I just chaired a session at the FOCI conference earlier today, where people were talking about Internet censorship circumvention technologies and how to prevent governments from blocking them. I'd like to remind everyone that the U.S. government has been one the largest funders of that research for decades. Some of it is under USAGM (formerly BBG, the parent of RFE/RL)
and some of it has been under the State Department, partly pursuant to the global Internet freedom program introduced by Hillary Clinton in 2010 when she was Secretary of State.
I'm sure the political and diplomatic valence is very different here, but the concept of "the U.S. government paying to stop foreign governments from censoring the Internet" is a longstanding one.
Sure, if that’s your problem with my comment, feel free to rephrase it in your mind to something like "to promote fringe-right and anti-immigration parties and movements that any sane observer recognizes as authoritarian and racist because they’re not even bothering to dogwhistle". If you need a source for that you haven’t been following the news.
This court case has nothing to do with the claim made that US government explicitly stated that they want to promote racists and fringe-right ideology among our allies.
Sure, but it is not the same thing as explicitly promoting racist and fringe-right ideas.
JD Vance may have voiced support (I didn’t listen to his speech) for conservative or right-wing political forces in Europe, but it is not the same as promoting explicitly racist and fringe-right ideas. There is a night and day difference between the original claim, and the evidence presented.
Sorry but you are just riding semantics here - what is the difference between far-right, extreme-right and “fringe”-right?
AfD is classified as extreme-right by German intelligence.
The US vice president gave them an endorsement in public speeches and met with their leaders privately.
The AFD is actively promoting racist, fringe(sic!)-right ideas such as “remigration” (aka trying to get rid of all German citizens that don’t look “german” enough)
The US government is explicitly promoting the racist ideology that parties like the AFD represent.
If that isn’t enough to open your eyes, please explain what level of “evidence” would be enough - but I rather feel like you have made up your mind long before and aren’t really looking for an honest discussion
> Sorry but you are just riding semantics here - what is the difference between far-right, extreme-right and “fringe”-right?
I have no idea what is the practical difference. I would say that far right is a party or a group that believe in inherent superiority of certain race over the other. Like, white power, etc. I do not think that saying things like “my culture is better” is racist or makes you far right.
> AfD is classified as extreme-right by German intelligence.
> The US vice president gave them an endorsement in public speeches and met with their leaders privately.
> The AFD is actively promoting racist, fringe(sic!)-right ideas such as “remigration” (aka trying to get rid of all German citizens that don’t look “german” enough)
It shows support by JD Vance, sure.
> The US government is explicitly promoting the racist ideology that parties like the AFD represent.
I would not agree that this constitutes as explicitly promoting. In my view explicitly promoting an ideology is standing on a stand and repeating the goals of said ideology. Did JD Vance said that reimigration is a good thing, and that he fully supports it for Germany? Idk, if he did, let’s see, and I will concede.
> If that isn’t enough to open your eyes, please explain what level of “evidence” would be enough - but I rather feel like you have made up your mind long before and aren’t really looking for an honest discussion
I didn’t make my mind. I’m very much against racism, and any other form of discrimination. I’m also against intellectually lazy forms of debate.
In my view and my experience the journalists discredited themselves so much in the past 5 years, so I simply do not trust their interpretations at all (regardless of their political affiliation). Show me the source, so I can see myself.
I showed you all the sources but you prefer to close your eyes.
Of course even the most hardcore AFD racists wouldn’t go on a stand and proclaim that they support remigration, because that would get the party banned and destroy all chances of them getting to power.
I know it’s a tired example online but at least I know a bit about it: do you think the Nazis wrote in their party agenda and proclaimed in their public speeches that the white race is superior and they would start a genocide to exterminate subhumans?
Of course they only revealed their true faces between each other or AFTER they achieved absolute power. Anything else would be ridiculously stupid.
