Coyote ^.^ ΘΔ: Something else I just realized: the Chevron SCOTUS case potentially guts the power of the regulatory agencies to interpret laws. Which means any law restricting cryptography would have to specify every type and use case not allowed, and something not covered by that law would be quickly developed.

I know smut may seem like a frivolous thing to be upset about, but crushing it is part of fascism. Controlling all forms of sexual expression is fascism. Only allowing certain kinds is fascism. Smut peddlers are always canaries in the coal mines.

Controlling telecommunications in order to "fight pornography" sound like they're creating a problem to get to the solution they really want. Any platform speaking out against them gets shut down, since there was "porn" on it somewhere. Trust us on this claim though, since we already deleted it.

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I will stand firm in the belief that the ability of the govt to control them has long since passed in the US. They have tried before. They will try again. But they forget at this point the government relies more on the carriers than vice/versa and the carriers answer more to their shareholders.

Even the DoD’s network (outside of tactical/combat comms) is handled by commercial carriers. They may have dedicated circuits, but those are provided by the big backbone companies. And those companies could easily turn them all off in protest of laws they couldn’t possibly comply with.

But they make a lot of money off the government and certainly aren't responsible for or interested in maintaining the civil rights of their subscribers. Telecom companies have eagerly complied with the rapid decay of the 4th Amendment at SCOTUS and law enforcement, well beyond what's required by law

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They make a lot of money off the government but they make more off the private sector. Mass surveillance was never supposed to be discovered and it didn’t impact customers, and it was “comply and get more federal contracts” It made sense for them to do that…

I don't think the majority of their corporate clients are going to go to court to fight government anti-pornography measures. They'll just shrug and say they already outsourced this problem - to the telecoms.

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Not to mention that if you really wanted to ban all porn and other “thoughtcrime” you would also have to ban or backdoor all encryption. Otherwise, there is no way to know exactly what people are looking at. Corporations would fight that, because it’s the only way to keep anything confidential.

{conspiracy hat on} Ban all encryption, you say? Maybe that's their end goal with this whole situation. Knowing what people are looking at is a really useful tool for controlling what people get access to and how. Especially coupled with being able to shut down services by shouting "porn" at them.

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Today we have fully open-source crypto that nobody can break, barring weaknesses in individual implementations. The algorithms are sound, even the government is using them. That ship has sailed.

My guess is that kind of technology would be on their hit list too. As long as they can find a way to exempt their own crypto dealings.

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Something else I just realized: the Chevron SCOTUS case potentially guts the power of the regulatory agencies to interpret laws. Which means any law restricting cryptography would have to specify every type and use case not allowed, and something not covered by that law would be quickly developed.

Unless they introduce an overarching law that prohibits all forms of cryptography, and allows the courts to decide on a case-by-case basis whether a specific use should be allowed or not. Once again shifting the power over to SCOTUS to be the final adjudicator in such matters.

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Such a law would be thoroughly ignored. At this point you would have no choice. The vast majority of sites, not to mention the infrastructure the makes the Internet function, simply do not work without encryption. Outright banning or even phasing it out would not be possible. It would all shut down.

That's their plan. Shut down anything you don't own a share in, and monopolise the internet.

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Monopolize it? They hope, but they can’t. The internet is not just the US, and if we’re going to ban the ability to have any security or privacy on it, I seriously hope we also do a Great Firewall of China style isolation… or we will quickly be assimilated by China (or another country)

Those two points seem contradictory to me. Once they isolate the US behind a firewall, they'd have a monopoly on the localised systems in the same way the Chinese government does behind theirs. They'd use it to manipulate the data for their own ends, even more so than they already do.

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I should have said “even if they do”. No censorship is perfect. People in China access forbidden stuff all the time. So if state actors outside the US were to get in, probably via a VPN someone here is using to get out, and we have banned security and privacy on our networks? We’re done.

I don’t know if I have said it in this thread, but the biggest threat posed by P2025 isn’t what they plan to do, but how they plan to do it. Gutting the federal government and replacing it with incompetents while alienating/enraging every blue state and city is how you cause the nation to collapse.

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