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I just chaired a session at the FOCI conference earlier today, where people were talking about Internet censorship circumvention technologies and how to prevent

by schoen 8mo ago

I just chaired a session at the FOCI conference earlier today, where people were talking about Internet censorship circumvention technologies and how to prevent governments from blocking them. I'd like to remind everyone that the U.S. government has been one the largest funders of that research for decades. Some of it is under USAGM (formerly BBG, the parent of RFE/RL) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_Global_Media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_Globa... and some of it has been under the State Department, partly pursuant to the global Internet freedom program introduced by Hillary Clinton in 2010 when she was Secretary of State. I'm sure the political and diplomatic valence is very different here, but the concept of "the U.S. government paying to stop foreign governments from censoring the Internet" is a longstanding one.

reactordev 8mo ago
It goes deeper than that. The U.S. Government funds it, discourages other nations from using it, and spies on all web traffic as a result of it. Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA. Within a quick drive to Langley, Quantico, DC, and other places that house three letter agencies I’m not authorized to disclose.
- recursive 8mo ago
  Speed of light establishes certain latency minima. Experimental data can falsify (or not) at geographical locations far enough from VA.
  - reactordev 8mo ago
    Correct but local governments using Palantir will need to provide it to them somehow.
    - reactordev 8mo ago
      https://amp.dw.com/en/german-police-expands-use-of-palantir-surveillance-software/a-73497117 https://amp.dw.com/en/german-police-expands-use-of-palantir-... https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2025/12/15/us-tech-firm-palantir-extends-deal-with-french-intelligence-agency_6748523_7.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2025/12/15/us-tech-... https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/05/calls-to-halt-uk-palantir-contracts-grow-amid-lack-of-transparency-over-deals https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/05/calls-to-ha... https://theweek.com/tech/palantir-influence-in-the-british-state-mod-mandelson https://theweek.com/tech/palantir-influence-in-the-british-s... https://digitalrightswatch.org.au/2026/02/01/palantir-in-australia/ https://digitalrightswatch.org.au/2026/02/01/palantir-in-aus... Mmmmkay…
  - dboreham 8mo ago
    "Going through" doesn't necessarily imply store and forward. It could be tapped elsewhere and shipped to WVA. fwiw the idea of running a network in order to tap it is hardly new. The British operated largest telegraph network in the world in the 1800's for that reason.
    - Aurornis 8mo ago
      You think there's an entire shadow infrastructure across the United States or world that carries 80% of all internet traffic all the way to VA? It would have to be several times larger than the internet infrastructure itself due to the distances involved. All built and maintained in secret?
      - Henchman21 8mo ago
        No. That isn't required at all. Fundamentally you lack understanding of how this happens. Yes, there is some port duplication. Yes it costs money. But it is not anywhere near as onerous as you assume. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
        Aurornis 8mo ago
        > Fundamentally you lack understanding of how this happens. Yes, there is some port duplication. Yes it costs money. But it is not anywhere near as onerous as you assume No, I understand networking hardware quite well actually. I'm also familiar with Room 641A. Room 641A did not capture 80% of internet traffic. If you think 80% of internet traffic could be routed through Room 641A you're not thinking about the infrastructure required to get it all there. It was a targeted operation on backbone lines that were right there.
        PenguinCoder 8mo ago
        While the most well known, there are other points of presence doing the same thing. Easy and trivial to duplicate traffic at line speed. It doesn't affect the traffic flow itself.
