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.
Considering how many people need to use VPNs to telecommute, this seems like it would be a non-starter. But you can’t discount the sheer stupidity and hubris of Republicans these days.
Many countries are trying to figure out how to ban VPNs. I expect it will end up with big corporations and rich people being able to
pay a bribebuy a licence to use encryption and VPNs, while ordinary people will not be able to afford it. Or they will just require ISPs to block suspected VPN traffic from home connections. If people find workarounds it’s still a pretext to arrest anyone inconvenient to the government and ban them from using the internet to organize.I expect it will end up with big corporations and rich people being able to
pay a bribebuy a licence to use encryption and VPNs, while ordinary people will not be able to afford it.That’s a good thing Wireguard and OpenVPN are open source and available for free to everyone.
Or they will just require ISPs to block suspected VPN traffic from home connections. If people find workarounds it’s still a pretext to arrest anyone inconvenient to the government
I mean, China and Russia have been on this mission for quite some time now and have failed over and over. Doubt the US will be any different.
It’s not about buying the technology though: it’s about buying the right to use it without being punished by the law.
Companies like L3Harris have to use VPNs just to access their emails because the securities required on government contracts. Whoever suggested this bill is just an idiot.
This is the right answer
Banning VPNs would be an unmitigated disaster and anyone who suggests that it’s a good idea has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about and should never be allowed to make tech policy again because they are a massive idiot.
Businesses, institutions, and even the government itself all require the use of VPNs to remain secure. VPNs are vital to functioning IT infrastructure everywhere.
Additionally, such a move wouldn’t even stop people from accessing porn (which isn’t even what VPNs are for), all it would really do is break IT security everywhere.
Yeah but people are really stupid and the economy is going to implode any day now anyways. It has nothing to do with porn and everything to do with criminalizing privacy and making mass surveillance more easy. They do not care how it affects people, they are rich and completely detached from reality. They will go live on Epstein Island or move to Ireland or something when America explodes. They rather be rich and connected then do anything that would actually help anyone, and Americans for the past 30 years have voted consistently for mass surveillance, destroying the constitution and fiat economics. This is what your average American wants by their voting habbits. People are just too stupid and brainwashed by this point.
I remember walking into work one day and some agitated co-worker wanted to know what I knew about Colorado’s libraries, because he knows I regularly use them. He was listening to hate radio on the way into work and became convinced that it was a huge problem that libraries were not tracking their Internet usage back to individuals. The idea of people doing things untracked (also, on “his” dime, LOL) was driving him crazy.
I had to laugh and try to calm him down by pointing out things like Tor (and i2p) and the fact that at that time anyway, you could wardrive and probably find a few dozen open Wifi connections within a few blocks, and use one of those if you were really up to something “nefarious” (whatever that might be). Not to mention go to some coffee shop.
He was much more annoyed that people might be watching porn at the libraries, though, as if all taxpayers have to endorse every single use of all things [1]…though I’m sure control freaks like this would be positively delighted at having the right people (read: Republicans) able to see all activity of all Internet users…
One guess what religion he is and what party he votes for…
[1] See for another example - how a certain type of person thinks they should get to decide what food stamps are spent on.
I usually tell people that, if you think you are such a good person then you are probably not a good person. I also tell them that people are living things, and they deserve dignity and autonomy and privacy and that every culture in history that has been operated by people with their worldview has disintegrated into ashes, because nobody is wise enough to see everything and understand everything, and not be tempted by their own power to do wrong unto others.
I tell them that nature has likely figured out the most optimal path, and that nature is probably far older than even the earth is. Life has discovered that the best path is freedom, no rules, autonomy, and love and wonder for each other.
The only good king is a king of peace, a king of dissolving power, a king of balance. The only good democracy is a democracy of respect for others, a democracy of responsibility, a democracy of ensuring everyone else’s freedom at the cost of your own.
That’s what revolutions are for when the government fails its social contract
It’s not just the government. It’s almost the entire human race.
Thats what revolutions are for just make sure you dont let the power dynamics of an economy dictate your future again or it is never going to change because you will just become the rich people inhibiting our species.
