The TikTok Ban Bill

Senate Bill no. 686, also known as the Restrict Bill or the TikTok Ban Bill, is going to change internet privacy forever. You can read the full bill here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/686 tldr: > "software, hardware, or any other product or service integral to telecommunications products and services" > "internet- or network-enabled sensors, webcams, end-point surveillance or monitoring devices, modems and home networking devices" > "software designed or used primarily for connecting with and communicating via the internet, including desktop applications, mobile applications, gaming applications, payment applications, or web-based applications" That are manufactured by, or used to contact and communicate with "foreign adversaries" (so basically everything) are basically derezzed, and the penalty of trying to bypass said bans is made a criminal act under this bill. The penalty is a minimum imprisonment of 20 years and a minimum fine of 250K USD, or 1M USD, depending if you knowingly did it to bypass the government bans. This bill also gives the Feds the power to monitor every single activity of "suspicious devices", which means a government backdoor on every single Internet-enabled technology, software or hardware. This bill also allows a certain group or comittee to be formed for "enforcement" without any outside input or vote whatsoever, allowing them to censor whatever they want. The sad part is that the general public only knows that this is the "TikTok Ban" bill and is fine about it because they think that the government is only going to ban Chinese botnet and not take control of their entire privacy and security. What does lain think? If the bill goes to pass, what would the future of /sec/ look like, without VPNs or Proxies to hide trails? Are there going to be ways to circumvent it?

>>21288 What about anonymizing networks such as Tor, i2p, and others? Will this see an exodus from the clearnet for good this time? I've been feeling like something like this would eventually take hold this decade. Finally the time has come for us to ramp up our operations to the next level of figuring out how to continue the fight for our internet freedoms to ensure a future of connectivity for the wired.

I'm no fan of the bill, but it seems that the majority of talk online think that it will give permission to incriminate normal internet users with no resistance, ban VPNs and crypto, and essentially give a blank check for any activity to crack down on dissidents. The vague scope and harsh penalties are so comically tyrannical it's as if it was crafted to create outrage. I'm actually incredulous to the whole thing and want to take more time to absorb it until participating with the (time is running out!) foreclosure of freedom in the US. This section in particular does suggest that the outrage is largely fueled on misinterpretation, but that doesn't excuse it for being soykaf in every other regard, nor am I well versed in the legalese enough to make a sound judgement. Hopefully somebody else here can parse it properly. 4) COVERED TRANSACTION.— (A) IN GENERAL.—The term “covered transaction” means a transaction in which an entity described in subparagraph (B) has any interest (including through an interest in a contract for the provision of the technology or service), or any class of such transactions. (B) COVERED ENTITIES.—The entities described in this subparagraph are: (i) a foreign adversary; (ii) an entity subject to the jurisdiction of, or organized under the laws of, a foreign adversary; and (iii) an entity owned, directed, or controlled by a person described in subparagraph (A) or (B).

>>21290 It seems the bill was written by angry conservatives amped up by a new anti-China yellow menace panic with no real understanding of tech or how the internet works. TikTok also has a rep as a Gen Z platform full of insufferably woke liberals, and naturally US conservatives want to hit out at that crowd. It’s like Americans are taking their insane culture wars soykaf to a global level and we’re all going to suffer for it.

