This is the most wildly dangerous threat to liberty in this nation's history. And yes I know that sounds weird, but it's true.
People got too comfortable with the idea of just turning on a VPN to get around various bans and thought it'd be a permanent solution. OS level ID verification laws are already being passed. Countries that are often preferred as being "free" and the VPN regions of choice for those with censored internet are now passing insane restrictions. The usefulness of VPNs is coming to an end pretty quickly, as well as anonymity entirely.
And any time this is ever mentioned, it's always responded to with "Good. Anonymity was bad and I'm glad to see it gone" from people too cowardly to stand for their beliefs and post a scan of their ID with their posts.
Parents and policy makers have noticed that their kids attention spans are lower, their ability to read and reason is lower, and most alarming their ability to socialize suffers. Of course they are going to try and stop it. Requiring age verification, and putting the onus on the social media sites seems like a way to do this. We are able to verify ages for all sorts of things online, e.g. gambling sites, opening bank accounts, etc. It shouldn't be too hard for social media sites to figure out how to require age verification to create an account that can access their service.
I have no idea why tbh! But I think an age gated internet is far worse a solution than parents simply enabling device management on mobile phones and filtering on their home networks.
Unfortunately, it was worded to address the privacy concerns of the time and the Supreme Court over the years has watered it down significantly, not the least of which has been to allow the warrantless purchase of personal information from corporations who collect it from their customers, regardless of their consent or knowledge.
Notwithstanding whether there's a chance at being ratified, we could update the fourth amendment to modernize it and counter bad Supreme Court rulings as well, but I'm afraid it's going to have to be a repeated process of touching it up from time to time in the face of bad actors in government who want to chip away at its protections.
I don't think it's hyperbolic at all. I think this is something that absolutely must happen, and that it's pretty obvious that it must happen. But then again, I often cite Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four as the most influential book I've ever read in my life, so I'm not exactly unbiased.
It's a major problem with no fix for it.
volume matters
You better sit down before you look up “citizens united."
[1] https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/citizens-united-...
I've said this before, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47127261 But I think – a few true believers aside – these bills are part of a systematic, global push to put the internet genie back into the bottle. It's actually a very boring, humdrum type of "conspiracy" being done out in the open by vendors pandering to the state.
It's easier to have it laid out when it's the outgroup. Here are a few resources on the topic from The Atlantic Council, the NBER, US officials, and The Economist talking about China's push to "export" its "surveillance state."
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/is...
https://www.economist.com/international/2025/11/13/chinas-cr...
https://www.chosun.com/english/world-en/2025/11/25/CPLM4FFKQ...
This paper talks about the numbers / shows the exports are occurring, https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31676/w316...
Of course, it's easier to point at the out group than the in group; so what's left unsaid is that we're doing it too. Because the charade of saving the children is really about power. Real power. Karp-ian "scare enemies and on occasion kill them" power.
I wrote this in the context of the Discord ID fiasco; but I invite people to examine the why and how these systems are being implemented. For example, why Discord? Why Twitch? Why now? These platforms aren't actually that important. Not as much as messaging platforms like Telegram and Whatsapp. So why them?
I think it has something to do with Nepal and the global, persistent fears of another Arab spring.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/15/more-egalitarian-ho...
Discord's goose was cooked when 20-somethings and teenagers used Discord to overthrow the Nepalese government and elect a new PM.
It used to be that superpowers would export arms and fighter jets to align other states with their interests. It's how superpowers turn their customers into client states.
In the modern world, the surveillance state is starting to fulfil that role. If you buy a surveillance state from the US or China, you are now dependent on updates, maintenance and upkeep from US and/or China. You are also directly uploading all of your intelligence data to the US and/or China. And there's – of course – the nice little ancillary benefit of state aligned contractors making a bit of dough on the side.
Age verification keeps popping up everywhere, because connecting online activity to IDs is essential for establishing ground truth. If it's truly about age verification, then why don't they ask people to verify with a credit card?
Adult entertainment services have been doing tacit age verification this way for a very long time now. Seems to work just fine. Yes, minors can get credit cards in the US, but they can be identified by the block / number.
These age verification systems could also have been a new zero-knowledge proof system; and only that zkp system. Or, ideally, the formerly libertarian tech industry could have banded together to tell the authorities to get bent.