It’s hard to have a revolution without the global powers interfering and trying to steer you down the path of international corporate pseudocapitalism, or authoritarianism. The history of communist revolutions is very interesting in this regard. The good communists always got crushed by the bad and authoritarian and well funded communists.
That’s what they’re trying to get ahead of with this kind of mass-surveillance plan. Identify and mark everyone who may possibly want to create political disruptions. Just posting on a site like this will get you on a list and you will suddenly start getting pulled over and searched for no reason at best, you will disappear entirely at worst.
criminalizing privacy and making mass surveillance more easy
Bingo. They want to know your shopping habits, your political affiliations and how valuable you are to the economy (how disposable you are) so they can better predict what you’re going to do. It’s good for business and political ambitions alike, and ensures that you won’t do any inconvenient protests or strikes. (There’s a drone for that!)
They also want to control your mind and hack your mind. The sort of secret religion of silicon valley is to hack people’s minds. There are all kinds of weird cults that are all about trying to manipulate people. It seems they are having some success on that front but lack the wisdom to know what to do with it, and hence, our society is dying, because there simply is no better path than to not play stupid games, respect people’s autonomy and privacy, and let things work themselves out. Chaos isn’t just a side effect, it is a necessary aspect of life.
A society which finds a way to stop chaos, to stop revolutions, to stop free speech, to stop progress, those societies die. Human beings like all living beings, cannot thrive unless they are free.
I want to see one state pass this (not mine ofc) just to see the carnage of an entire state full of companies that suddenly cease operations.
Businesses, institutions, and even the government itself all **require** the use of VPNs to remain secure. VPNs are vital to functioning IT infrastructure everywhere.
This is the first thing I thought about. Bills like these always allow for vulnerabilities that would affect the entire nation, themselves included. It’s extremely short sided.
How do you even define a VPN? Is SSH tunnelling allowed then?
For that matter, how do you define porn?
yeah a vpn ban would fuck up networks
Just like world-wide tariffs will disrupt supply chains.
They don’t care, they are dumber than rocks and twice as corrupt.
The problem is that influencers have shilled stupid VPN services so much that even legislatures think they know what they are and think the primary use for the technology is circumvention and privacy.
They have no idea about all the IPsec tunnels providing site-to-site VPNs for all their businesses. Or how VPN protocols like GRE, which while providing no security on their own, are still very useful for tunneling protocols through different network stacks.
Banning VPNs would be an unmitigated disaster and anyone who suggests that it’s a good idea has absolutely no idea what they’re talking about and should never be allowed to make tech policy again because they are a massive idiot.
You’re right. Sadly, this have no bearing on the people actually deciding federal laws in the US, if I am to trust the news cycle from the last 10 or so months.
The damage that would stem from such things is guaranteed to span far and large :(
I suspect what will actually happen is this bill will go nowhere. If it starts to go somewhere, business interests will step in and squash it because of the many, many, many problems it would cause.
So what you are saying is this is a fantastic RTO strategy. /s
But yeah, I work for an international company, setting up the IT infrastructure so that each of those individual offices have a standard security policy and connection whitelists, and then requiring an on-site IT person to manage each of those sounds horrible.
VPNs are needed for way more than people working from home. It’s hard to understate how spectacularly stupid banning VPNs would be in terms of business alone, never mind all the other problems it would cause.
Um, how the actual fuck are businesses supposed to operate where some regressive dumbfucks have outlawed VPNs?
Also, never underestimate the ability of a set of dumbasses doing some damage to this country - for one thing, see the asshole in the WH right now doing all kinds of self-owns to this country.
Secondly, I’m old enough to remember things like the V-chip and the Clipper chip and the government going after Phil Zimmerman. All of these things were rather stupid. And that was during the Clinton administration, which, sure, they were right-leaning as well…were not fucking crazy right wing.
Oh, businesses will get an exception for their company owned hardware, I’m sure. Suck it, pleb!
Um, how the actual fuck are businesses supposed to operate where some regressive dumbfucks have outlawed VPNs?
Hardwire connections in the office. Finally they’ll be able to undo all the good things that came from covid!! I mean, who doesn’t thrive in an environment where you’ll be constantly monitored so they can sell your work behavior for privately targetted ads? (/s, but only partial)
I know a great many companies - especially larger ones - have forced people back to the office. I see also that the unhinged government has also force people to stop working remotely, for purely ideological reasons.
