or bot detectors. I also heard that Tor is blocked in China. I mean isn't the list of entries and exits public? Of course these groups are also shooting themselves in the foot. Tor was invented by the Navy after all and they like spies to go through it because connecting to "totallynotNSA.com" is a great way to get yourself found. But Tor also only works for those purposes if non bad actors make up the majority of traffic
    - pabs3 10mo ago
      Tor bridges allow people to bypass blocking of Tor entry nodes and look more like normal traffic and less like Tor traffic, here is an example of how to set one up. https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/webtunnel/ https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/webtunnel/
      - godelski 10mo ago
        Oh interesting, thanks. Do you know how well that compares with Mullvad? I know Tor and them collaborate on the browser but I'm traveling right now and Mullvad's is definitely getting picked up by some routers
jd172 10mo ago
in Michigan there is a recently proposed piece of legislation that aims to ban content that "corrupts the public morals“ (which includes pornography, manga, and talking about trans people). It labels VPNs, proxies and encrypted tunneling methods as "circumvention tools" and would make it illegal to use them to access such content. I hope people will start to see these blatant censorship proposals for what they are, but honestly I'm not too optimistic...
- ranger_danger 10mo ago
  The scary thing about that is who gets to say what public morals are. And how this would normally be next to impossible to prove.
  - why-o-why 10mo ago
    Seeing as how the US government recently said anti-capitalist and anti-christian opinions are a threat, well... hold on to your collective hats.
  - throw20251220 10mo ago
    Who? The people you have all elected.
  - gmerc 10mo ago
    Donald Trump of course, the most moral of them.
gorgoiler 10mo ago
”After the UK implemented its Online Safety Act the country’s VPN usage surged as teens sough [sic] to skirt age checks on social media platforms and pornography websites.” The report they link to presents no evidence that the surge was from “teens”. Practically, it’s also wrong to categorize all popular sites that opted into the geo-block as being social or adult. For example, imgur.com is by all sensible definitions a general purpose image upload site with 3M DAU worldwide. It is as much a “pornography website” as YouTube or Reddit. I would suggest this article be corrected to instead say “usage surged as netizens sought to avoid online ID checkpoints and mandatory facial recognition”, but that’s bordering on inflammatory in the other direction.
- orthoxerox 10mo ago
  Out of Imgur, YouTube and Reddit, Imgur is actually the most prudish. Reddit is full of hardcore pornography; YouTube still allows some "people being naked for non-sexual reasons" videos; Imgur is right there with Facebook, automatically deleting anything racy.
- ssl-3 10mo ago
  Is imgur blocked because it is a "pornography website" or because it is a "social media website"? imgur has featured a combination of social media features including accounts, commenting, tagging, upvotes, downvotes, and et cetera for a good number of years. It hasn't been just a simple image-host for a long time.
  - ndsipa_pomu 10mo ago
    Imgur is blocking itself to avoid any legal exposure from the UK's insane law.
ETH_start 10mo ago
It's always the same pattern. Point to a genuine evil and then use that as justification to strip everyone of their rights.
- billy99k 10mo ago
  Like gun control.
  - stuaxo 10mo ago
    The right to life (not to be shot) never seems as important as the right to take a life with US gun folk, it seems mad from the outside.
    - bgbntty2 10mo ago
      I'm on the "outside" of this argument - never owned a gun yet and not in the US, but the right to life (not to be shot) can be exercised by protecting oneself from guns, with a gun. Here we're discussing how attacks against privacy are totalitarian and how more and more governments are on their way to become totalitarian regimes, but we don't agree that people having guns is a good defense against a totalitarian government. We talk about police or ICE overreach, but don't talk about what would happen if that overreach expands even more.
  - halJordan 10mo ago
    That's kind of a jump. The 2a is cool, but gun deaths outpace car deaths now and 2a people refuse literally any of the protections we have against car deaths. Whereas a 15 year old jerking it to a pornstar hurts no one and these people want to completely ban the 4th amendment.
ranger_danger 10mo ago
Pretty sure a ban on VPNs would simply collapse society overnight. I think lawmakers vastly underestimate just how prevalent and necessary they are to ordinary business functions, including by ISPs themselves.
- Madmallard 10mo ago
  Corporations and military of course will have a way to exclude themselves from this.
- netsharc 10mo ago
  Your comment is one of several that doesn't distinguish between corporate VPNs (to access internal systems) and commercial VPNs (to bypass country-level laws and restrictions). Do you not think the lawmakers would realize this difference, it's a cartoonish level of understanding if you think lawmakers will accidentally ban any software with the term "VPN" in it. They'll describe a ban of tools/services to circumvent the laws..
  - DangitBobby 10mo ago
    Lawmakers in the aggregate are apparently cartoonishly incompetent so it's not much of a stretch.
  - ranger_danger 10mo ago
