Comment by fsociety999 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fsociety999 | Hacker News Reader

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While I agree it is a bit of a clickbait headline, it is all about the precedent when it comes to this kind of thing. I think you are severely downplaying the risk here. Using vague language like that opens the door for them to crack down even harder.

The government wants to monitor everything people do online and VPNs give people a way to opt out of that surveillance. It is a typical legislative move to add extra provisions all in the name of “banning the evil, Chinese spy app”. There is no reason to believe this will stop at TikTok. What if people use VPNs to get around other censorship that may or may not exist now? What if people use VPNs to access content using BitTorrent? Who is to say they won’t crack down on that that stuff next?

Governments love to take advantage of situations to expand their control think about what happened after 9/11.

Apparently this is exactly what is going on here: https://twitter.com/Fynnderella1/status/1640016692305711105

This is about using VPNs to avoid financial controls on transactions with a banned organization.

That's a different concern to monitoring communications. It's more like the Bianance thing where they were "we can't have US customers but we only ban you based on your IP address. Here's a link about how VPNs let you change your IP address".

>I think you are severely downplaying the risk here. Using vague language like that opens the door for them to crack down even harder.

>The government wants to monitor everything people do online and VPNs give people a way to opt out of that surveillance. It is a typical legislative move to add extra provisions all in the name of “banning the evil, Chinese spy app”. There is no reason to believe this will stop at TikTok. What if people use VPNs to get around other censorship? What if people use VPNs to access copyrighted content using BitTorrent? Who is to say that they won’t crack down on that that stuff next?

I'm not downplaying the risk of the bill, only pointing out the rhetoric is false and misleading. Based on the tweets and the article there aren't any anti-VPN or anti-anti-censorship tool provisions in the bill. Now, you can still argue that passing this bill sets us on a slippery slope to get encrypted chats banned or whatever, but it's dishonest to say that people are facing "20 year jail sentences" for using VPNs when they're not. Pointing that out isn't "severely downplaying the risk ".

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