> I do not think that saying things like “my culture is better” is racist
It’s not as racist as the other example you gave but it’s very nationalistic - and from that it’s just a small step to go “if my culture is better, why shouldn’t we rule the world?” - “if my culture is better why should we allow other (worse!) cultures to exist”?
If you arrived at that point you almost have to exterminate other cultures - how could you allow something bad to poison and destroy the people? They could be saved by your obviously better culture! You would almost be a monster not “liberating” them!
“Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen” - look it up
> shows support by JD Vance, sure
He is the vice president of the United States - it’s not like he is some random guy whose opinion has no weight
> Show me the source, so I can see myself.
Then just listen to the speeches and proclamations of your heads of state.
If you are as antiracist as you claim it should be easy to reveal the agenda they never quite state openly but that is always present between the lines
> do you think the Nazis wrote in their party agenda and proclaimed in their public speeches that the white race is superior and they would start a genocide to exterminate subhumans?
This is funny. Are you saying that germans of the early 20th century had the same perspective as you?
> It’s not as racist as the other example you gave but it’s very nationalistic - and from that it’s just a small step to go “if my culture is better, why shouldn’t we rule the world?” - “if my culture is better why should we allow other (worse!) cultures to exist”? If you arrived at that point you almost have to exterminate other cultures - how could you allow something bad to poison and destroy the people? They could be saved by your obviously better culture! You would almost be a monster not “liberating” them!
Maybe, maybe not. The same thing can be said about left as well, and we have a lot of examples in history how left ideologies were taken too far and millions of people had perished in the process: industrialization of USSR by Stalin, Mao's great leap, etc.
So, the bottom line is that extremes are bad.
> Then just listen to the speeches and proclamations of your heads of state. If you are as antiracist as you claim it should be easy to reveal the agenda they never quite state openly but that is always present between the lines
Which ones? Why is it always a referral to something abstract that I have to go an look up in order to prove your point? Do you have a particular speech in mind that you've listened to, where on minute XYZ JD Vance stated something that made you believe that he pushes racist or what not agenda? Please share.
Or, perhaps, you've read about the fact that JD Vance made the speech (and you never listened to it in its entirety), and you've read an article where the journalist attributed some things to JD Vance and his speech?
The court case established the ability for ICE to go and harass anyone who they think looks like they're potentially a migrant. Hmm, I wonder what they'll use to profile those people...
And this domestic ruling is, in your view, an evidence of the “very explicitly stated goals of sowing discord within the US's former "allies", to weaken Europe, and to promote racist and fringe-right views.”?
You can’t be serious. The original claim is about the foreign policy of US government to promote racist ideologies, and your “proof” is a ruling about constitutionality of using race and language as a indicator to investigate someone’s immigration status?
So yeah, this is promoting racist views of "assume everyone who looks non-white and speaks a language other than English as a potential undocumented migrant and go harass them with impunity".
I see that you still do not understand the difference between the stated claim, and its scope, and your evidence. You also seem not to understand the difference between the US government, which is an executive branch, and the Supreme Court, which is a judicial branch, and by design has no policy to push.
Who do you think was involved in this supreme court case? Who was racially profiling people and doing the harassment based on race again? Which group was doing this policy that the SC gave a green stamp to continue doing?
You're ignoring that "to promote racist and fringe-right views" isn't grouped with the foreign things.
Do you see the difference?
I see that you still do not understand the stated claim. Let me break it down for you, maybe English isn't your first language (do be worried about a Kavanaugh stop if you travel in the US though, sorry, I hope they don't detain you for too many weeks):
The claims were:
- sowing discord within the US's former "allies"
- to weaken Europe
- to promote racist and fringe-right views.
Where is the entirely foreign requirement for racist and fringe-right views?
But sure, continue moving the goalposts. I guess to you its only a bad thing for the government to promote foreign racist policies. Is it not a bad thing for the candidate for VP to openly say racist lies and openly acknowledge he knew he was lying and he would continue saying such lies if it accomplishes his political goals? Are you OK with him doing so? Why continue supporting it?
