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Comment by robot-wrangler | Hacker News Reader

Not idiots necessarily, sometimes just long-time observers who have finally become cynical. People that were pro-guns for decades may watch several years of failure to adopt basic and uncontroversial gun-control regulation, then eventually become anti-gun. People that were in favor of regulating it once may suddenly become fearful for their safety, and want no regulations at all in case that regulation puts them out in the cold. Since both PR campaigns and any action on policy tends to cater to extremes, there's always pressure that is shrinking the middle

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The comment "useful idiots" is more a play on the russian KGB strategy.

They use assets to influence people and achieve certain goals. In this case here, terrorism or child pornography is used as cop-out rationale for censorship, surveillance and so forth. It's never about those topics really, perhaps 5% at best, the rest is just sugar-coated decoy to restrict people and keep them as slaves and pets.

> Since both PR campaigns and any action on policy tends to cater to extremes, there's always pressure that is shrinking the middle

This only works on people who are susceptible to this. I understand how propaganda works so I am never fooled by "this is because of terrorists". This is also why I am for 100% transparency at all times.

Can you explain to me what loopholes that opponents believe this law will exploit?

Is it just "more ID is bad"? Or is there a specific concern that this bill is a targeted overreach to increase censorship and surveillance.

It genuinely doesn't seem like any more of a threat than age-gating Playboy at the bookstore. What have I missed?

I went to check my Social Security administration account like 4 years ago - I forget why. To access it, I have to have an actual video face to face conversation with people from some Real ID company.

I'll never look at that account again in my ficking life.

Is this affected by this bill at all?

> Or is there a specific concern that this bill is a targeted overreach to increase censorship and surveillance.

https://bsky.app/profile/tupped.bsky.social/post/3lwgcmswmy2...

> The U.K. Online Safety Act was (avowedly, as revealed in a recent High Court case) “not primarily aimed at protecting children” but at regulating “services that have a significant influence over public discourse.”

Thanks, this was good info. As an aside, I read the original source. I found the writing completely impenetrable and realized I know nothing about the British legislative process.

But this did, nonetheless, convince me that british legislators are interested in using this bill to regulate the internet.

> It genuinely doesn't seem like any more of a threat than age-gating Playboy at the bookstore

If it was really like that, I would have no problem. Simple ID check, in-person only, that's never stored anywhere.

I've proposed this several times. Age-gated websites (social media, random forums, adult websites) should require a one-time use code or token that expires once a year. The token should only be available for purchase at liquor stores or tobacco stores - someplace they check your ID on pain of losing their license. It should be reasonably priced.

Sometimes someone might resell a token they purchased to a minor. Those people should be actively hunted with sting operations and prosecuted.

There's no good reason to make age verification on the Internet more stringent than age verification to buy alcohol or tobacco. Alcohol and tobacco kill far more people.

I don't know much about modern PoS but I assume that when you scan your ID for tobacco that data is stored and retained.

I've never had my ID scanned. The sales clerk glances at it. These days they don't even ask :-D

If they scan your ID for alcohol or tobacco purchases where you live it might be time to fix that with legislation too. Insurance companies would love that data.

I don't understand the downvotes. If you have this question then so do others and it ought to be part of the discourse. Anyhow...

From what I've seen, the current wave of ID-gating the internet is a wedge for opening the door to much broader censorship. Specifically, some jurisdictions (Wisconsin, Minnnesota, and the UK) are using recently-passed legislation to argue that we need to make VPNs illegal [0 1 2].

0 https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/lawmakers-want-ban-vpn...

1 https://www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-privacy-security/vpn-usage...

2 https://hansard.parliament.uk/Lords/2025-09-15/debates/57714...

Thanks, I appreciate this.

Speaking for my own beliefs, banning the use of VPNs is a huge problem, and it seems like basically anybody who understands the technology would be against it.

I have no problem with banning or age gating pornography at all. Personally it seems weird to me that that's the red line for people.

But this is a good point, which is that lawmakers who don't have a clue what they're regulating will see VPNs as undermining the laws they've made. Thanks for this

> The comment "useful idiots" is more a play on the russian KGB strategy.