    Yes I understand the difference. Yes I think (and know) they are that dumb, especially given their penchant for blanket banning any and all things that happen to include "DEI" terms, starting lawsuits they know they can't win, and constantly walking back guidance they give after realizing how stupid it was. I also know they'll do just about anything for enough money. But I appreciate you punching down.
jillesvangurp 10mo ago
I'm sure the Chinese, Russians, and other adversaries of the west will welcome any intentional weakening of network security to "protect children". Any back doors, crippled encryption, etc, is a way in for their intelligence services. I find it baffling that politicians are so careless with their national sovereignty. It's especially worrying that a lot of populist support for this nonsense is indirectly supported by the before mentioned adversaries. There's a well documented history of especially Russian and Chinese propaganda aimed at supporting fringe populist parties. The agenda with that is complex but it isn't necessarily with friendly intentions. Both Russia and China have isolated their own populations from the normal internet and effectively their countries run on centralized infrastructure where private VPNs are no longer allowed and traffic is monitored, filtered, and analyzed. Additionally, especially China has long targeted academic and enterprise network security for industrial espionage reasons. Weak government security has caused a few embarrassing situations across especially EU governments (e.g. Germany) with scandals related to over reliance on Chinese technology for telecommunications (huawei) and components for energy, auto motive, etc. The point here is that those countries calling for this the most are also the most at risk of being compromised like this.
- 9dev 10mo ago
  > There's a well documented history of especially Russian and Chinese propaganda aimed at supporting fringe populist parties. The agenda with that is complex but it isn't necessarily with friendly intentions. You can add the USA to that list now, who follow the exact same strategy in the EU.
why-o-why 10mo ago
>> a considerable chunk of the market — including three of the six most popular VPNs — is quietly operated by an Israeli-owned company with close connections to that country’s national security state, including the elite Unit 8200 and Duvdevan Units of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).” What are those VPNs? Asking for a friend...
- mft_ 10mo ago
  ExpressVPN Cyber ghost Private Internet Access ZenMate Intego VPN According to [0] though there are various other sites that roughly align with this list. [0] https://blog.boycat.io/posts/expressvpn-israeli-ownership-1b-privacy-risk https://blog.boycat.io/posts/expressvpn-israeli-ownership-1b...
almaight 10mo ago
Fully HTTPS traffic can bypass that damned Great Firewall. Greetings from inside the Great Firewall.
- halJordan 10mo ago
  Tls 1.3 is completely banned by the gfw
  - bgbntty2 10mo ago
    Why is TLS 1.3 interesting here, in relation to censorship circumvention? Why is version 1.3 banned and not 1.2?
    - Hizonner 10mo ago
      TLS 1.3 forces PFS, which means that if you want to decrypt a 1.3 stream, you have to actually do a man in the middle attack, not just get a copy of a key. PFS was optional before. It supports ECH, which lets you hide which service the client is trying to reach on a multitenant host or CDN. Given that Cloudflare supports ECH, and that it's possible to hide the fact that you're using ECH, that makes it possible to have connections that could actually be using any of a huge number of possible sites without passive spying equipment being able to tell which ones. It removes a bunch of weak old primitives and options, and should generally be harder to misconfigure in a dangerous way.
      - bgbntty2 10mo ago
        Thanks a lot for the detailed reply! Just in case someone will read this without knowing the abbreviations: PFS = perfect forward secrecy [0] ECH = Encrypted Client Hello [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_secrecy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_secrecy [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication#Encrypted_Client_Hello https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication#Encrypt...
cjs_ac 10mo ago
I think the hidden motivation for all of these crackdowns across the developed world is the increasing risk of a third world war. Propaganda is already rife across social media for both sides of both the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine conflicts. Governments very much want to be able to repeat feats like the XX System, and will need strict control over online communications to achieve that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Cross_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Cross_System
- fleroviumna 10mo ago
  [dead]
- Hizonner 10mo ago
  1. That's unrealistic. 2. There is no way any significant number of the people involved in this are thinking that far ahead.
mikewarot 10mo ago
Am I the only one who thinks it's possible that the vast majority of VPN providers are actually working for the intelligence agencies of the world? It wouldn't be the first time something like that happened. There was a Swiss company[1] selling cryptography gear that turn out to be a CIA front. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG
- halJordan 10mo ago
  You're not the only one, and youre not a part of the stupidest conspiracy in the world, but you better hope the flat eartherers dont walk in
snapplebobapple 10mo ago
I wonder how much lower my taxes could be if the government fired everyone focused on oppressing me?