But that's not what's happening. Instead, we're getting the rollout of very specific asks, via Discord's documentation,
If you choose Facial Age Estimation, you’ll be prompted to record a short video selfie of your face. The Facial Age Estimation technology runs entirely on your device in real time when you are performing the verification. That means that facial scans never leave your device, and Discord and vendors never receive it. We only get your age group.
Even if that data is hashed, as the human face can only be so many values, you can brute force it and establish exactly who the user is with the help of the trillions of other images people have been uploading everywhere.
For some reason, people are still stuck in a human-first world. They assume that as long as it's not an image or it's not the whole text; it's fine. It's not.
We're anthropomorphising machines. A machine doesn't need pictures; "a bunch of metadata" will do just fine.
Collectively, the public imagination is still stuck in the era where the surveillance state would have required tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of humans sitting in a shadow-y room going over pictures and videos. Today, a bunch of vectors and a large multi-modal model will do just fine. Servers are cheap (for a nation state) and never need to eat or sleep.
Certain firms are already doing this for the US Gov, https://x.com/vxunderground/status/2024188446214963351 / https://xcancel.com/vxunderground/status/2024188446214963351
As inference gets more efficient, these capabilities will only expand. And now suddenly, everyone gets a personalized Stasi LLM looking over their shoulder, forever.
I think an early version of this has already seen operational use in places like Dubai. There were recently stories about people getting arrested for photos they shared in private group chats:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/03/31/expats-fle...
https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15693741/Paranoid-Dub...
https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15739739/airline-work...
People were running around in paranoia that their friends are snitching on them to the authorities, but the number of cases and distinct groups were too large and too foreign for it to be Emirati patriots leaking it. A bunch of british flight attendants are very unlikely Emirati patriots. Or any of these groups,
According to official figures released alongside the announcement, the 109 arrests form part of a broader enforcement campaign that has seen 189 individuals detained since the beginning of the conflict on February 28. Of those arrested, 67 are UAE nationals, while 122 are foreign residents or visitors representing 23 different nationalities. The largest groups among the foreign detainees include Indian nationals (31), Pakistani nationals (22), Filipino nationals (18), Egyptian nationals (14), and British nationals (9). The remaining 28 detainees come from a mix of other nationalities including Americans, Canadians, Australians, and various European and Asian passport holders.
Fact 1) We know the gulf states have access to Whatsapp messages, https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/insight/dubai-police-use-what...
Fact 2) They are clearly somehow identifying drone damage photos and videos shared in private chats and using that to arrest people.
But the Emirati population isn't that large. They import their labor. So I doubt they have humans going through the millions of messages that their system captures. Or, viewing these images and videos one at a time.
My hypothesis is that this is the first publicly recognizable case where a state actor has used a multi-modal model for mass surveillance.
I think models are being used to flag photos and conversations; and flagging them so that the senders can be imprisoned.
This is the future. That's what this is all about. The perfect watchers watching everyone everywhere forever. And yes, of course, it needs your ID.
These provisions won't stop a tech-savvy teenager, but they certainly will impact the privacy of every regular Utah resident who just wants to keep their data out of the hands of brokers or malicious actors.”
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/utahs-new-law-regulati... (incl. donation link)
Utah legislators should know the reason the EFF makes this statement is that it’s true.
Yes, there are 50 states. But besides some superficial differences, they tend to cluster in terms of policy. So, as a state slides further towards one extreme, it's not easy to decide which straw will break the camel's back. Because it could always be worse elsewhere, and is it really worth the trouble?
True when compared to emigrating to another country, which is much harder than most assume.
Moving is extremely disruptive if you have a lot of family and friends nearby, though. You go from having a huge community and social circle to almost nothing. Maybe some work friends to begin seeding a new social life, but everything has to be rebuilt.
This is why “if you don’t like it, you can leave” (the parent commenter didn’t claim this, I’m being it up separately) is not a good argument for tyrannical government decisions that get imposed on citizens of a location. They are invested in that place and have built lives there. Telling them to abandon it all and start over somewhere else is not a reasonable response. Some things have to be fought.
Culturally, especially in the US, the idea of packing up your bags, going somewhere else, or even to a new frontier used to be a big part of its appeal even and national identity. This isn't in contrast to fighting for things, in fact people do neither and that's probably related because both involve a level of risk and starting over that's now entirely foreign.
Especially in a world that is changing as fast as ours does now not being able or unwilling to start new or reinvent yourself is a big problem. It was the internal superpower of the US compared to other countries that it had so many people who were just willing to go and build a city, or even a state or a new religion somewhere just for the sake of it.