- Den_VR 8mo ago
  So they… drive the data around NOVA?
  - shimman 8mo ago
    No, but if you want to collaborate with the federal government it makes it more convenient to be located where the federal government resides.
  - reactordev 8mo ago
    No, but you can visit a “clean room” and look at the data at any number of sites.
- Aurornis 8mo ago
  > Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA Nobody who understands the scale of the internet could possibly believe this is true. Routing internet traffic through a geographical location would increase ping times by a noticeable amount. Even sending traffic from around the world to a datacenter in VA would require an amount of infrastructure multiple times larger than the internet itself to carry data all that distance. All built and maintained in secret.
  - Henchman21 8mo ago
    Never tapped a port, eh? Edited to not be so flippant: I work in HFT/finance where recording all traffic is required I think by law and definitely for one's own sanity. We're able to maintain nanosecond trades while capturing ALL the traffic. It has zero impact on the traffic. This is normal, widely used tech. Think stuff like Ixia passive taps and/or Arista Metamako FPGA-based tap/mux devices.
    - wasabi991011 8mo ago
      But you are only tapping your own data that's already passing by you not? Not 80% of the internet that has nothing to do with you.
    - Aurornis 8mo ago
      > Never tapped a port, eh? I have. I have a background in high speed networking. Have you ever paused for a moment to consider how much infrastructure would be required to send 80% of data on the internet across the country and into a single datacenter in Virginia? If you've worked in HFT, you can probably at least start to imagine the scale we're talking about.
      - reactordev 8mo ago
        It’s not a single data center, it’s about 200 of them.
        8mo ago
- rootusrootus 8mo ago
  When I worked for a CLEC (during that moment in history when they were briefly a Thing), we had a USG closet at our main datacenter, and we are nowhere even close to NoVA. I expect they still handle it this way rather than try to funnel any significant amount of traffic to a particular geographical region.
- ascorbic 8mo ago
  Most of the replies to this seem to think it's referring to some kind of secret government datacenter. It's us-east-1, and every other cloud provider's US East and GOV zones, which are all in NVA
Waterluvian 8mo ago
It’s a clear way to project soft power: make sure your message and culture can get through.
- nomilk 8mo ago
  It might do that too, but access to information is just so utterly critical, and exponentially moreso in circumstances where government brutally cracks down on it, as we saw in Egypt during the Arab Spring and we're seeing in Iran presently.
  - jasonvorhe 8mo ago
    Then again, Egypt was definitely driven by Western agitators, as was the case Iran recently. Iran probably got Russian tech to trace starlink users during the blackout which put a target on many Western assets in Iran. I'm not saying the Iran government didn't also kill and torture independent actors nor that I support state violence (against its citizens, in this case). Just saying that any government will use violence to stay in power and to ensure regime change doesn't happen outside of whatever system the state upholds.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    - linkregister 8mo ago
      Evidence to the contrary abounds regarding Egypt. Secretary of State Clinton famously rejected the popularly-elected Muslim Brotherhood government and pledged support to Mubarak. This tacit approval led him to have a successful coup against the popularly elected government. If by "western" you meant some other power then you should be specific. Western as a term is imprecise and can be interpreted differently depending on the audience.
    - ch4s3 8mo ago
      The claim that Iranian protesters were western agitators is a pernicious lie.
learingsci 8mo ago
[flagged]
- motbus3 8mo ago
  Can you be more specific?
- mossTechnician 8mo ago
