From what I've read a VPN only becomes a problem IF you use it to bypass restrictions on accessing TikTok. Stating VPNs will be illegal is a bit of a reach from what I've seen.
Section 11 (a) (2) (F)
> No person may engage in any transaction or take any other action with intent to evade the provisions of this Act, or any regulation, order, direction, mitigation measure, prohibition, or other authorization or directive issued thereunder.
The criminal penalty for willingly violating that "shall, upon conviction, be fined not more than $1,000,000, or if a natural person, may be imprisoned for not more than 20 years, or both". Cool and reasonable, to be sure.
[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...
IANAL but "transaction" in this case surely refers to financial transactions, not just visiting tiktok with VPN on? If the government is sanctioning Iran and say you can't transact with them, it seems fairly reasonable for them to also say that if you try to evade that through various ways you should be punished as well. I don't see why the same shouldn't apply if tiktok is sanctioned.
To make it more clear, you can read that specific entry as:
"No person may engage in any action with intent to evade the provisions of this Act, or any regulation, order, direction, mitigation measure, prohibition, or other authorization or directive issued thereunder."
And which part of the act prevents you from visiting tiktok?
>(B) with respect to a transaction found to pose an undue or unacceptable risk and qualify as a covered transaction, determine whether—
>(i) the covered transaction should be prohibited; or
>(ii) any other action should be taken to mitigate the effects of the covered transaction.
I suppose the least charitable interpretation is that this gives them unlimited power to do whatever they want to "mitigate", but that seems like something that would be struck down by the courts for being too broad.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...
> (12) MITIGATION MEASURE.—The term “mitigation measure” means a measure agreed to in an agreement between any relevant party and the Federal Government, or ordered by the Federal Government and of which any relevant party has been notified, in any matter addressed under this Act to address any risk arising from a covered transaction or associated with a covered holding.
Basically what would happen is, Bill gets passed.
The secretary of commerce, or some other figure in that range, talks to the president and they decide yeah, we need to ban those guys.
They talk to apple, Google, Microsoft, various cloud providers, and say "yeah, you're taking them off your store. You're also not allowed to do any business with them anymore".
I don't think it's likely they end up talking to ISPs to try to cut off the internet side of things, because that's going to take a lot more work and the people given power in this case aren't the sort to try to do that sort of thing.
So you're probably never going to be unable to access the website, they're just going to make it a heck of a lot harder to use it, and they're going to cut off all profit motive.
>They talk to apple, Google, Microsoft, various cloud providers, and say "yeah, you're taking them off your store. You're also not allowed to do any business with them anymore"
Yeah, that's what I thought the law does. I think that's bad for other reasons, but the "omg they're going after your VPNs" rhetoric is over the topp.
Given sci-hub is banned at the ISP level here in the UK, I disagree.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...
>(17) TRANSACTION.—The term “transaction” means any acquisition, importation, transfer, installation, dealing in, or use of any information and communications technology product or service, including ongoing activities such as managed services, data transmission, software updates, repairs, or the provision of data hosting services, or a class of such transactions.
it's pretty obvious from the examples they're talking about B2B transactions, not consumers visiting their site.
> The term “transaction” means any use of any information and communications technology product or service.
>No person may cause or aid, abet, counsel, command, induce, procure, permit, or approve the doing of any act prohibited by, or the omission of any act required by any regulation, order, direction, mitigation measure, prohibition, or other authorization or directive issued under, this Act.
Meaning that the VPN service must track what users are doing to prove that their users aren't using it to do something against this bill. It effectively makes privacy-protecting VPNs illegal.
edit: standard laws against aiding/abetting. Should we be concerned about those as well? https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2
>(G) No person may fail or refuse to comply with any reporting or recordkeeping requirement of this Act, or any regulation, order, direction, mitigation measure, prohibition, or other authorization or directive issued thereunder.