I did not move goal posts at all. In my first reply to your comment I asked for evidence. Even if I use your current parsing (and yes, English is not my first language), I am sorry, but using a Supreme Court decision that is related to domestic matter as evidence of sowing discord and weakening of Europe is ridiculous.
Even if I focus on the "promotion of the racist and fringe-right views", this court decision does not prove it at all. The court is independent, and rules based on their interpretation of the law and the constitution. It has no goal to promote anything.
> Are you OK with him doing so? Why continue supporting it?
No, I am not. But politics today are like this, and you won't find a politician who does not do it.
This whole discussion stemmed from your wild claim, and I did not believe your claim, and I was interested to know how you would prove it.
And yet here you are, moving the goal posts again.
> using a Supreme Court decision that is related to domestic matter as evidence of sowing discord and weakening of Europe is ridiculous.
The statement "to promote racist and fringe-right view" is a separate concept you just continue to choose to ignore. Adding it as a requirement when it wasn't is precisely the definition of moving the goalposts. Painting that statement as having a foreign requirement isn't arguing in good faith, especially after this gets pointed out multiple times.
I'm glad I didn't bother wasting my time providing you with more evidence. It wouldn't have made any difference to you. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink.
> this court decision does not prove it at all
This court decision tells the administration feel free to use race as much as you want to harass people even if there's zero other signals they might not have legal status. Once again, if you can't see the racist enablement of this decision you're choosing to be blind to it.
> But politics today are like this, and you won't find a politician who does not do it.
I can absolutely find politicians that don't call black people monkeys and claiming foreigners are eating your pets. It's really not that hard. It's sad you seem to think that's normal. You might want to re-evaluate who you support if you think they all do this stuff.
I’ve read the article and I do not see any evidence to the original claim. Where did Vance say that he supports racist ideologies? Being anti-immigration is not racist.
I didn’t say “illegal immigration” I said being “anti-immigration”. Not sure why you’re mentioning Bernie—think that’s more a comment on your politics than mine.
But to be explicit: The current administration’s deportation push is racist. The administration is racist. If you think there’s any other rationale you’re either lying or being duped.
I did not move a goal post. Show me where the US government explicitly states that their goal is to promote racist ideology. Not a new article about nothing and filled with interpretations. But an actual evidence.
> And no, saying things like “read his tweets/NYT/whatever yourself” is not evidence
It actually is evidence. Just not conclusive beyond a reasonable doubt. I suspect you're not going to get the better responses that might actually convince you. 1) because you're clearly being argumentative (nothing wrong with that) but primarily 2) because the people smart enough to read through the bullshit and construct an argument with real evidence and citations, are already smart enough to know you're not actually interested in the reasonably convincing argument they might produce.
You're demanding, repeatedly, for concrete evidence. You're not going to get whatever impossible standard you're asking for. Which does seem to be your intent. You don't appear to want to understand because you refuse to engage with anything other than perfect undeniable proof. That's actually an absurd way to behave.
Imagine you're talking to your friend, they think their spouse is cheating on them. Their spouse used to joke about that kinda thing, they're constantly leaving for business trips that they seem to be searching for, they never used to lock their phone but now it's constantly locked, or hidden away when they walk into the room. Oh and you then find out that they've cheated on their previous spouse before their first divorce.
Are they cheating again?
Here I'm sure you'd demand video proof of them having sex with someone other than their spouse, ideally with a newspaper in the frame so you know it's not from before, right?
That's not what a reasonable person would demand. You've right to demand a higher standard when you're going to convict someone in a legal proceeding. It's inane to place that standard on every single observation or conclusion. If one idea is a better predictor of future actions and outcomes. It's reasonable to use that until you get better evidence. Burying your head in the sand and pretending [thing you don't like] isn't true because no one has concrete evidence of them admitting guilt... is the dumbest thing I've read today. It's still early but I'm hoping you still win, because holy shit dude!