I doubt the bill will even pass. If it does, I still don't think much will come of this. The Tor Project may take a heavy blow or may disappear altogether. Tor was created by the United States Government and the Tor Project relies heavily upon the United States Government for funding. If The Tor Project complies with the US Government access to Tor could be removed from civilians, at best civilians could access Tor but it would be jewed in some way eliminating their anonymity. If The Tor Project didn't comply with any sort of demands from The US Government they would expect to lose all funding from the feds, and be pursued legally, perhaps personnel in America could be arrested and Tor Project members living abroad could be harrassed by the US Government. The majority of relays are based within America and a good portion of funding aside the US Government comes from America so the network size would be expected to be reduced drastically, this perhaps would lead to the death of The Tor Project. The only reason the public was given access to Tor was so that CIAniggers could hide among the traffic output by the general populace. Perhaps the US Government have some alternatives to Tor. Maybe they could also just simply offer the general populace a jewed, backdoored version of Tor while keeping an effective version for theirselves. Unlike Tor, i2p does not depend upon the US Government. I assume some Americans are involved in the development of i2p, and there are many Americans who use the network. It could be assumed that any Americans involved in the maintainence of i2p would be persecuted. The size of the network might be reduced. There are a few other memenets, there's Lokinet, what else. They're too small to survive most likely. VPNs are already useless for anonymity, I don't even want to bother touching upon how soykafty they are, most people are more than aware of that fact anyway. VPNs are the most popular "anonymizer" though, there are enough idiots using them that I doubt they could or would get outright derezzed. People could simply not comply with laws regarding them, there are so many people using VPNs, the US Government couldn't prosecute every VPN user, it's impossible. Not much could happen granting a significant portion of users refuse to comply. I think the VPN companies would just openly declare their involvement with the US Government, they wouldn't disclose their former involvement though. Tor is also large enough that if Americans users refused to comply with laws the US Government couldn't do anything. They could persecute some users which would cause outrage, but the majority of users would go unmolested. Users could make efforts to attempt to protect theirselves while accessing the Tor Network, people could use bridges (although they are not entirely effective), they could steal WiFi. Of course the authorities could try to hunt down Tor users who are relying upon public or stolen internet with bridges to access the Tor Network, they could absolutely track them down and deploy TEMPEST attacks and other things but that all becomes much more complicated and costly to execute on a mass scale. Non-compliance is the best solution. If VPN companies and The Tor Project jew the masses will have to resist and build their own alternatives. (if you don't want me to say c uck I'll just say jew, see which is more irritating, glitterboy)

>What does lain think? Sigh... It's all so depressing, Lainon. I'm canadian, this bill doesn't directly affect me, but I'm very afraid of the precedence it will set in the future, not to mention adding one more reason to never return to the US. I still want you guys to keep the rest of your freedom you can have and I don't want the other world powers to get tempted at the thought making their own "[insert popular foreign app] Ban" of their own. I have no power to do anything about that bill, other than to talk about it and spread the word thru out the wired. you Lainons ITT helps me find some hope that it won't pass and that, even if this bill passes, maybe not all is lost.

>>21288 It honestly just makes me sad. The senators know that this is outright authoritarian censorship, and they don't give a fuarrrk because they're fossils who will die in 10-20 years and never suffer the consequences.

>>21290 >a transaction in which an entity described in subparagraph (B) has any interest This to me sounds like the place where the scope of this law may expand unconstrained by being broadly interpreted. I wrote a whole long response but deleted it after looking up the legal meaning of "interest" (https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/interest), which seems to be something like "having property rights over". So maybe this actually wouldn't be subject to wild Commerce Clause style creative interpretation to effectively mean all possible transactions between anyone. On the other hand, it looks like the ability to challenge the merits of a particular ban are constrained by secrecy, according to the EFF: >The RESTRICT Act sets the stage for a TikTok ban. But the government has publicly disclosed no specific information that shows narrow tailoring. Worse, three provisions of the bill make such transparency less likely. First, the executive branch need not publicly explain a ban if doing so is not “practicable” and “consistent with … national security and law enforcement interests.” Second, any lawsuit challenging a ban would be constrained in scope and the amount of discovery. So maybe they could just say something is an interest of a foreign adversary whenever convenient, and prevent anyone from challenging that claim in court by pulling the national security trump card.

>>21292 Please don't post on Lainchan with chatgpt.

>>21290 You basically nailed it on the head it's mostly to rail in non-american corpo's. the entities in question are specifically tech companies in countries america hates (Venezuela, China, Russia, Iran and others to be added when america gets angry). If you look a paragraph under the tech monitoring it specifically includes. >(3) any software, hardware, or any other product or service integral to data hosting or computing service that uses, processes, or retains, or is expected to use, process, or retain, sensitive personal data with respect to greater than 1,000,000 persons in the United States at any point during the year period preceding the date on which the covered transaction is referred to the Secretary for review or the Secretary initiates review of the covered transaction. The Government wants to audit to prevent backdoors if China/Russia wants American data they have to buy it from facebook/meta like everyone else. I'm not lying about that ether, the biggest funder of the restrict act is Twitter(Elon), Facebook(Zuck), and a few other's who profit off selling American data. Everyone flipping out about it at the start, ironically on tiktok is Tiktok pressing their finger on the button. Specifically to get people to try to get senators and reps to go against it. tl;dr it's corpo on corpo violence. >So I don't have to worry over this nothing burger? No, I'd keep in eye on it. as of now it's still pretty broad but for specifically targeting non american tech, but it's just been announced and hasn't had any amendments added yet. every senator and rep has to add their dumb 2 cents to it. Which could make it much worse. But, as it currently stand not much to worry about.