You can plausibly use a VPN to commit fraud, but there isn't a "Fraud Investigation Secretary" who can arbitrarily decide how/what/when records need to be kept. The investigation for someone committing fraud on the VPN wouldn't give the "Fraud Investigation Secretary" the right to see any and all records that the VPN service has when a smaller subset of records specific to the instance of fraud would suffice. Oh and the "Fraud Investigation Secretary" can determine that this entire process can be handled secretly because it's classified. Oh and you're not allowed to ask the government through a FOIA request how it determined the fraud was committed through the VPN.
I reject the notion that the government wouldn't use this law as a dragnet. The Patriot Act remains expired after all.
And remember kids, the next time that somebody tells you "the government wouldn't do that"-- oh yes they would
Made a blog post about accessing TikTok in the internet censorship era? 20 years of jail and one million dollars of debt. Can't make this up.
Even if that were happening, you'd have to find a judge and jury willing to give out a fine like that.
There are times that such a fine would actually be perfectly reasonable. Imagine something like apple or Google providing millions of dollars worth of services, a 20-year prison sentence for one of their executives or a million fee is perfectly justified in such a case.
For individuals, certainly not, but that's why courts exist then that's why appeals are a thing. You have a right to a trial by a jury, have no jury is going to give you such excessive fees.
If you're going to say that you can't trust courts to do this job, you're saying that the whole government is non-functional, and That point there's nothing you can say or do that's reasonable.
Blanket cynicism and obstruction helps no one and gets us nowhere.
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22/1158356619/plea-bargains-crim...
Can't help but be cynical when presented with these numbers.
The laws are written by prosecutors for other prosecutors to generate headlines and votes.
If you know you did the crime, you know they've got proof, you have an option to take a plea deal that's less than the costs of losing the court case, wouldn't you take it?
Funny how the laws always give the government absolute power, and then everyone has to just hope that no government from here into the future in perpetuity will ever use the rest of the overbroad authority.
They could have easily narrowed the scope of the language if they wanted. It didn't have to be written to be so broad.
The same thing prevents this bill from being used to ban VPNs as the passage of a brand new law that specifically outlaws VPNs.
You can't just take a wild elaboration as gospel because it could technically happen.
Edit: it was written by prosecutors for prosecutors. Please stop voting AGs into congress.
The key is to be generally applicable such that companies can't find loopholes, but specific enough that courts understand the essence of your intent and don't go overboard in terms of allowing abuse of the law.
You can't just stop criminalizing things, society would grind to a halt within a few decades.
The only big relevant cases are across borders and often with the endorsement or the permission of the home government.
Small scale hacking is only prosecuted when someone did something very very stupid and obvious.
Hacking is a really clear and obvious example of why we need that ability and we will need to exercise it regularly.
Legally of hacking is a clear example of why your philosophy doesn't work. In that respect it's very relavent. Especially when you say that small scale hacking is rarely enforced, showing that you understand that even if a law appears crazy broad, the reality of the country and our system generally keeps it in check.
I did not say that so do not twist my words. I never even said hacking should be legal.
I said that in the current context the legality of hacking does not matter because either large scale hacking happens across borders. Or often it is at such a small scale it never reaches the legal system (think spouses snooping on each other by using a password written on a post-it). Or the resources to track down a hacker are far to high to lead to an investigation and therefore it never reaches the legal system (think logins and cc numbers where people and banks just deal with it).
In the 1990's and early 2000's when most hacking was unsophisticated, prosecution might have been an effective deterrent.
It can but there is a process to follow and the process might take time.
It is the same with Russia conscripting and officially threatening to use nukes. Of course they could and they did, but in order to do so they first had to officially declare the annexation. Otherwise there was no internal legal basis to conscript since Russia officially was not at war, it was a "special military operation". They could have also gone the alternative route of changing the laws. Or the alternative route of officially declaring war as an aggressor from the beginning.
Same for official nuclear saber rattling, their official nuclear doctrine only allows defensive use and, before annexation, Russia could not claim anyone was attacking it. Before annexation, threats of nukes only came from TV people not high ranking officials.
No matter how democratic or repressive a regime, no ruler rules alone. Therefore even in the most authoritarian regimes there are processes to go through in order to achieve certain objectives. Different processes have different costs and risks. Those processes have steps with each step facilitating the next ones regardless of whether they are eventually taken or not.