103 points by indigodaddy 10mo ago

I wish these articles would highlight the very real dangers these types of laws present to children. How they often create the very harm they claim to prevent. Surveilling children only makes it easier for the creeps to track them too. This has been one thing I've liked about how Benn Jordan has been handling the Flock issues. How he shows that the very cameras used to protect children can also be used to harm them. And uses this to walk into the conversation about wider privacy concerns and authoritarian turkey tyranny. But with the article, we've been using the same rhetoric for decades. There's nothing wrong with it, per se, but we need to iterate on it if we're to communicate these dangers more effectively. Those trying to get that authoritarian control are iterating and they're effective. The dangers are only becoming more real and the current rise in global authoritarianism should make many realize how dangerous it is

spencerflem 10mo ago
Sadly, I think the unspoken point is never to protect children but to control them. If you look at the many “think of the children” arguments from this angle it becomes a lot more consistent
- godelski 10mo ago
  Maybe, but that doesn't mean this side of the argument won't be impactful. Even if people want more control over their own children I very much doubt they want others to have similar control. Especially those that wish to do harm. Take for example the age verification via camera we're seeing be suggested in some places. I can't think of a more endangering technology than putting a camera in every child's bedroom. We know how bad security is and how even making it a lot better still makes this a highly valuable target for these people. People want control because they're scared. But what they need to be taught is that these people are leveraging that fear to turn those nightmares into reality.
woleium 10mo ago
it being that time of year, this reminds me of how children are being indoctrinated into the surveillance state by the “elf on the shelf” Christmas “toy”. My point being, these things creep up on a society in ways you don’t anticipate
- yareally 10mo ago
  I understand where you're coming from, but how is it different than parents telling kids that Santa is watching them?
  - gs17 10mo ago
    If anything, I think it might help kids understand real-world surveillance better. Knowing that there's a device in their environment spying on them as part of a system versus magic man can see everything at all times because he's magic.
  - godelski 10mo ago
    They can see the elf

galleywest200 10mo ago

Does this impact people who work from home and connect to the corporate VPN? I have to do that to access production servers, as I assume most people here who WFH do as well. Reading TFA it seems that use case would be allowed, but would I be a criminal for checking social media on my work PC when connected to the corporate VPN?

flipped 10mo ago
They can't do jackshit. They are totally clueless and run by a bunch of extremely incompetent boomers. Next, they will try to ban Tor but guess what that can't happen as Tor is censorship-resistant!
- godelski 10mo ago
  > Tor is censorship-resistant I'm not sure that's actually accurate. Using Tor or even many VPNs you get hit with a lot of block lists or bot detectors. I also heard that Tor is blocked in China. I mean isn't the list of entries and exits public? Of course these groups are also shooting themselves in the foot. Tor was invented by the Navy after all and they like spies to go through it because connecting to "totallynotNSA.com" is a great way to get yourself found. But Tor also only works for those purposes if non bad actors make up the majority of traffic
  - pabs3 10mo ago
    Tor bridges allow people to bypass blocking of Tor entry nodes and look more like normal traffic and less like Tor traffic, here is an example of how to set one up. https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/webtunnel/ https://community.torproject.org/relay/setup/webtunnel/
    - godelski 10mo ago
      Oh interesting, thanks. Do you know how well that compares with Mullvad? I know Tor and them collaborate on the browser but I'm traveling right now and Mullvad's is definitely getting picked up by some routers

jd172 10mo ago

in Michigan there is a recently proposed piece of legislation that aims to ban content that "corrupts the public morals“ (which includes pornography, manga, and talking about trans people). It labels VPNs, proxies and encrypted tunneling methods as "circumvention tools" and would make it illegal to use them to access such content. I hope people will start to see these blatant censorship proposals for what they are, but honestly I'm not too optimistic...

