RESTRICT Act Could Imprison VPN Users For 20 Years, Ban Free Speech - The Internet 'PATRIOT ACT'

I keep seeing people mentioning the 'dark' web..scary..here to tell ya, not gonna link or advert, but 'dark' web not needed..but this internet Patriot act certainly is.

All dark web is, is a browser, originally set up for encrypted comm for you know who..yup spooks..thats all it is..now its a trap house for re hash junk..tik Tok is garbage just because it exploits the littles imo..so good riddance, hopefully along with the rest of it..knee jerk to this proposition is hel% yes, finally.

How many streamed suicides have there been? Ive personally seen two both children under 18.(obviously begging for someone to come through the screen.(you tube, totally friggn random, not looking for it AT ALL). Doing some light digging, my minor kids have encountered worse starting so early…viewing live suicides at 8 and nine years old..it messes them up, they were not prepared and shouldn't have had to have been... that's not even the trail that leads to the sign that tells you what way to go to get directions to the rabbit hole.

This crap these days makes faces and traces of death mandatory primary education if you want to survive it without in patient.

It's not about censorship, it's about control. Everybody and I mean everybody has done something or been somewhere on the net that might not be wrong or illegal, but if there is a different "committee" who decides what is wrong everybody is open to be arrested. Now with laws everyone knows (or maybe lawyers know) it's mainly black or white for everybody, excluding the Bidens. And being enshrined in law anyone can defend themselves in the courts.

But with someone (in secret) else deciding what is illegal that opens the door for cleansing of political opposition, as no one is extra clean, not for illegal activity on the net because that is just the excuse and nobody can defend themselves because it's the "committees" feels not a black and white law.

a reply to: GENERAL EYES
Guess you are not a journalist who has uncovered government wrong doing and need to keep your sources safe then.
Or an inventor who wishes to keep their new invention safe from industrial espionage.
Or someone who wishes to report a serious crime annonymously,to protect yourself and your family.

There are plenty of other non criminal reasons people may wish to retain their privacy-this bill seems to make everyone of them a criminal.

Seems irrational.
Especially as the cops (at least in Europe)have managed to break the encrypion of dark net criminal networks,and arrest the actual criminals without banning the use of VPNs.

a reply to: Silcone Synapse

Yeah, America has a history of going after Law Abiding citizens without cause or provocation over trivial offenses.

OH LOOK BEHIND YOU IT'S THE FEDS!

You really aren't paying attention to how some of the kids are using this tech are you?

They're smarter than you think.

I'm sure Hunters wire transfers from China went right on over through legit channels.

a reply to: GENERAL EYES
Your arguement seems to be that privacy needs to be made illegal for everyone just becasue some criminals use privacy technology to ccommit crimes.

They also use cars to commit crimes-should cars be made illegal for everyone?
Where does it stop?
Guns-criminals use guns-ban them all?
Cellphones,used for crime by some-ban them all?
What about kitchen knives-some are used to kill people-shall we make chefs criminals because of those people?
Some banks clean cartel money-lets make all banks illegal..

All the above seems crazy-but making private communications is not?


Oh,Hunters transfers from China went through banks yes.There is a paper trail.
Seems irrational.

a reply to: Silcone Synapse

It sets a precedence to fall back on when they decide to bust someone for illegal activities you dolt.

Do you understand NOTHING about law?

Is your tinfoil hat on so tight and you're so worried about Big Brother coming after you for your personal browsing habits?

Are you so completely unaware how many people are intentionally posting violent, gore, death and suicides on kids apps?

You gonna tell a six year old browsing TIk TOk for funny videos to just "suck it up" after he gets a vid of someone blowing their brains out?

You gonna pay the therapy bill?

What about the other types of grooming going on?

Calls for violence and hate speech?

Child porn?

Are you even AWARE of what's going on out there outside your little safety zone?

a reply to: GENERAL EYES
No need for personal insults.
I already said ACTUAL criminals should be arrested-my point was that its irrational to criminalize those who have not used privacy technology for crimes.
Anyway we seem to be in disagreement,which is fine.
Carry on with the personal insults if you wish-its not a crime and I really don't care.
Have a great day.

a reply to: Silcone Synapse

Ok, you want to censor my freedom of expression and it's cool because YOU were insulted by words.

Way to go Warrior.

I've said my peace.

Have a nice day.

And I genuinely mean that.

a reply to: GENERAL EYES
Comprehension ain't your strong point is it?
Or did you not read this part-
"Carry on with the personal insults if you wish-its not a crime and I really don't care. "

So I wasn't censoring your free expression,nor was I offended.

BTW its "piece"not "peace"

a reply to: Silcone Synapse

I'm not playing this game any further.

Have a nice day.

I don't understand this line of thinking, though.

You can't simply ban VPNs nation wide- not because it's wrong but because they're required for secure online communication.

If I log into work on my home pc, it creates a VPN tunnel back to the corp network- which then obfuscates my location and secures traffic between myself and that network.

Any company that has its own servers as well as servers up in AWS will be using VPNs 24/7, it's been that way for many years.

Secure communication is the backbone of the internet, without it you might as well just switch the whole thing off and go back to writing paper checks for your groceries.

originally posted by: GENERAL EYES
You guys are really naive about the realities of cyberwarfare aren't you?