This bill is just one of those steps towards dystopia.
Government isn't a big slippery slope, it's a balancing act between the people and the government. Law represents where we stand on that balancing act.
It doesn't matter really how the government tries to shift the status quo. If things get out of line with the will of the people, and they notice, change will be brought to a halt.
This is a common fallacy, especially with recent talk of the "Overton window" that's convinced people it's a good idea to be as extreme as possible instead of approaching the middle ground.
Your party and it's positions do not determine the average person's point of view. They determine what positions you can sustainably maintain, and wherever you move you will see raising or dropping support based on that.
The government won't just slide on over to some crazy extreme. This is why Russia, despite all their bluster, is still not managing to pull a draft. The people don't want it.
And this is why TikTok is so dangerous. By getting into the minds of the people, they threaten to undermine the foundation of our political process.
But going by that definition (intangible construct) plenty of ideas have been banned before without issue.
I do think there is merit in understanding that TikTok can be a threat vector unlike Facebook which is also a distinct threat vector.
Just as there is merit in accepting that this bill is a threat.
I don't see how you can arrive at the conclusion that a company isn't tangible.
Apps are intangible and servers are merely substrate.
Hypothetically I could even steal all of TikTok's servers and I still wouldn't be TikTok. TikTok simply isn't the sum of its physical parts.
To put it in Saussureian terms, the signifier TikTok doesn't completely signify tangible objects. Therefore part of the signified must necessarily be intangible.
Your argument that "TikTok is an idea" does not syllogistically connect with "TikTok should not be banned" because the connector "Ideas should not be banned" is invalid.
Intangible things have been banned and will continue to be banned especially if you extend that notion to include companies.
In other words, they are real things, you can go speak to people who work for apple. You can visit its buildings. Your can install their apps.
> Hypothetically I could even steal all of TikTok's servers and I still wouldn't be TikTok. TikTok simply isn't the sum of its physical parts.
You're getting into the weeds here. To bring things into focus, how does any of this qualify the TikTok company/platform as an idea that would be "censored" if you shut them down?
Once a concept is de-reified the magic gets sucked out of it. If anything understanding enough about the process of reification to de-reify the concept has a much greater chance of de-reifying the concept in your own mind than it does re-reifying it in mine.
Saying repeatedly that something is real to someone for which the concept is de-reified is only further evidence that they are attempting to reify the concept. That's the weird part of the reified mind - it's a self-alienating process - a mental blindspot and once you see your own blindspot, you can't unsee it.
It's, like, saying that instead of seeing a chair, they now gained understanding and only see a collection of molecules forming some wooden fibers arranged in a peculiar shape and there is no chair because no physical object can be a true materialization of the platonic idea of a chair. Like, the chair was de-reified. In fact, if no one is sitting on it does it even have any chairness? You gotta, like, go deeper bro. Like, because of natures water and CO2 cycle, the chair is not a chair and you are not you, you are in fact one with the chair. It's all atoms and quarks and strings and stuff.
Same with any brain-in-a-vat solipsist concepts. Cute and logically rigorous but completely unworkable and useless. A philosophical dead end, a cognitive tar-pit and
The mocking was because it derailed the thread. The discussion was about a piece of legislation that has many undeclared goals and whose declared but unwritten goal is to ban TikTok. Whether TikTok is tangible or not, reified or not, an idea or something else is just besides the point. Thinking that it can not be banned is foolish.
Let me remind you that your argument was:
> You can't touch a platform, TikTok included. It's an intangible construct and as such it clearly falls into the category of ideas. Everyone knows this. The only reason someone would think otherwise is that banning an idea is a yucky concept and in a fit of cognitive dissonance, it must therefore not be an idea. Let's not fool ourselves.
You did not say "let's discuss about whether Tiktok is reified and how it could be de-reified". That would have been an interesting discussion.
