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Comment by amatecha | Hacker News Reader

Using a VPN (or any other mechanism) to bypass ANY service banned under the provisions of this act[0] would be illegal (TikTok is not mentioned at all):

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...

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AND

>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.

That seems like an overly broad interpretation. How is this different from standard laws like "you can't aid or abet someone committing fraud"? You can plausibly argue that you can use VPNs to commit fraud, therefore any sort of law that says you can't "aid, abet, counsel [...]" is a ban on VPNs.

edit: standard laws against aiding/abetting. Should we be concerned about those as well? https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2

It's different because it's way more nebulous:

>(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

This guy has been commenting all throughout the discussion showing he doesn't understand the text and hasn't actually read it.

Yeah, that's a really good point. This is even more insidious than I thought. :(

> counsel

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.

Is that supposed to reassure people?! Million dollar fine and 20 years in prison for using a VPN is beyond excessive.

The first thing I think is important to point out here is that the bill isn't really pointed towards VPNs, any interpretation of it that leans that way is probably going to get shut down before it ever gets to the point that it's an issue at all.

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.

I'm sure you're aware that realistically most people would just plead guilty and accept some kind of deal rather than go through the court system.

There are also lots of people who wouldn't.

Many more would plead and that's the problem.

At this rate you may as well just tear down the whole government. You can't write law that's specific to every single use case, you have to rely on courts for that.

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.

> In any given year, 98% of criminal cases in the federal courts end with a plea bargain — a practice that prizes efficiency over fairness and innocence

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.

That's not exactly a great number to show if you don't know the percentage of people going to trial who are guilty in the first place.

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?

>the bill isn't really pointed towards VPNs

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 government could literally take any power at any moment for any reason at any time that they wanted to.

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.

Broadly written laws encourage abuse.

Edit: it was written by prosecutors for prosecutors. Please stop voting AGs into congress.

As do incredibly specific ones.

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.

Just stop criminalizing shit.

Times change, situations adjust, and new behaviors appear that need to be regulated and shut down.

You can't just stop criminalizing things, society would grind to a halt within a few decades.

What about when previously criminalized acts like consuming cannabis products become socially acceptable? It's still illegal on the federal level so that's a huge mess not to mention the harm that was done by enforcing those laws over the years.

You decriminalize it, we've already seen movement towards that happening.

Citation needed

Would you prefer hacking be legal?

Legality of hacking does not matter.

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.

You just said we should never make new things criminal.

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.

> You just said we should never make new things criminal.

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.

The reason why they have to at least pretend to play by the rules that are supposed to bind them as much as they do is because legitimacy is what keeps people from quitting the game, bringing it to a halt, and starting their own new games.

> The government could literally take any power at any moment for any reason at any time that they wanted to.

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.

You're kind of repeating the same thing here.

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.

Do you have a list of other dangerous ideas?

TikTok isn't an idea, it's a platform atop which people speak, and the platform is owned by a country that recognizes no right to free speech and is actively hostile to the United States.

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. Folks want to ban an idea and we all know how that story goes.

Your argument is a bit too philosophical.

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.

It's not even philosophical; it's sociological. Besides, the banning of ideas ventures too far into the IdeaCrime territory than I feel comfortable with.

It's absolutely tangible. It's an app. It's servers. It's a company.

I don't see how you can arrive at the conclusion that a company isn't tangible.

Companies are social relations with legal protection.

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.

This is off-topic sophistry.

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.

nailed it. sophistry indeed.

> Companies are social relations with legal protection

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?

I don't think you're going to convince me to re-reifiy the concepts of Apple and TikTok.

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.

That reads like a freshman’s essay on Baudrillard. It’s really hard to make sense of it.

I don't think it is impressive in any way. It's pompous bullshit that is really hard to believe they really believe it themselves and can now be generated by AI.

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

If you think I'm saying that TikTok is not real in the same way chairs aren't real, then you haven't been keeping up. There are ways to argue against reification, but mocking ain't one bud.

I am arguing that whether the notion of TikTok or Apple or CocaCola is reified for you or me is absolutely irrelevant. They are reified to the vast majority of people so much so that even if a significant portion of their material substrate would be lost, it would be recreated because the brand is just that important.

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.