But there are still a whole lot of people working from home, either fully, or as part of a hybrid arrangement.
I’m assuming this regressive and idiotic bill would have carveouts for the “right” people to be “allowed” to use VPNs, but if they didn’t…wow. The business use for VPNs are more than just working from home.
That could spell trouble for VPN owners and other internet users who leverage these tools to improve their privacy, protect their identities online, prevent ISPs from gathering data about them or increase their device safety when browsing on public Wi-Fi.
Is the extent of their knowledge on VPNs just what they heard from a NordVPN commercial? Not once in the article do they mention corporate VPNs.
Unfortunately this is becoming enough of “A Thing” that the left is going to have to, once again, be seen doing “something” about it.
I completely disagree with this sentiment and any Democrat that agrees with this isn’t on "the left, but one more diet-Republican who exists solely to legitimize everything the right is doing at every turn.
It’s quite possible they will make an exception for corporate VPNs while banning them for the rest of us. There will be a big fee to buy a corporate encryption licence, unaffordable to the peasants.
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The trans bit is key here. First that, then anything “promoting homosexuality”. It’s in Project 2025 that the porn bans are about criminalising LGBTQ people and allies.
Oh but they won’t stop there. Fascism NEVER stops at the first target.
Trans and gay people to the camps today. Tomorrow interracial couples. The day after that? Anyone looking at interracial porn. We can only imagine where it goes from there, but likely it won’t be a return to an imagined 1950’s sitcom utopia.
Sure, but the porn laws are specifically about targeting LGBTQ people.
It actually gets worse than I outlined above, because I was in a hurry when I wrote that.
So, you make porn illegal and you define “porn” as anything “pro-LGBTQ”. That’s all books which feature LGBTQ characters, all organisations which support LGBTQ people, all people who are openly LGBTQ themselves.
Now you’ve got a school librarian who purged the books she was told to purge but accidentally missed one. A student checks it out, his parents see it and recognise it, now that librarian is guilty of distributing pornography to a minor. If the book features an LGBTQ character who is a minor, then that librarian is guilty of distributing child pornography.
And that’s not even as worrying as it gets. Because everything above is in Project 2025, but that’s not the entire limit. Over the last couple of years Republican politicians have been floating (and even trying to introduce bills which would actualise) the idea of the punishment for sexual offenses involving minors to be the death penalty. They’re not there yet (and bills have thus far been defeated), but that’s the direction of travel. That’s the end goal. A pseudo-legal framework to justify executing people for being openly LGBTQ (held hands with your girlfriend in public? A 17 year old saw you holding hands. You are now guilty of a sexual offense involving a minor), or anything other than publicly anti-LGBTQ. Off to the camps with you!
So, yes you’re right that they’ll use whatever weapon they can against whichever group they can - historically, fascists often target LGBTQ people first, and at the moment it’s easier to start with trans people than explicitly going after gay people - yet.
But the anti-porn laws are explicitly about targetting LGBTQ people. And they’re only part of the way down the roadmap.
Bro can we not?
I thought I got lucky to be born into a family that was able to leave China, and I could browse the internet freely in the US. What the fuck y’all? Just let me have my unlimited access to entertainment in peace mmkay?
So… fucking… cooked…
Blatent First Amendment violation.
I mean what even is gonna be the difference between fucking CCP and this BS.
(Canadaaa plssss lemmme innn? 🥺👉👈❓️
Australia? 👀)You seem to be picking the absolute worst countries if you’re looking for freedom, especially online. Australia is already worse than the US in many ways, and Canada not too far behind. How about Europe?
I mean what even is gonna be the difference between fucking CCP and this BS.
Most notably, I’d say the fact that the CCP is a competent government leading the country into its golden age, while the Republican US government is driving its country into collapse. We can all have differing opinions about the CCP, but at least we have to give them credit where it’s due.
ban porn
Lol, good luck with hat
ban VPN
Lol, good luck with that too, maybe ban HTTPS while you’re at it?