It might resonate with you like it does with others, or either seem completely vacuous, or even provoke a mentally allergic reaction like it does in some. The latter tends to have a load-bearing egoistic reaction to ideas contra to a singular objective reality in which everything must fit to a prescribed ontology, again a theme you might now recognize in the proceeding comments. Some folks desperately want to manifest their views as the correct view of what "being" is and wield it like a cudgel.
Never read Baudrillard; you're more than welcome to revise it to make it sophomoric, or even grad level if you want. Show me up and do it better than me.
That’s weird criticism. Why shoudn’t someone hold a view that in their opinion corresponds to reality to the greatest degree among all views that are available to them? For example, you seem “desperate” to manifest your views on TikTok and “reification” in this thread. And I don’t see anything wrong with that.
> you're more than welcome to revise it to make it sophomoric
That’s easy. You should clearly define the technical jargon that you use and the theories that you apply. It looks like you reify the ideas of Berger and Luckman and, what is worse, the words they use.
Explication will help others to make sense of your unconventional use of words and help you de-reify the ideas that you use ;)
Such a change can only be brought to a halt if the imbalance of power is small enough.
The Overton window is a thing. That does not justify extremism if your goal is a functioning society. The Overton window says nothing about whether a position is right or wrong. It only describes what is acceptable and what is extreme. The average citizen is not a static thing.
Russia managed to pull a partial draft even if the people didn't want it. People fled the country because of it. Because before that, all protests were swiftly crushed. It managed to do so because the imbalance of power is great enough that what the people want matters less.
For comparison France is seeing protests for increasing retirement age by two years. It is better to be a citizen of France than a citizen of Russia.
I never said that TikTok is not dangerous. Influencing the minds of people through TikTok is just one way to influence the Overton window.
What many people criticizing this bill are saying is that despite TikTok being a danger of multiple kinds, this bill is also a danger for democracy.
Not having ever used TikTok I will not speculate on which danger is greater, but this is not a dichotomy. Pass the bill as is or not are not the only two options. A better bill that addresses the threats while introducing less threats of its own is possible.
My point here is that government is ultimately restricted by the people. Any assumption what the government does will change that window of acceptability is wrong.
This bill won't make it OK for the government to ban (insert thing the average person likes or does here). To do so will likely mandate that the average person begin to dislike or oppose that thing.
> Russia managed to pull a partial draft even if the people didn't want it.
Key word here is partial, and as far as I'm aware it was quickly withdrawn. Ultimately Russia will act against its people, because it's an authoritarian nation, they just have to get there.
The USA, however, is a functioning democracy.
> What many people criticizing this bill are saying is that despite TikTok being a danger of multiple kinds, this bill is also a danger for democracy.
The number of blatant lies about the bill makes me think otherwise. The tone isn't "this needs fixed" it's "this must not pass".
The end result here rapidly looks like it's approaching an end to any ban on TikTok, and when that happens we will be deeply and truly fucked. Far far more so than we would be by this bill.
[1] realistically not, given federal sentencing guidelines, see: https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...
Prosecutors use the arduous court system to force their victims to accept pleas.
The law says "up to 20 years". Therefore, american citizens can be imprisoned for 20 years over this bullshit. Don't minimize it.
20 years for being a teenager and watching shitty vlogs and memes? "unlikely" doesn't cut it, anything less than "impossible" should be unacceptable.
> You might get some sort of prison
Again: WHAT? go to prison for watching shitty vlogs and memes? You guys are really reaching Saudi Arabia levels with this law, how can you be so complacent with that?
The latter is enforceable, the former is just a recommendation
Like the Patriot act?
The famously overbroad laws that get abused by prosecutors in cases like Aaron Schwartz facing 35 years for downloading files.
The same applies for the tiktok law. Go out and argue how the government is banning you from using tiktok under threat of prison sentence or whatever. Don't make the unsupported argument that the proposed law is going to punish you for using VPNs for unrelated reasons (eg. torrenting).
Oh, so it's just a fee.
Be that as it may, the bill is still illiberal bullshit and a transfer of power interest wrong hands.