- Wyoming
- Idaho
100mi doesn't get you into the population center of either state. the western US is BIG, really you're talking like 1k miles to get anywhere that's meaningfully different from utah. Depending on where you live in utah, that might not get you out of the state either.
That word "relatively" is doing a lot of work in this phrase. 50 options sounds great until you think about the realities of it. As someone who's moved around a half dozen times, shared "values and beliefs" pales in comparison to the practical concerns of jobs, family, climate.
I personally would love to live in a western state like oregon, arizona, or new mexico where I feel like there is an appropriate balance between freedom, geography, and government for my lifestyle.
Also a weakness. Utah, one of the most stunningly beautiful states in the union, is completely under the grip of a regressive theocracy that has controlled nearly every aspect of life there for over a century. Really sucks.
I think it's also doing well re: reproductive rate. I expect it to continue be a thriving place for years to come.
I'd take SLC over all of Mississippi, for example.
The VPN thing skews that a little more -- and is hilarious given how it's like the state that is largest consumer of internet porn -- but the city is far more livable than people give it credit.
Yeah fair you got me there
Yes, moving is possible, and easier than switching countries. But the biggest strength of the U.S. is not that people can move, but that the blast radius is contained. The strength is being able to think later "I'm glad we didn't try that everywhere at once." The strength is being able to experiment, not necessarily have states aligned to with all there residents needs within a certain threshold.
Uprooting a well grown tree isn't easy.
If you hitch-hike from California to Vermont while feeding your kids whatever rats and river water you can dredge up and then set up a tent in the forest until you can score a job at Dollar General, then you are an evil neglectful bastard and the state will be on your ass and take your kids away.
You might be better off actually moving countries if you are broke. Because for whatever reason it is better tolerated because you can just say you were broke and your children went through hard times because the last country was evil or something.
According to whom?
The immense hardship endured by migrants isn't a badge of glory, but the direct result of a global economic system designed to extract wealth from the global south to enrich the global north.
The current economic disparity between the United States and the countries to its south is not an accident. The wealth of the United States, like much of the Western Hemisphere, was built on a foundation of 500 years of ongoing theft—specifically through the colonization and theft of indigenous lands, and the mass kidnapping and wage theft of the Atlantic slave trade. The governments and agencies that now police the borders are institutions built on this stolen land.
The US imposition of NAFTA allowed heavily subsidized American agribusiness giants to flood the Mexican market with cheap corn, which decimated Mexican agricultural communities, drove small farmers off their land, and triggered massive waves of migration.
In Central America, the CIA sponsored the 1954 coup in Guatemala to overthrow a government that was attempting land reforms that threatened the profits of the American-owned United Fruit Company. The US government also heavily funded brutal military regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala that committed massacres and genocide against their own citizens. The US government effectively bankrolled the destruction of these countries, and then militarized its border to punish the survivors fleeing the devastation.
The migrant walking from Ecuador is not a "glorious immigrant" immune to state violence; they are treated as walking meat by human trafficking cartels and hunted by authorities.
If Utah wants a firewall, they can erect one at their borders. It's crazy of them to expect everyone else to do their work for them.
It is unrealistic for many to move states or live in their ideal state, but we don't even live in the "50 different options" world anymore.
Corporate and NGO interest groups are seeing to it that your politicians and journalists are controlled from the municipal to national levels. Tribal two-party politics has reduced our world to "red" and "blue" states, and plenty authoritarian legislation has bipartisan support.
You also can't just keep playing whack-a-mole and uprooting your entire life each time a state you considered safe suddenly introduces legislation you disagree with.
Some would even argue that it isn't very patriotic to flee a community and allow it to rot instead of participating in its liberation.
Even then as you see with the abortion ban, the folks on that side will not be satisfied without a federal level policy and they are just whittling away state by state.
The "red" people in blue states are opposed to the freedoms people in blue states have, while the "blue" people in red states are denied freedoms people in blue states have.
So, while people are "trapped" in blue states, they generally aren't suffering by being denied rights.
Show me a state that will invalidate the "mandatory arbitration" clauses and let me sue Google (in small claims court) if they lock me out of my account or falsely take down my video on copyright grounds. You won't find that because it's impossible.
There are minor differences between states, like gun or drug ownership. Or various tax levels. But that's about it.