  Shortly after the American version of TikTok was established in January of 2026, users began reporting that certain content was creating error messages, including using words like "Epstein" in direct messages, which news outlet CNBC was able to replicate and confirm, with the error message reading: "This message may be in violation of our Community Guidelines, and has not been sent to protect our community." Other users reported similar messages for content critical of U.S. President Donald Trump or other topics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_TikTok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_TikTok
Aloisius 8mo ago
Didn't Doge gut the USAGM?
- awwaiid 8mo ago
  Yep! Maximally closed as much as possible under the law. They also shut down other programs which aim to sidestep propaganda (including US propaganda), though some of those are starting to come back. Radio Free Asia, for example, https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/radio-free-asia-says-it-resumes-broadcasts-to-china-2026-02-17/ https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/radio-free-asia-s...
  - thenthenthen 8mo ago
    Thanks for the link. This should be indeed understood in the context of stations like Radio Free Asia, Voice of America etc.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
bzhxb45 8mo ago
[flagged]
pasc1878 8mo ago
But part of Agency has just been defunded https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/19/us-funding-for-global-internet-freedom-effectively-gutted https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/19/us-funding-for...
- Sharlin 8mo ago
  [flagged]
  - reliabilityguy 8mo ago
    > very explicitly stated goals of sowing discord within the US's former "allies", to weaken Europe, and to promote racist and fringe-right views. The US government explicitly said that they seek to promote racist and fringe-right views? Do you have any sort of evidence to back it up?
    - Sharlin 8mo ago
      Sure, if that’s your problem with my comment, feel free to rephrase it in your mind to something like "to promote fringe-right and anti-immigration parties and movements that any sane observer recognizes as authoritarian and racist because they’re not even bothering to dogwhistle". If you need a source for that you haven’t been following the news.
      - reliabilityguy 8mo ago
        > not even bothering to dogwhistle So, basically, you are saying that they are openly racist? Is there any evidence of this? > If you need a source for that you haven’t been following the news. Nice deflection. You are the one making outlandish claims, so the proof is on you and not the “news” that someone is supposed to follow.
        pdpi 8mo ago
        You want concrete proof? Vasquez Perdomo v Noem is your proof. The Supreme Court effectively legitimised racial profiling.
Helmut10001 8mo ago
This is somewhat counterintuitive: The US is the only country I know where most newspapers and government services use strict geoblocks to prevent me from accessing US sites in Europe. Conversely, I've never had any problems accessing European sites from the US. I know this is for a different set of reasons (likely GDPR cookie law or similar), but it's funny that anyone thinks blocks like this are relevant. Most people I know use VPNs these days to make their traffic appear to come from whatever country they need.
- herbst 8mo ago
  This. I regularly face geo blocks from American websites. Like literally at least once a week. It's very common for whatever reason for smaller US shops, newspapers any size and other random sites.
  - asgeesg 8mo ago
    [dead]
  - Aerroon 8mo ago
    The geoblocks happened because of our (EU) governments making punitive rules of the website doesn't follow European standards. It's easier for an American website targeted at Americans to just not bother with Europeans.
    - herbst 8mo ago
      That may explains the news sites with thousands of cookies and tracking bullshit, but it doesn't explain small brick and mortar stores blocking traffic
      - Aerroon 8mo ago
        Why wouldn't it? It exposes them to unknown risks because they're not lawyers while providing negligible returns since they are not geared towards a European audience. I would've done the same thing.
throwaway24778 8mo ago
I suppose COPPA is a form of internet censorship we help children bypass?
adrian_b 8mo ago
"has been" => "had been" (since a few days ago)
Noaidi 8mo ago
But will it let me torrent? /s