Oh, I'm familiar with the phrase, but I'm specifically disputing how applicable it really is to people that are self-aware about the situation they are facing. Useful idiots are ones that are tricked, especially ones that are evangelical about tricking others. People forced to choose between 2 extremes where both choices are very bad are called.. normal citizens participating in the democratic process.

> This only works on people who are susceptible to this. I understand how propaganda works

What? You can see through propaganda, but you can't just pencil in your own policy options. Unfortunately and by design, the things you can ultimately vote for are "all or nothing" flavored. Censor everything, censor nothing. Track everybody, track nobody. Tons of parents who totally understand the surveillance state probably got flipped by meta's memo about chatbots being "sensual" with children. They'd rather vote to force corporations to be good citizens, but they can't. So they'll vote for an age-gated internet as the best of the bad options. I wouldn't assume all those people are naive, confused, or duped.. they've simply switched from a principled/abstract stance to a convenience-based calculus after they were forced into it. Meta wins either way, as planned. Either they get to build a more addictive platform, or they track more info about more people

>tricked [and] evangelical about tricking others

Nah, that's just your "democratic" process.

People forced to choose between 2 extreme evils, one (debatably) lesser, are not called "normal", they are called unfree.

The process of making sure people are always in one such situation or another is not called "governance", it's called driving insane.

>I wouldn't assume all those people are naive, confused, or duped.. they've simply switched from a principled/abstract stance to a convenience-based calculus after they were forced into it.

Forced into it under threat of violence, or under threat of denied sustenance and shelter, or "forced" by catering to their naivete, by confusing and duping them, by silently extorting them by enclosure of the commons?

Switching from "principle-based stance" to "convenience-based stance" is not called "being sensible", it's called... cowardice.

>Unfortunately and by design, the things you can ultimately vote for are "all or nothing" flavored. Censor everything, censor nothing. Track everybody, track nobody.

If voting changed anything they'd ban it.

>Tons of parents who totally understand the surveillance state

If you truly understood how the surveillance state feeds on human life, you would deny it sustenance by - yes: - refusing to breed in captivity.

That's one of the few meaningful political actions available to the individual. At least until advances in reproductive medicine get turned on us, same way it happened with the mind-bicycles. A society with the technical capacity to go Gattaca might rather go all-in on Plato's Republic.

Type of beat like yall can have the world to yourselves if yall want it that bad, but believe me, you will choke on it.

I think in this case many of these people are "useful idiots" in the sense that they lack a strong technical understanding of how the internet and www are architected. This can cause them to accept erroneous concepts like "tracking the identity of all internet users is the only way to protect the children" while alternatives like the one proposed at the beginning of this thread can be easily glossed over as some techno mumble jumble.

> I understand how propaganda works so I am never fooled

That's not how it works.

see, when you cut out the part about "because of terrorists" that sounds like a patently laughable claim. I would tend to agree with the poster on the strength that some propaganda is very, very easily spotted:

- anything that mentions "terrorists" (or the nouveau "narco-terrorists")

- "think of the children" / "we must protect the children"

- "we need to create jobs" / "job creators"

- "they're turning the frogs gay"

- "we need to protect America"

tbh if you're fooled by any of that (and there's no delicate way to say this) you're dumb. Even a cursory glance at history would reveal the obvious deception and it's on you that you haven't bothered.

> Not idiots necessarily, sometimes just long-time observers who have finally become cynical.

This doesn't explain why they would support privacy-invasive ID requirements instead of the RTA header.

> People that were pro-guns for decades may watch several years of failure to adopt basic and uncontroversial gun-control regulation, then eventually become anti-gun.

I want to call this a bad example because the only people who call the rules that don't pass "basic and uncontroversial" are the people who were on the other side to begin with, but maybe it's a good example because the analogy lines up so well with exactly the same scenario:

People who are anti-X propose rules with low effectiveness against actual harms but that impose significant burdens on innocent people who are pro-X, persistently insist that their proposal is fine and supported by everyone even as it demonstrably lacks enough support to pass and then point to the period of nothing being done to try to garner enough support from independents to squeak over the line instead of considering less burdensome alternatives, because burdening the pro-X people is the point. And then the people who fall for it are the useful idiots.

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