ranger_danger 10mo ago
The scary thing about that is who gets to say what public morals are. And how this would normally be next to impossible to prove.
- why-o-why 10mo ago
  Seeing as how the US government recently said anti-capitalist and anti-christian opinions are a threat, well... hold on to your collective hats.
- throw20251220 10mo ago
  Who? The people you have all elected.
- gmerc 10mo ago
  Donald Trump of course, the most moral of them.

gorgoiler 10mo ago

”After the UK implemented its Online Safety Act the country’s VPN usage surged as teens sough [sic] to skirt age checks on social media platforms and pornography websites.” The report they link to presents no evidence that the surge was from “teens”. Practically, it’s also wrong to categorize all popular sites that opted into the geo-block as being social or adult. For example, imgur.com is by all sensible definitions a general purpose image upload site with 3M DAU worldwide. It is as much a “pornography website” as YouTube or Reddit. I would suggest this article be corrected to instead say “usage surged as netizens sought to avoid online ID checkpoints and mandatory facial recognition”, but that’s bordering on inflammatory in the other direction.

orthoxerox 10mo ago
Out of Imgur, YouTube and Reddit, Imgur is actually the most prudish. Reddit is full of hardcore pornography; YouTube still allows some "people being naked for non-sexual reasons" videos; Imgur is right there with Facebook, automatically deleting anything racy.
ssl-3 10mo ago
Is imgur blocked because it is a "pornography website" or because it is a "social media website"? imgur has featured a combination of social media features including accounts, commenting, tagging, upvotes, downvotes, and et cetera for a good number of years. It hasn't been just a simple image-host for a long time.
- ndsipa_pomu 10mo ago
  Imgur is blocking itself to avoid any legal exposure from the UK's insane law.

ETH_start 10mo ago

It's always the same pattern. Point to a genuine evil and then use that as justification to strip everyone of their rights.

billy99k 10mo ago
Like gun control.
- stuaxo 10mo ago
  The right to life (not to be shot) never seems as important as the right to take a life with US gun folk, it seems mad from the outside.
  - bgbntty2 10mo ago
    I'm on the "outside" of this argument - never owned a gun yet and not in the US, but the right to life (not to be shot) can be exercised by protecting oneself from guns, with a gun. Here we're discussing how attacks against privacy are totalitarian and how more and more governments are on their way to become totalitarian regimes, but we don't agree that people having guns is a good defense against a totalitarian government. We talk about police or ICE overreach, but don't talk about what would happen if that overreach expands even more.
- halJordan 10mo ago
  That's kind of a jump. The 2a is cool, but gun deaths outpace car deaths now and 2a people refuse literally any of the protections we have against car deaths. Whereas a 15 year old jerking it to a pornstar hurts no one and these people want to completely ban the 4th amendment.

ranger_danger 10mo ago

Pretty sure a ban on VPNs would simply collapse society overnight. I think lawmakers vastly underestimate just how prevalent and necessary they are to ordinary business functions, including by ISPs themselves.

Madmallard 10mo ago
Corporations and military of course will have a way to exclude themselves from this.
netsharc 10mo ago
Your comment is one of several that doesn't distinguish between corporate VPNs (to access internal systems) and commercial VPNs (to bypass country-level laws and restrictions). Do you not think the lawmakers would realize this difference, it's a cartoonish level of understanding if you think lawmakers will accidentally ban any software with the term "VPN" in it. They'll describe a ban of tools/services to circumvent the laws..
- DangitBobby 10mo ago
  Lawmakers in the aggregate are apparently cartoonishly incompetent so it's not much of a stretch.
- ranger_danger 10mo ago
  Yes I understand the difference. Yes I think (and know) they are that dumb, especially given their penchant for blanket banning any and all things that happen to include "DEI" terms, starting lawsuits they know they can't win, and constantly walking back guidance they give after realizing how stupid it was. I also know they'll do just about anything for enough money. But I appreciate you punching down.