I find this interesting because I like the idea of an increasingly nationalistic and walled off internet where its harder to find foreign content and as such different countries may be more culturally free, independant and isolated. Should be for more than just internet exchanges, but films and television and all of these things, imho. Only hyper weebs in the US should be using east asian software like this, and likewise facebook/whatsapp/instagram & twitter and all these things would be better as exclusive american sites, with small smatterings of expats and the rare foreign national who's slipped in somehow and can't openly admit it. If you're in germany it should be difficult to access twitter, and terribly slow even when you do.... On the other hand I live in the US and would rather that every single member of the national bueaucracy be beheaded before we give them any more power or influence on anything, and I'm pretty sure they'll still be trying to force as many countries as possible to drink our network zogslop wholesale, while I am skeptical that those loosers in west europe are going to stop drinking it up no matter how terrible it is.

>>21291 >Americans are taking their insane culture wars soykaf to a global level and we’re all going to suffer for it the usual?

>>21304 jokes on you foreigner because you have to deal with it. in addition to the culture war soykaf there's a very reasonable world war angle to this, if USA is preparing for a anti china or anti russia war then its imperative to limit their power in american media, limit their ability to collect mass data on US goings on, etc. US soldiers with tiktok on their phones at real risk of giving significant info to the litteral enemy. not sure this is the best way to go about that, but the real question is less what the law says and more what gets done, to which such proposed bills are simple preludes. personally im against trying to start a war with russia.

>>21302 the Americanization of Western Europe isn't a new thing, the web and social media just accelerated a process that had already existed for decades. People have been protesting against "Americanization" ever since the US obtained the technical means to export large amounts of media (the 1920s) > I like the idea of an increasingly nationalistic and walled off internet where its harder to find foreign content and as such different countries may be more culturally free, independant and isolated. read about what happened to the Qing dynasty and pre-Meiji Japan. Isolationism is only effective if all your neighbors are isolationist as well. The only effective means of preserving your nation and culture is to be not worth interacting with

>>21288 some other fun facts, the bill makes it explicitly exempt from the freedom of information act and allows for lobbyists to have much deeper integration into the banning process than would normally be legally allowed. Do not be fooled. This bill is designed from the ground up to betray the people in a manner as bad, or worse than that abomination we know as the Patriot act.

What makes this even worse is the advancements of AI that have been coming around which makes mass surveillance and global censorship even more dangerous than before.

>>21362 Can you elaborate please?

I don't give a fuarrrk to be honest.Good.Ban tiktok.Ban 4chan.ban the whole God damn internet.

>>21291 It has a reputation for being insufferable not for being woke

i dont get what everyones so sad about

Everybody has so far been interpreting this bill along the axis of "privacy", i.e. a restriction of that dimension of an individual's activities online. This is bad, evidently--our personal user experiences of the internet, should this bill pass, will be structurally altered in a way that is deeply unpleasant, inconvenient, maybe even unlivable. But the way I want to read this is as something much larger: as a competition of sovereignty between platforms and states. The cold war interregnum allowed for the relatively independent growth of states, markets, and platforms--the triptych stitching our world together. We tended to cluster towards one or another of them as "the future" (or attempt to revitalize some imagined "past") but like all natural systems an eventual saturation point tripped the agonistic jungle back into conflict. The bill, while self-evidently stupid, is a little smarter than everybody might seem to think: it recognizes the relative decline in the overall importance of geographic borders/state monopoly on violence and the ground it has lost to, for instance, platforms that provide governance/income/livelihood to a greater and greater proportion of the global population. The bill attempts to reintroduce the political priority of geographic sovereignty over networked individuals, platforms, markets, and other institutions--which, by and large, have tried to assert their independence from and priority to the state. This was always going to happen--it should be read not as a decrepit and anachronistic form of state violence attempting to prevent its own demise (though comparisons to the Ottomans and late Tsarism are welcome), but as one vector (geographically-defined state governance) drawing the lines of battle in the always inevitable war between the newly-developed sovereignty of market finance and platform-organized software (TikTok, as one particularly stupid example--but otherwise think Google, Facebook, Tencent, etc). All we've got, on the other hand, is each other. There are enough fascists and reactionaries here caught up in their own neo-feudalisms who won't see it, but for others there's a chance at an intervention based on hacking together solidarity out of the conflicts, contradictions, and ruins of the war described above--the dispossessed forced together geographically, network-adjacent, etc by the mass expropriation the three vectors described above will facilitate/have accumulated already. "May you live in interesting times..."