Mind you though, this bill has diddly squat to do with porn. Republicans don’t really care about that especially since they’re usually too preoccupied with abusing their own children for their sexual needs. Blocking porn is just a cherry on the cake so that they have even more poetry and control
This is mainly about the VPN and encryption. Those are technologies that can be used to pass along true facts, true news, organize protects without them knowing.
You can’t really break all types of encryption with one bill, but many aimed at the same goal just might do the trick
I feel that encryption should be enshrined as a human right
Make all their grindr accounts public
The representatives proposing this bill must have some really embarrassing search history.
This fuck needs to be under a microscope.
VPNs (virtual private networks) are suites of software often used as workarounds to avoid similar bans that have passed in states like Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, as well as the UK. They can be purchased with subscriptions or downloaded, and are built into some browsers and Wi-Fi routers as well.
I don’t think the author understands what a VPN is, or is trying to legitimize the proposed ban… Or maybe both.
That jumped out at me as well. Like VPNs don’t have a legitimate use outside of shielding your porn traffic! I would argue they’re more often used for secure commercial traffic than for evading porn bans. I’m sure those numbers are rapidly changing, though!
From that excerpt, it sounds like they understand what it is… for the general public. Take anyone on the street, if they know what a VPN is, they’re likely to just know some brand name that sells “VPN” to end users. The same way to some people, github is git.
The idea that such ban/restriction would affect basically every business and a lot of individual out there doesn’t matter if you just open with “VPN are used for illegal things” and just, stop there.
Will it ban their Grindr access though?
“If you removed all the porn from the internet you would be left with one website, titled “Bring Back the Porn””
Scrubs was way ahead of its time.
“Anticorruption of Public Morals Act”
Fucking 1920s
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.
Sure. Just ban TCP and encryption. Easy.
It seems quite obvious to me that this will, in fact, not work. I’d even argue that nobody wants it to work. Only to introduce a law that a lot of people will break at some point, to have an excuse to target them later in the future if the need arises.
No project like this will produce any significant results in any western country. It’s simply impossible to implement without full supervision and control over the entire Internet. China was able to block all online porn due to having such infrastructure. And that was possible due to a vastly different culture. We don’t.
In general, the issue of widespread pornography is very analogous to climate change. We’ve been warned about this for decades, and yet, have done nothing to prevent it. All we can, and in my opinion should be doing, is limiting its presence in our societies, especially in the context of children. This would no doubt involve online ID verification at some stage, though that can be done with respect towards privacy.
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.
Also, what’s up with targetting ASMR? It has no inherent relation to adult content. The transgender people part isn’t surprising and we know where that’s coming from.
This would no doubt involve online ID verification at some stage, though that can be done with respect towards privacy.
This is exactly what the UK has attempted. It doesn’t work, either.
Porn is here to stay. “Children” covers a wide range of ages, and exposure to sex of some kind is not the debilitating thing it’s made out to be. The approach should be to contextualize it and educate about it.
Humans reach sexual maturity as young as like 8 years of age in rare circumstances. Trying to act like humans arnt just fucking animals is bafflingly stupid.
You can’t fucking hide humanity from humans. You want to prevent stupid kids from making more kids before they are ready? Or prevent them from easily being taken advantage of sexually?
TEACH THEM WHAT SEX IS, AND BE AS BLANTENT AS POSSIBLE.
The only thing that prevents people from doing something stupid is education and support . The only thing that stops people from letting others take advantage of them is education and support.
If you don’t educate your fucked up on bother counts. If you don’t support them you fucked up on both counts.
Pussy footing around, using complicated metaphors and flowery language does nothing but confuse children most of the time.
Kids are smart, give them the basic ass facts and they will understand.
Hell even teaching abstinence wouldn’t be so God damn fucking problematic if it wasn’t so wrapped up in religious bullshit to go along with it.
Just telling your kid what sex is, what porn is, that it’s risky and shouldn’t be done till they are older. But should it happen use a condom and talk to their parents about it. Would solve so many god damn fucking problems.
FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING PLEASE JUST TALK TO YOUR KIDS AND BE UPFRONT.
Also, what’s up with targetting ASMR?
Something with “morals”, I guess…
no. children get shot and killed at school on a monthly basis here and all the government can think to do is age-gate porn