jillesvangurp 10mo ago

I'm sure the Chinese, Russians, and other adversaries of the west will welcome any intentional weakening of network security to "protect children". Any back doors, crippled encryption, etc, is a way in for their intelligence services. I find it baffling that politicians are so careless with their national sovereignty. It's especially worrying that a lot of populist support for this nonsense is indirectly supported by the before mentioned adversaries. There's a well documented history of especially Russian and Chinese propaganda aimed at supporting fringe populist parties. The agenda with that is complex but it isn't necessarily with friendly intentions. Both Russia and China have isolated their own populations from the normal internet and effectively their countries run on centralized infrastructure where private VPNs are no longer allowed and traffic is monitored, filtered, and analyzed. Additionally, especially China has long targeted academic and enterprise network security for industrial espionage reasons. Weak government security has caused a few embarrassing situations across especially EU governments (e.g. Germany) with scandals related to over reliance on Chinese technology for telecommunications (huawei) and components for energy, auto motive, etc. The point here is that those countries calling for this the most are also the most at risk of being compromised like this.

9dev 10mo ago
> There's a well documented history of especially Russian and Chinese propaganda aimed at supporting fringe populist parties. The agenda with that is complex but it isn't necessarily with friendly intentions. You can add the USA to that list now, who follow the exact same strategy in the EU.

why-o-why 10mo ago

>> a considerable chunk of the market — including three of the six most popular VPNs — is quietly operated by an Israeli-owned company with close connections to that country’s national security state, including the elite Unit 8200 and Duvdevan Units of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).” What are those VPNs? Asking for a friend...

mft_ 10mo ago
ExpressVPN Cyber ghost Private Internet Access ZenMate Intego VPN According to [0] though there are various other sites that roughly align with this list. [0] https://blog.boycat.io/posts/expressvpn-israeli-ownership-1b-privacy-risk https://blog.boycat.io/posts/expressvpn-israeli-ownership-1b...

almaight 10mo ago

Fully HTTPS traffic can bypass that damned Great Firewall. Greetings from inside the Great Firewall.

halJordan 10mo ago
Tls 1.3 is completely banned by the gfw
- bgbntty2 10mo ago
  Why is TLS 1.3 interesting here, in relation to censorship circumvention? Why is version 1.3 banned and not 1.2?
  - Hizonner 10mo ago
    TLS 1.3 forces PFS, which means that if you want to decrypt a 1.3 stream, you have to actually do a man in the middle attack, not just get a copy of a key. PFS was optional before. It supports ECH, which lets you hide which service the client is trying to reach on a multitenant host or CDN. Given that Cloudflare supports ECH, and that it's possible to hide the fact that you're using ECH, that makes it possible to have connections that could actually be using any of a huge number of possible sites without passive spying equipment being able to tell which ones. It removes a bunch of weak old primitives and options, and should generally be harder to misconfigure in a dangerous way.
    - bgbntty2 10mo ago
      Thanks a lot for the detailed reply! Just in case someone will read this without knowing the abbreviations: PFS = perfect forward secrecy [0] ECH = Encrypted Client Hello [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_secrecy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forward_secrecy [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication#Encrypted_Client_Hello https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication#Encrypt...

cjs_ac 10mo ago

I think the hidden motivation for all of these crackdowns across the developed world is the increasing risk of a third world war. Propaganda is already rife across social media for both sides of both the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine conflicts. Governments very much want to be able to repeat feats like the XX System, and will need strict control over online communications to achieve that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Cross_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Cross_System

fleroviumna 10mo ago
[dead]
Hizonner 10mo ago
1. That's unrealistic. 2. There is no way any significant number of the people involved in this are thinking that far ahead.

mikewarot 10mo ago

Am I the only one who thinks it's possible that the vast majority of VPN providers are actually working for the intelligence agencies of the world? It wouldn't be the first time something like that happened. There was a Swiss company[1] selling cryptography gear that turn out to be a CIA front. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG

halJordan 10mo ago
You're not the only one, and youre not a part of the stupidest conspiracy in the world, but you better hope the flat eartherers dont walk in

snapplebobapple 10mo ago

I wonder how much lower my taxes could be if the government fired everyone focused on oppressing me?