There ought to be some significant level of cohesion between constituent states in a federation (like the US or India) or even a confederation (like the EU or Switzerland), else the common market and the common law system won't be able to function. It should not be overdone though.
Of course, SCOTUS may not see it that way. But clearly this is an imposition of the age verification strategy in project 2025, which is meant to be an imposition of Christian religious values on everyone.
This will definitely work. It sounds like it's time for some "How not to use a VPN" articles.
https://www.grapecollective.com/prohibitions-grape-bricks-ho...
You can teach them how to start a fire, and fire safety rules for the home, and you can teach them how to secure their cars and point out common vulnerabilities, but you can't actually counsel people on how to commit a crime or do something illegal.
Well, you can and I guess that is your "free speech" but the judge is also going to show you the schedule of fines and penalties.
Utah has chosen, unfortunately, to abrogate the rights of parents to raise their children and to allow people to engage privately online.
I pretty much foresaw this and much more that very moment. Not that I think social media isn't partly carcinogenic or worse, but I think monopolies and censorship are worse. And sometimes, for best results, we must accept some bad with the good...
I thought the US has free speech?
A more truthful take would be something like "Utah is the latest state to pass yet another law that conflicts with the constitution and will not go into effect".
Ironically, inaccurate journalism is a side effect of the freedom of speech that the first amendment grants us, but the benefits far outweigh the downsides, even if it means you need to dig around for better journalistic sources.
The law will go into effect probably. It may be negated later.
You could say that they are in effect when the law becomes official, but for all practical purposes, the prohibition on describing what a VPN is or how to use it is unenforceable and not in effect.
We use a VPN to enable remote users to access our internal network for things we don't want exposed to the public at large. And we're not a tech company.
This really sounds like someone who has no fucking clue trying to legislate away all the loopholes to their other shitty legislation.
Story goes they need proof of humanity for their business (advertising) survive. Pesky things like the continuity of businesses they don’t own, that can be figured out later.
What if the pretty advanced e-government system decides it will not be unblocked?
> The law, which takes effect May 6, doesn't make VPNs illegal — but it's a blow to your rights, even if you don't live in Utah.
> websites subject to the state's age verification law will be legally barred from explaining how to use a VPN to get around age restrictions. They'll also be liable for enforcing age verification for any user within Utah's physical borders — regardless of their apparent virtual location.
The title is disgustingly clickbaity.
Second would be technically impossible, or the responsibility of VPN providers to somehow forward geo-location information for website operators to consume.
Should be, but I wouldn't bet on it. We can see what states have been doing about "child sex abuse material" and arresting people for fictional stories, animations, etc on the theory that it might contribute to viewers becoming predators. It's disgusting stuff to even think about in this principled context, but it's wild that something fake is treated basically the same as the real thing. That's a lot of maybes and what-ifs resulting in child abuse convictions for something fictional. Might as well start up the pre-crime division.
Edit: Why do people disagree? Is it just because it is repulsive? Or is there an actual legal theory and material harm you are thinking about? If it's just "gross", isn't that the basis for many people's anti-gay stances, and how is this different?
> if a person suffers damages from a minor committing the same offense repeatedly on school grounds … the person may bring a cause of action against a parent or guardian with legal custody of the minor to recover costs and damages caused by the repeated offense … the court may waive part or all of the parent's or guardian's liability for costs or damages if the court finds … that the parent or guardian reported the minor's wrongful conduct to law enforcement after the parent or guardian knew of the minor's wrongful conduct.
And of course
> A person may not bring a cause of action against the state, an agency of the state, or a contracted provider of an agency of the state, under this section
Is this standard stuff?
Plus the issue of compelling otherwise fully lawful speech around providing VPN instructions.
It is quite the coincidence that the NSA has their datacenter in Utah.
When the Bill of Rights was passed the purpose of those amendments was to restrict government action that may limit a person's ability to share ideas. I think that clearly makes anything that makes privacy online harder unconstitutional.
But, we also don't need the Supreme Court to weigh in on constitutionality. It is the responsibility of citizens to assert their Constitutional rights. That often looks like law suits against the State trying to infringe on our rights.
Where I live, one site I log into started asking for my birth date. That is in a State were age verification is not yet even being talked about. So my response is to never go to that site again. I believe it will change once users start dropping off that site.
This VPN law is a weak attempt to claim that it’s not enough to geo-block people, similar to the UK governing bodies that are trying to go after websites that have geoblocked the UK because they don’t believe that’s sufficient.
Is this balls? You can curse here.