The lawmakers aren't evil mustache twirling villains, they're trying to create a law and they wrote it as sensibly as they reasonably would in their circumstance and people on the internet are blowing it way out of proportion.
Blowing things up like this is a thing the internet, America in general, has problems with. The TTP, If you remember that one, was another one that people absolutely tried to crush and it turned out it was actually a really good idea that we should have been part of.
The reaction to this is scarily similar, and it's going to be resulting in a similar loss if it gets shut down.
In all hopes they buckle down, put down some revisions to neuter some of the more egregious things people are complaining about, and the law passes with those extra protections.
Trump's withdrawal from that agreement was one of the most catastrophic decisions the United States government has made in the last 20 years.
"I will stop any trade deal that kills jobs or holds down wages, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership. I oppose it now, I’ll oppose it after the election and I’ll oppose it as president.”
The TPP's 5,000+ pages actually had very little to do with trade. Instead, corporations tried to turn it into a wish list for policies that they knew would never pass through Congress.
They were in favor of it because it was a good law, and it further an American interests in the wider world. Half of the restrictions and changes were ones that literally didn't affect America and just brought other countries up to the Americans standard.
> because it was a good law, and it further an American interests in the wider world.
No, it wasn't a good law. It would have raised the cost of drugs significantly. The pharma bros are already billionaires. We don't need them to get richer. It had no protection for low-income American workers - esp auto workers. TPP would have led to a mass offshoring of jobs. Frankly, I do not wish this to devolve into a discussion on TPP, because its disadvantages and non-trading related addendums were already covered by media on both the left and the right.
https://www.vox.com/2015/10/5/9454511/tpp-cost-medicine
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/opinion/united-auto-worke...
https://time.com/4065267/trans-pacific-partnership-american-...
Do you know what populist means? Short term appeal to voters instead of long term and more difficult decision making.
> No, it wasn't a good law. It would have raised the cost of drugs significantly.
Yeah. For other countries. America already pays these prices. In fact, a lot of that is what lets these drugs exist for other countries in the first place.
This likely would have *lowered* the price for Americans.
Hah, the American voter is far more brighter than HN folks give them credit for. They have to look out for their interests since the elite most certainly wont.
No, the drug prices wouldn't have reduced. Come now - provide your logical reasoning why the drug prices would have reduced ? Do you really think the Pharma industry would have gained suddenly gained sympathy after achieving a perfect stanglehold?
The US imports >50% of its generic drugs from nations who have none to minimal drug patent protection policies and thats how it keeps it's citizens alive. You would have had the pharma billionaires choke this supply too.
Every modern bill for free trade agreements is perverted into a corporate wishlist to the detriment of most people.
What do you believe would have been the key benefit?
"VPN" occurs exactly zero times in the bill.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...
Furthermore, some have pointed out that the language of the bill could force providers to start tracking what users do.
I’ve encountered quite a few “but the bill says nothing about VPNs” comments and those seem to be problematic takes.
The bill doesn’t mention TikTok either.
Source?
The key issue seems to be the very open ended language about attempting to circumvent or aiding in the circumvention of any enacted restrictions.
As written, this seems to potentially impact both users of VPNs and VPN providers.
It also says transactions or any other actions... So, I let myself be tracked by TikTok by using a VPN, am I a criminal?
9 times out of 10 you can basically assume, " reasonability". Does viewing ads in TikTok give them money? I would expect not, because you're not getting the money. Posting ads on there certainly would count.
Giving gifts to creators probably would also count, although I'm sure a court would consider that incredibly minor, it would probably never get enforced, and even if it did it would probably be some tiny paltry amount.
The bank who lets that transaction happen however, might get in trouble.
If you let yourself be tracked using a VPN...? I suspect the answer to that question is going to lie in why you're doing that. Inadvertently? Almost certainly not going to be an issue.
Do you have some sort of ulterior motive? It's probably going to be a problem. After all, you're literally committing espionage for a foreign adversary of the United States in this case.
Remember that law is backed by court cases, and courts tend to be pretty reasonable. These things aren't programmed, they're human