There are, but none will be allowed to exist. All tools which help privacy also makes it easier to get away with breaking the law or engaging in immoral behaviour. Online anonymity is under attack through ID verification, and they’re trying to ban encryption. VPNs are also increasingly illegal.
The system is trying to make the world more legible so that it can automate its judgement of you, the processing of your information, and the collection of your private information (since it’s valuable to companies and attractive to governments). They will claim that you must be doing something illegal if you want privacy, and since most people don’t want to look bad, few will come to your defense.
Those bans are a work-in-progress. I expect it to take a few more years personally.
Senate Bill 73 was signed on March 19, making websites accountable for users use of VPNs in the state of Utah. Denmark tried to ban VPNs recently (perhaps not a full ban, just a move to “combat piracy”), but due to pushback it was dropped. Officials in France have talked about VPN bans in connection to a planned social media ban for teens under 15, and there’s a proposed EU regulation called “Child Sexual Abuse Regulation” (it’s also known as Chat Control”) and VPNs seem like a likely way to get past it, so I figure VPNs will be targeted next. VPNs also have legitimate uses which are hard to ban, so they might simply restrict their use.
When laws like this don’t go through at first, they simply try again and again until they manage, so it’s just a question of time. The slippery slope fallacy is rarely much of a fallacy when it comes to things like this
My impression was that the FBI and CIA etc has always been trying to ban encryption an similar, but has so far mostly failed. Strong encryption was illegal (from the Wikipedia page on PGP):
”in February 1993 Zimmermann [inventor of PGP encryption] became the formal target of a criminal investigation by the US Government for “munitions export without a license”. At the time, cryptosystems using keys larger than 40 bits were considered munitions within the definition of the US export regulations; PGP has never used keys smaller than 128 bits, so it qualified at that time.”
But this was later changed to allow strong encryption for the public. So while I share your worry, I take hope that the slippery slope is not inevitable.
There are, but none will be allowed to exist. All tools which help privacy also makes it easier to get away with breaking the law or engaging in immoral behaviour. Online anonymity is under attack through ID verification, and they’re trying to ban encryption. VPNs are also increasingly illegal.
The system is trying to make the world more legible so that it can automate its judgement of you, the processing of your information, and the collection of your private information (since it’s valuable to companies and attractive to governments). They will claim that you must be doing something illegal if you want privacy, and since most people don’t want to look bad, few will come to your defense.
Where (outside of widely-recognized-as-totalitarian societies) are VPNs illegal?
Those bans are a work-in-progress. I expect it to take a few more years personally.
Senate Bill 73 was signed on March 19, making websites accountable for users use of VPNs in the state of Utah. Denmark tried to ban VPNs recently (perhaps not a full ban, just a move to “combat piracy”), but due to pushback it was dropped. Officials in France have talked about VPN bans in connection to a planned social media ban for teens under 15, and there’s a proposed EU regulation called “Child Sexual Abuse Regulation” (it’s also known as Chat Control”) and VPNs seem like a likely way to get past it, so I figure VPNs will be targeted next. VPNs also have legitimate uses which are hard to ban, so they might simply restrict their use.
When laws like this don’t go through at first, they simply try again and again until they manage, so it’s just a question of time. The slippery slope fallacy is rarely much of a fallacy when it comes to things like this
My impression was that the FBI and CIA etc has always been trying to ban encryption an similar, but has so far mostly failed. Strong encryption was illegal (from the Wikipedia page on PGP):
”in February 1993 Zimmermann [inventor of PGP encryption] became the formal target of a criminal investigation by the US Government for “munitions export without a license”. At the time, cryptosystems using keys larger than 40 bits were considered munitions within the definition of the US export regulations; PGP has never used keys smaller than 128 bits, so it qualified at that time.”
But this was later changed to allow strong encryption for the public. So while I share your worry, I take hope that the slippery slope is not inevitable.
I’m reminded of https://xkcd.com/504/ (which was written before “crypto” meant “cryptocurrency”).