>>21373 Total control over the circulation of information and therefore, over the thoughts of everyone. It don't matter who stupid or intelligent you are, if your only inputs are controlled by the party, you think and feel what the party want you to think and feel. And it would make the interest groups of billionaires de facto omniscient and omnipotents on the wired, which is the definition St Thomas of Aquinas gave for God. The wired will have gods after all, just not the one we expected.

>>21376 >It don't matter who stupid or intelligent you are, if your only inputs are controlled by the party, you think and feel what the party want you to think and feel. Uh. No?

>>21375 Very interesting perspective on the bill. Are you suggesting this bill is a way for the US to draw lines on what is American worthy outlets in an attempt to preserve it's own identity and sovereignty? In other words, Obstruct ways to go "out of network" (I.E. visit non-US ally sites) to prioritize American media to keep nationalism popular? Coming from someone outside the States, this is what I thought of the bill myself. A way to restrict any US citizen from accessing content (however that content may be or is presented) the current gov judges to be "harmful". A way to keep people in check with the idea of what America should be, undisturbed from outside influence. To the common folk, the bill is clearly soykaf, but for the leaders, it's a stepping stone into controlling a part of the unruly and corporate-driven Wired. >All we've got, on the other hand, is each other. I agree. I hope for the best for you all, and, for now at least, will be there to watch from afar.

>>21288 It probably isn't going anywhere. The EARN IT act was being kicked around in 2022 and died in committee I believe. Given that this bill appears to have caught real flak from the mainstream media, I seriously doubt the RESTRICT act will do better. >>21375 This is an interesting take, but I see it a little bit differently. The United States government has hitherto pursued a policy of supporting a (relatively) free and open internet. It has pursued this policy without compromising it's policing powers because all the predominant information firms have either been American or based in US-affiliated countries. While states adversarial to the USA have tried to lock down the WWW to enable effective domestic cyber policing, the US has been able to have it's cake and eat it too. Now facing the prospect of a foreign information firm gaining significant clout among the American public, politicians of a more authoritarian bent are trying to employ the same methods that those adversarial states use. Ultimately, goal of the RESTRICT act is to force ByteDance to sell TikTok to a western firm that the USA can control, and to place the USA in a position to control any other foreign firm that establishes itself in the US. This state of affairs allows the US to continue promoting an "open" WWW while at the same time holding sway over every firm that matters.

May the Great Satan consume itself. Stay safe.

>>21377 It is easier to train a smart dog. The paradox is that smart people think their intelligence makes them immune from propaganda when in reality their desire to appear smart and informed to their peers is what makes them more vulnerable.

>>21292 >the Tor Project relies heavily upon the United States Government for funding. This hasn't been true for a very long time. The Tor project has a diverse set of sponsors, most of which are unnafiliated with any government. Losing the darpa race and the bureau of democracy, human rights, and labor (the only two government affiliated active sponsors) wouldn't be a big deal. connection between the tor project and the government is blown extremely out of proportion by schizos online who have, at most, a shallow understanding of the project.

>>21400 >The Tor project has a diverse set of sponsors, most of which are unnafiliated with any government. Within the last 5-10 years Tor Project suddenly started advertising their commitment blm, global warming, lqbtbbq, covid, ukraine and every other $current_thing corporations pretend to care about to get their ESG funding. That alone is proof that the Tor Project is not as independent from the Western globalist establishment as you like to think. The public sponsor list doesn't really prove anything. It's not like the DoD mails checks directly to ISIS. There are always cutouts in the middle. >schizos online who have, at most, a shallow understanding of the project Or you're just being naive.