by schoen 8mo ago

reactordev 8mo ago

It goes deeper than that. The U.S. Government funds it, discourages other nations from using it, and spies on all web traffic as a result of it. Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA. Within a quick drive to Langley, Quantico, DC, and other places that house three letter agencies I’m not authorized to disclose.

recursive 8mo ago
Speed of light establishes certain latency minima. Experimental data can falsify (or not) at geographical locations far enough from VA.
- reactordev 8mo ago
  Correct but local governments using Palantir will need to provide it to them somehow.
  - reactordev 8mo ago
    https://amp.dw.com/en/german-police-expands-use-of-palantir-surveillance-software/a-73497117 https://amp.dw.com/en/german-police-expands-use-of-palantir-... https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2025/12/15/us-tech-firm-palantir-extends-deal-with-french-intelligence-agency_6748523_7.html https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2025/12/15/us-tech-... https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/05/calls-to-halt-uk-palantir-contracts-grow-amid-lack-of-transparency-over-deals https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/05/calls-to-ha... https://theweek.com/tech/palantir-influence-in-the-british-state-mod-mandelson https://theweek.com/tech/palantir-influence-in-the-british-s... https://digitalrightswatch.org.au/2026/02/01/palantir-in-australia/ https://digitalrightswatch.org.au/2026/02/01/palantir-in-aus... Mmmmkay…
- dboreham 8mo ago
  "Going through" doesn't necessarily imply store and forward. It could be tapped elsewhere and shipped to WVA. fwiw the idea of running a network in order to tap it is hardly new. The British operated largest telegraph network in the world in the 1800's for that reason.
  - Aurornis 8mo ago
    You think there's an entire shadow infrastructure across the United States or world that carries 80% of all internet traffic all the way to VA? It would have to be several times larger than the internet infrastructure itself due to the distances involved. All built and maintained in secret?
    - Henchman21 8mo ago
      No. That isn't required at all. Fundamentally you lack understanding of how this happens. Yes, there is some port duplication. Yes it costs money. But it is not anywhere near as onerous as you assume. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
      - Aurornis 8mo ago
        > Fundamentally you lack understanding of how this happens. Yes, there is some port duplication. Yes it costs money. But it is not anywhere near as onerous as you assume No, I understand networking hardware quite well actually. I'm also familiar with Room 641A. Room 641A did not capture 80% of internet traffic. If you think 80% of internet traffic could be routed through Room 641A you're not thinking about the infrastructure required to get it all there. It was a targeted operation on backbone lines that were right there.
        PenguinCoder 8mo ago
        While the most well known, there are other points of presence doing the same thing. Easy and trivial to duplicate traffic at line speed. It doesn't affect the traffic flow itself.
Den_VR 8mo ago
So they… drive the data around NOVA?
- shimman 8mo ago
  No, but if you want to collaborate with the federal government it makes it more convenient to be located where the federal government resides.
- reactordev 8mo ago
  No, but you can visit a “clean room” and look at the data at any number of sites.
Aurornis 8mo ago
> Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA Nobody who understands the scale of the internet could possibly believe this is true. Routing internet traffic through a geographical location would increase ping times by a noticeable amount. Even sending traffic from around the world to a datacenter in VA would require an amount of infrastructure multiple times larger than the internet itself to carry data all that distance. All built and maintained in secret.
- Henchman21 8mo ago
  Never tapped a port, eh? Edited to not be so flippant: I work in HFT/finance where recording all traffic is required I think by law and definitely for one's own sanity. We're able to maintain nanosecond trades while capturing ALL the traffic. It has zero impact on the traffic. This is normal, widely used tech. Think stuff like Ixia passive taps and/or Arista Metamako FPGA-based tap/mux devices.
  - wasabi991011 8mo ago
    But you are only tapping your own data that's already passing by you not? Not 80% of the internet that has nothing to do with you.
  - Aurornis 8mo ago
    > Never tapped a port, eh? I have. I have a background in high speed networking. Have you ever paused for a moment to consider how much infrastructure would be required to send 80% of data on the internet across the country and into a single datacenter in Virginia? If you've worked in HFT, you can probably at least start to imagine the scale we're talking about.
    - reactordev 8mo ago
      It’s not a single data center, it’s about 200 of them.
      - 8mo ago
rootusrootus 8mo ago
When I worked for a CLEC (during that moment in history when they were briefly a Thing), we had a USG closet at our main datacenter, and we are nowhere even close to NoVA. I expect they still handle it this way rather than try to funnel any significant amount of traffic to a particular geographical region.
ascorbic 8mo ago
Most of the replies to this seem to think it's referring to some kind of secret government datacenter. It's us-east-1, and every other cloud provider's US East and GOV zones, which are all in NVA

Waterluvian 8mo ago

It’s a clear way to project soft power: make sure your message and culture can get through.

nomilk 8mo ago
It might do that too, but access to information is just so utterly critical, and exponentially moreso in circumstances where government brutally cracks down on it, as we saw in Egypt during the Arab Spring and we're seeing in Iran presently.
- jasonvorhe 8mo ago
  Then again, Egypt was definitely driven by Western agitators, as was the case Iran recently. Iran probably got Russian tech to trace starlink users during the blackout which put a target on many Western assets in Iran. I'm not saying the Iran government didn't also kill and torture independent actors nor that I support state violence (against its citizens, in this case). Just saying that any government will use violence to stay in power and to ensure regime change doesn't happen outside of whatever system the state upholds.
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - linkregister 8mo ago
    Evidence to the contrary abounds regarding Egypt. Secretary of State Clinton famously rejected the popularly-elected Muslim Brotherhood government and pledged support to Mubarak. This tacit approval led him to have a successful coup against the popularly elected government. If by "western" you meant some other power then you should be specific. Western as a term is imprecise and can be interpreted differently depending on the audience.
  - ch4s3 8mo ago
    The claim that Iranian protesters were western agitators is a pernicious lie.