There's a subsection of Berger&Luckman(1966) on reification that I'm applying. It's not a particularly difficult concept, but it has wide application and describes what we would call today "social facts" are made manifest as reality to some folks. It's a foundational sociological text and I'd encourage anyone who's slightly interested in epistomology to give it a read.

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.

> Some folks desperately want to manifest their views as the correct view of what "being" is and wield it like a cudgel.

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 ;)

Power is a slippery slope. That does not mean that it has a single destination or that going down the slope is irreversible. It just means that reversing an imbalance of power is harder.

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.

> It only describes what is acceptable and what is extreme. The average citizen is not a static thing

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.

You're not being put in jail for 20 years[1] for using a VPN (eg. for torrenting). You're being put in jail for 20 years because you violated other provisions of the law and tried to evade using VPNs. It's not any different than you getting put in jail for 20 years for violating some anti-terror legislation, and using VPNs to pull that off.

[1] realistically not, given federal sentencing guidelines, see: https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentenc...

Having 20 year sentence on the books for something that isn't rape or murder is barbaric in my opinion.

Did you miss the footnote?

Nope. Didn't even click it.

Prosecutors use the arduous court system to force their victims to accept pleas.

That might be true, but it still doesn't change the fact that you're unlikely to get 20 years for accessing tiktok over VPN. You might get some sort of prison sentence (or none, too lazy to look up the exact guidelines), but saying 20 years is pure hyperbole.

> saying 20 years is pure hyperbole

The law says "up to 20 years". Therefore, american citizens can be imprisoned for 20 years over this bullshit. Don't minimize it.

> unlikely to get 20 years ...

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 footnote is irrelevant, the guidance says you shouldn't, but the law says you legally can.

The latter is enforceable, the former is just a recommendation

>violating some anti-terror legislation

Like the Patriot act?

That part of the argument can easily be substituted with something less controversial, like sanctions or wire fraud laws.

>wire fraud laws

The famously overbroad laws that get abused by prosecutors in cases like Aaron Schwartz facing 35 years for downloading files.

Rip aaron

I can already see the copyright monopolists lobbying the government to classify infringement as intellectual terrorism or something.

Again, the problem there wouldn't be that the law is banning VPNs, it's having harsh punishment for copyright infringement. That's a perfectly serviceable argument. Don't say they're putting people in jail for using VPNs, that would just be dishonest.

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).

Where did you get the idea I was trying to reassure anyone? I was clarifying that the Act says nothing about TikTok (or any other service) specifically, since for some reason people keep saying stuff like "it's only for a TikTok ban". Not sure why people keep having such charitable interpretations of this overly-broad and draconian proposal.

> The criminal penalty for willingly violating that "shall, upon conviction, be fined not more than $1,000,000

Oh, so it's just a fee.

And up to 20 years in prison

Only if you're a natural person.

You know "natural person" means "human being", right? Like an individual person, not a business or that sort of thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_person

That's exactly my point.

> >No person may engage in any transaction or take any other action with intent to evade [...]

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.

Unfortunately the word "or" means the word "transaction" can be completely ignored and thus literally everything else is covered by the overly-broad words "take any other action", such as using a VPN or similar service.

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."

>"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?

No part does, until TikTok becomes one of the services banned as per the "mitigation" acts defined under this Act.

I skimmed the bill and I'm having a hard time determining what type of activity is prohibited once an entity is identified, except for

>(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...

Yes, the mitigation action is completely variable and could include basically anything. It's intentionally vague because it might mean banning a service, seizing assets, who knows what.

> (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.

The act itself does not, it only gives the secretary of commerce the power to create regulations and other mandates related to any company owned by something that is defined as a foreign adversary, which in the bill is listed as Venezuela, China, Iran, Russia, the typical types.

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.

>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"

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.

> 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.

Given sci-hub is banned at the ISP level here in the UK, I disagree.

Totally different country. Totally different laws. You can't compare them.

No, the term "transaction" is defined very broadly in the bill, and includes "use of any information and communications technology product or service."

https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686...

IANAL but based on the full quote:

>(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 quote you cite indicates exactly the opposite. I'll omit some of the optional elements of the sentence to create a concise sentence that makes it clear simply downloading something is considered a transaction:

> The term “transaction” means any use of any information and communications technology product or service.

I'll concede that the law can possibly be interpreted to ban Americans from using tiktok.

No? The quote literally includes "data transmission" as a transaction.

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