>>21397 Maybe those are people who only think they are smart, or who have convinced others that they are. I know people who can talk with confidence about a topic they know nothing about, making it up as they go along, but I know they are full of crap because I know the territory and they don't. The performance alone is enough to convince others though.

>>21402 If you work in tech you'll know plenty of people with high IQs and great technical skills but get caught in the break area with them and they'll tell you we need to nuke russia to save ukraine from putler and go vegan to save the planet from global warming. It's not that they can't figure out the truth it's that they literally don't care. They just want to be part of the ingroup and this is the stupid soykaf the ingroup currently believes. If the ingroup told them a virgin gave birth to a carpenter who cured leopards and died for our sins they'd pretend to believe that too. The problem with humans is that our brains didn't evolve to rationally process facts and logic, we evolved to be part of a tribal structure and share whatever dumbass beliefs and traditions the tribe uses to build trust and bond with each other.

>>21404 No, they're stupid. Low IQ. Anyone high IQ would have the same opinions as other high IQ people such as myself.

>>21404 A lot of the times when politics or social problems are brought up in the break room, they don't want to be that one coworker that's alienated in the pack. And most of the time, these discussions never go in depth in those environments because they are not socially comfortable to tackle with just a coworker. They will adhere to a logic, but only if it is easy to explain in short quick bursts. Won't delve in controversial facts because they take too long to explain and fully understand. (That's if they value their social standing and their sanity to a degree.) If we take the tiktok ban bill as an example, it is easy to explain and affects most of us negatively, so if you talk about it to a coworker, they'll most likely say it's bad and should not be put in motion. The popular opinion atm. (I'm noticing that this kind of phenomenon doesn't really happen in small tech workplace thought. It's a lot more lax and having a conversation about such controversial topics to a coworker or two in my job is relatively easy and insightful. Either it really depends on the kind of coworker you have or corpo jobs or bigger tech workplaces really does suck ass) You know... All this is if we are assuming the person as more complex ideas and feelings about a topic and delved into the topic at hand before. People described by >>21402 can totally exist lol. The important part is that they need to realize that the topic may be more nuisance than initially thought. If they don't, then it's a problem and won't create any engaging conversation.

>>21408 >They will adhere to a logic, but only if it is easy to explain in short quick bursts. You can't facts and logic someone out of a position they didn't use facts and logic to get into in the first place. A book called The Righteous Mind makes a good case on this. >The important part is that they need to realize that the topic may be more nuisance than initially thought. They don't though. Everything is tribal. The issue is not the issue the issue is just a flag to show people which team you play for. You also need to watch out for people deliberately shunning reality to prove their loyalty to the tribe. People make the mistake of assuming that only happened in religious cults. The modern world has killed god but human psychology is the same as its always been. >If we take the tiktok ban bill as an example, it is easy to explain and affects most of us negatively, so if you talk about it to a coworker, they'll most likely say it's bad and should not be put in motion. The popular opinion atm. That doesn't sound like you changing anyone's mind. It sounds like a coincidence that your rational arguments reach the same conclusion those people have been propagandized with anyway.

>>21429 >That doesn't sound like you changing anyone's mind. Yeah I know. My point wasn't to change someone's mind, but to show a possible example of why people tend to stick with the quick and easy solution of "this is bad so i should disagree with it." in public scenarios. Whether it's the right or wrong idea. (I was using the bill example to have some relevance with the original post of the thread.) >Everything is tribal. Yup. Agreeing with the following, but I believe it's all tribal on the surface level, like how most public political conversations go. Someone can follow the mass, even if they disagree with the mass, just to fit in and not be picked on. (In other words, The folks stuck with agreeing with opinions they disagree with because they don't want to spend the energy to disagree with someone else. Not the same persons you warn about.) I'm putting alot more faith in one's ideas, to be fair. my view on people and the relationship with politics is a bit more hopeful because of how I compare myself with other people and imagine them on the same level as me from the beginning. Complex ideas about many topics, wanting to get on with their life on not dwell on it with others. >The modern world has killed god but human psychology is the same as its always been. We killed god and replaced god with [Current Trend]

>>21432 >a possible example of why people tend to stick with the quick and easy solution of "this is bad so i should disagree with it." in public scenarios I'm a bit out of the loop on this one. I think banning tiktok because it's corrupting the youth or whatever is a conservative position, and you probably don't work with conservatives. From silicon valley's perspective they're struggling to compete with tiktok's product and trying to bribe the government to make their competition go away. I don't know how the corporate media is trying to sell that to liberals though.

