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Countries like China and Russia are different, in that they try to catch all communication towards every website, most of them outside of their jurisdiction. Th

Countries like China and Russia are different, in that they try to catch all communication towards every website, most of them outside of their jurisdiction. They're targeting internet users, and without installing a watchdog on either the server side or the client side, that's hard to pull off on the encrypted internet. Laws like these target the website providers. These website providers are in control of infrastructure, they have the private keys, and they don't try to do any transparent monitoring. Browsers and VPNs are very good at protecting communications between you and a third party, but if that third party is trying to spy on you, things change. That's why governments buy data from data brokers: why bother spying on your citizens when they and their computers willingly give a few companies all the information you need. You can't buy cocaine on the clearnet in most countries. It's not hard to switch to TOR, but only because TOR is legally accepted at the moment. Accessing TOR from China is not all that easy without at least a (government-sanctioned) Hong Kong VPN. These legal attacks on the free internet won't stop hidden services from hosting porn videos, but they will make it very difficult to make money off of them. MindGeek and friends aren't going to risk illegality by going full dark web and moving their employees to a country that doesn't extradite to the US.

lstodd 6mo ago
You are wrong. The goal is not to "catch all communication" whatever that means. For the most part that has been accomplished before Snowden, and it does not help much in shaping the public opinion as they perceive it, which is the end goal. No one cares about drugs or porn outside of them being useful labels to incite public outrage in certain cultures, like US. For example, in eastern europe no one gives a shit about that. Or your Epstein brouhaha either, reaction being - lolwut, what's the drama, they all did that in adriatic for as long as anyone can remember. All this moral crusade is just smoke, no one behind it gives a shit about porn, children or drug money, get real. Now cutting down freedom of expression, that's something that could help them. So they attack along the axis of denying means to execute it, as in making it hard to have a visibile discussion on internets so that less people bother. And in that targeting websites with idiocy like age/identity verification is quite useful.

lstodd 6mo ago

You are wrong. The goal is not to "catch all communication" whatever that means. For the most part that has been accomplished before Snowden, and it does not help much in shaping the public opinion as they perceive it, which is the end goal. No one cares about drugs or porn outside of them being useful labels to incite public outrage in certain cultures, like US. For example, in eastern europe no one gives a shit about that. Or your Epstein brouhaha either, reaction being - lolwut, what's the drama, they all did that in adriatic for as long as anyone can remember. All this moral crusade is just smoke, no one behind it gives a shit about porn, children or drug money, get real. Now cutting down freedom of expression, that's something that could help them. So they attack along the axis of denying means to execute it, as in making it hard to have a visibile discussion on internets so that less people bother. And in that targeting websites with idiocy like age/identity verification is quite useful.