You have absolutely NO IDEA what's going on with the dark web, VPN's and the sale and production and trade of child abuse pornography, snuff videos to name a few and all other horrific stuff because you're too busy freaking out over MSM articles and minutia to the tune of "outrage of the day".

Do you have any idea how much illegal activity is going on under VPN's in clandestine channels online?

You think the grooming and sickness is just gender activists and drag queen storytime?

You really are sheltered.

Count your blessings.

No one is claiming we're sheltered. Some of us just like privacy. As far as I'm aware, there has always been illegal activity throughout history and there will always be. The US seems to have no issue with the CIA and other agencies doing illegal things under the guise of "national security".

a reply to: GENERAL EYES

Kinda like saying, if one child gets ran over in a crosswalk, everyone with a driver's license is a child murder.

A little something that everybody on ATS should think about, the nature of ATS with conspiracies, rabbit holes, political opinions etc, ALL of them could be construed as one of their crimes. Therefore because you're all on here answering posts etc you WILL all be guilty by association. Now they can't arrest everybody as that would overload the system so just who would they pick out of us all??????

a reply to: v1rtu0s0


Ummm...Sooooo...the premise is to remove anonymity from internet usage...

Well...maybe that's not such a bad thing after all...

After all...along with rights comes the responsibility...to be responsible...for your actions and interactions...for your speech...etc...


Maybe it's time to grow up...



YouSir

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Flashback


‘Panic made us vulnerable’

“They had it all ready,” said Cindy Cohn, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which defends civil liberties in the digital space. “This is what the NSA had long wanted – to ‘sit on the wire’, to watch all internet traffic and pick out whatever they chose. Now they finally had the crisis they needed to make it happen.”

Snowden has an even more vivid way of summing up the public consequences of the closed world he had bust open. In his memoir Permanent Record he writes: “All of us had been reduced to something like children, who’d be forced to live the rest of our lives under omniscient parental supervision.”

a reply to: GENERAL EYES

I've read this bill. It doesn't need to exist; we have other laws that take care of the provisions in this bill. It is no more than a digital patriot act, which in my opinion, was one of the final deaths of freedom in this country.

The tools exist to remove the illegal activities that you mention; look at Twitter under the previous regime. They had all the tools to stop the social deviants that used its services; they just chose not to enforce them.

Because you have no use for a VPN does not mean the rest of us do not. As for not understanding cyber warfare, unless you work in a specific few places, I imagine you don't have a firm understanding of it either. Also, even if you may work in one of these specific places unless you're doing threat intel or DFIR work, I doubt you've got the visibility you claim.

a reply to: v1rtu0s0

Uh, maybe:
reason.com...

It's a bit gobbledygooked, but this could be read to imply that "any person" using a VPN to access an app controlled by a "foreign adversary" or its alleged minions is subject to the secretary's ire. Hence anyone using a VPN to access TikTok would be in trouble—specifically, subject to up to $1 million in fines, 20 years in prison, or both.

Warner's office says this isn't so. Spokesperson Rachel Cohen told Newsweek that the provisions only apply when someone is "engaged in 'sabotage or subversion' of communications technology in the U.S., causing 'catastrophic effects' on U.S. critical infrastructure, or 'interfering in, or altering the result' of a federal election in order for criminal penalties to apply." The RESTRICT Act targets "companies like Kaspersky, Huawei and TikTok … not individual users," she said.

And even if the law would never be used to attack citizens for merely using VPNs, it's a deeply worrying piece of legislation that would give the government broad authority to restrict or ban all sorts of businesses and communications tools, so long as they're tangentially related to any country it decides is an adversary. It would give law enforcement wide leeway to punish a range of people involved in the provision or dissemination of any services from these entities. And it would grant authorities sweeping new powers to go after a huge range of economic and expressive activity and limit Americans' access to a wide range of tools, services, and products.

Language quoted from the actual "Bill" indicates something along slightly different lines:

Rather, it would grant the U.S. secretary of commerce the broad power to "identify, deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, or otherwise mitigate … any risk arising from any covered transaction by any person, or with respect to any property" that the secretary determines to pose "an undue or unacceptable risk" in several different areas. These include federal elections, "information and communications technology products and services," and "critical infrastructure or digital economy,"

Notice the term "digital economy". That implies to me that the act may be a back handed way to eliminate the use of VPN's to access foriegn Crypto exchanges thus prohibiting the population held hostage in the US from being able to do an end-run around FedCoin, the proposed CBDC for the US.

The Fed has a monopoly on control of the US Currency and they aren't going to allow any competition from the likes of Bitcoin.

originally posted by: ArchangelOger
a reply to: v1rtu0s0

I'm not a TikTok user, so what is your complaint? A VPN has nothing to do with that unless you use TikTok and if you use both oh well. Or am I overlooking something?

For one thing, it looks like this bill would discriminate against private citizens using a Virtual Private Network, Wouk’s it likewise stop many enterprise level networks from using same ? This is ridiculous on so many fronts.

originally posted by: GENERAL EYES
a reply to: Silcone Synapse

Ok, you want to censor my freedom of expression and it's cool because YOU were insulted by words.

Way to go Warrior.

I've said my peace.

Have a nice day.

And I genuinely mean that.

Where was the censorship you claim? Just what action was taken which prevented you from doing… something? It’s sad to watch a snowflake melt, but happens every spring.