>>21444 From what I could gather from the people that oppose it, it's not about the ban itself that is bad, (I personally don't really care if it's derezzed or not. Never used the app.) it's the fine details in the bill that may open the gov to do a bit more than just "ban tiktok". the tl;dr is that if you are trying to access content from "foreign adversaries" on their terms, you may be in legal trouble, Whatever the content may be. It opens a door for them to spy on you if they have any reason to suspect you are being a bad boy. To be honest, I wonder why they need a bill to just ban tiktok in the first place. Can't they just... do it? no bill at all? just restrict the ByteDance's products on your country. I'm not well versed in these kind of process so I have a hard time to understand the existence of the bill.

>>21447 They could embargo products from china, but it would be too broad in the sense that chinese media companies might complain about violation of different rights. There is a difficult and thin line as to what constitutes media/speech/expression, and everyone wants to have clear rules to be able to exploit. Remember that in the US of A, companies have many of the same rights as human beans. IIRC ByteDance is trying to say they are a bastion of free speech, like twitterX. The official from the company tried to use the defense that "TIkTok only accepts the data you give it" which means that it gets all the data off of devices, and when pressured to explain how it is not a MITM app, he said "well first you need to be connected to the network to use the network, and the only things it can read is the data you consent to" which many people have pointed out is either vague or extremely specific and broad reaching. Anyone with half a brain can see what the capabilities are, and they went into full damage control mode by telling people to practice civil activism to defend free speech by opposing the bill with pop up screens on their own platform. They also try to re-frame the bill as "think of all the information that people will loose access to," because a 30 second clip of a man dressed as a doctor telling me to give myself a cool ranch dressing enema is going to improve my skin complexion is more efficient and relatable content than reading free medical journal articles at a library like people did in the past.

>>21292 you know you can still post on 8kun, right? it didn't go away. you can just go back to 8kun

its kind of a fun interpretation that more people are online than ever, and that senators are trying to pass more-draconian-than-ever laws about it. seems like a non-ideal time to try and censor the only thing people had as entertainment during COVID. >>21295 >So maybe they could just say something is an interest of a foreign adversary whenever convenient, this is exactly what the ban is in the first place. tiktok is not undermining democracy, if anything banning it is. nor is it national security or the united states. in fact the reason why the US economy is getting raped so hard by inflation is because bans like this lock Americans out of foreign markets and weaken the power of the USD. >>21299 >corpo on corpo violence >only targeting non american tech >further qualifications ... you don't have to worry about it while it may be so that it threatening one set of corporations and serving another is where much of the heat-of-contest is coming from, the less-bad corporations, and many nonprofits like Mozilla are overwhelmingly against this and warning about it. the public which mainly consists of relative newbies who logged in during COVID and weren't paying attention for sesta-fosta / sopa / pipa / net neutrality / etc cycles of internet activism will react in ways that might remind you of the first such internet censorship law that you heard about, doesn't change that those laws were eventually defeated (with one exception: CISPA) and we don't actually know how bad it would be if they weren't. while PROTECT is a slightly different angle, as each other law was, it would be best to see it in the same light. >>21382 >It probably isn't going anywhere while I've heard its been losing steam, the fact that it was initially largely approved of is cause for concern, as well as the fact that its opposition is some saying it doesn't go far enough. the host of copycat legislation that have been popping up, as well. >The United States government has hitherto pursued a policy of supporting a (relatively) free and open internet not quite; you're assigning the USG the role of interest groups within the USG - on account of flattening all theoretical opposition into a singularized other, but it comes away interpretable as nonsense like, "the US government is petitioning the US government to ban tiktok". but the rest of what you say makes a lot of sense so I'm sorry for assailing you with this pedantry. it's just, a pet peeve. >>21432 >we killed god and replaced it with... psychology. "human psychology", it plays the exact role to many god once did.