learingsci 8mo ago

[flagged]

motbus3 8mo ago
Can you be more specific?
mossTechnician 8mo ago
Shortly after the American version of TikTok was established in January of 2026, users began reporting that certain content was creating error messages, including using words like "Epstein" in direct messages, which news outlet CNBC was able to replicate and confirm, with the error message reading: "This message may be in violation of our Community Guidelines, and has not been sent to protect our community." Other users reported similar messages for content critical of U.S. President Donald Trump or other topics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_TikTok https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_TikTok

Aloisius 8mo ago

Didn't Doge gut the USAGM?

awwaiid 8mo ago
Yep! Maximally closed as much as possible under the law. They also shut down other programs which aim to sidestep propaganda (including US propaganda), though some of those are starting to come back. Radio Free Asia, for example, https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/radio-free-asia-says-it-resumes-broadcasts-to-china-2026-02-17/ https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/radio-free-asia-s...
- thenthenthen 8mo ago
  Thanks for the link. This should be indeed understood in the context of stations like Radio Free Asia, Voice of America etc.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

bzhxb45 8mo ago

[flagged]

pasc1878 8mo ago

But part of Agency has just been defunded https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/19/us-funding-for-global-internet-freedom-effectively-gutted https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/19/us-funding-for...

Sharlin 8mo ago
[flagged]
- reliabilityguy 8mo ago
  > very explicitly stated goals of sowing discord within the US's former "allies", to weaken Europe, and to promote racist and fringe-right views. The US government explicitly said that they seek to promote racist and fringe-right views? Do you have any sort of evidence to back it up?
  - Sharlin 8mo ago
    Sure, if that’s your problem with my comment, feel free to rephrase it in your mind to something like "to promote fringe-right and anti-immigration parties and movements that any sane observer recognizes as authoritarian and racist because they’re not even bothering to dogwhistle". If you need a source for that you haven’t been following the news.
    - reliabilityguy 8mo ago
      > not even bothering to dogwhistle So, basically, you are saying that they are openly racist? Is there any evidence of this? > If you need a source for that you haven’t been following the news. Nice deflection. You are the one making outlandish claims, so the proof is on you and not the “news” that someone is supposed to follow.
      - pdpi 8mo ago
        You want concrete proof? Vasquez Perdomo v Noem is your proof. The Supreme Court effectively legitimised racial profiling.

Helmut10001 8mo ago

This is somewhat counterintuitive: The US is the only country I know where most newspapers and government services use strict geoblocks to prevent me from accessing US sites in Europe. Conversely, I've never had any problems accessing European sites from the US. I know this is for a different set of reasons (likely GDPR cookie law or similar), but it's funny that anyone thinks blocks like this are relevant. Most people I know use VPNs these days to make their traffic appear to come from whatever country they need.

herbst 8mo ago
This. I regularly face geo blocks from American websites. Like literally at least once a week. It's very common for whatever reason for smaller US shops, newspapers any size and other random sites.
- asgeesg 8mo ago
  [dead]
- Aerroon 8mo ago
  The geoblocks happened because of our (EU) governments making punitive rules of the website doesn't follow European standards. It's easier for an American website targeted at Americans to just not bother with Europeans.
  - herbst 8mo ago
    That may explains the news sites with thousands of cookies and tracking bullshit, but it doesn't explain small brick and mortar stores blocking traffic
    - Aerroon 8mo ago
      Why wouldn't it? It exposes them to unknown risks because they're not lawyers while providing negligible returns since they are not geared towards a European audience. I would've done the same thing.

throwaway24778 8mo ago

I suppose COPPA is a form of internet censorship we help children bypass?

adrian_b 8mo ago

"has been" => "had been" (since a few days ago)

Noaidi 8mo ago

But will it let me torrent? /s