You are saying that basically we do not have to hold anyone to any standard because (1) it’s hard, and (2) it’s enough to use prior behavior and common sense to deduce the conclusion.
Great!
If the US government explicitly stated their goal of promoting racist ideology, then it should not be hard to find a video clip of a video conference, a published policy memo, or anything of the sorts, that states this. Not an interpretation written by a journalist of something, but a raw source. But, there is nothing.
All we have is articles written in media (which can be biased), which you parse with your own specific bias (so, it’s already bias(bias(rumor))), and you want me to accept it?
> You are saying that basically we do not have to hold anyone to any standard
No, you have completely misunderstood.
> it’s enough to use prior behavior and common sense to deduce the conclusion.
Yes? It's not a difficult concept that you can use pattern recognition to predict how someone, or something will behave. It works especially well the more moving parts there are. The more moving parts, the more likely you are to find conflicting bits. So in that case, if you want to predict or explain the root cause of the behavior, you're going to need to use heuristics.
I really enjoy my friends description: He explained is as "I don't actually believe that Trump is a foreign asset. But given there's no daylight in between his behavior and the behavior of a foreign asset; you can just assume he is, and his decisions make sense." Feel free to substitute racist for asset if you'd like. The point is, your demand for magical proof is a red herring, you can predict correctly without it. Thus it's useful to describe them by the way they behave.
Technically, I guess you don't need to, you're arguments are a perfect counter example, about how you can just ignore the parts that make you feel icky, or conflict with what you assume you understand. Most people you talk to will not be able to perfectly explain the ideas they hold so if you want to learn what they might have to teach, you need to make some kind of attempt to engage with them, even if in the end you find you still disagree, you're very likely to learn something. But given how transparently you don't want to, I thought it might be nice to point out how obvious it is to anyone who might have something useful to explain, that you're just looking to get off on the one sided argument.
> and you want me to accept it? I’m sorry, but it sounds like BS.
I personally don't care what you accept. My reply wasn't attempting to convince you of anything. Just wanted to point out how obvious it is you're not even trying, just for the slim chance that you actually might want to.
No, I understood you quite well. You said that I am just argumentative for the sake of it, and that we can use deduction based on the incomplete evidence because it makes sense.
> Yes? It's not a difficult concept that you can use pattern recognition to predict how someone, or something will behave. It works especially well the more moving parts there are. The more moving parts, the more likely you are to find conflicting bits. So in that case, if you want to predict or explain the root cause of the behavior, you're going to need to use heuristics.
What does it even mean? How can you explain root cause of something with heuristics?
> The point is, your demand for magical proof is a red herring, you can predict correctly without it. Thus it's useful to describe them by the way they behave.
Sure, lol. So, what do you do with other "evidence" that does not fit the prediction you are trying to make? You just discard it as "error"?
> Technically, I guess you don't need to, you're arguments are a perfect counter example, about how you can just ignore the parts that make you feel icky, or conflict with what you assume you understand. Most people you talk to will not be able to perfectly explain the ideas they hold so if you want to learn what they might have to teach, you need to make some kind of attempt to engage with them, even if in the end you find you still disagree, you're very likely to learn something. But given how transparently you don't want to, I thought it might be nice to point out how obvious it is to anyone who might have something useful to explain, that you're just looking to get off on the one sided argument.
So, it's on me then that when people are making outlandish claims without evidence that they fail to produce such evidence?
> I personally don't care what you accept. My reply wasn't attempting to convince you of anything. Just wanted to point out how obvious it is you're not even trying, just for the slim chance that you actually might want to.
I do. I am open minded. Show me the evidence of your claim, and let's discuss it on its merits. Not "heuristics" and "predictions".
> So, it's on me then that when people are making outlandish claims without evidence that they fail to produce such evidence?
Yes, but that yes depends on your goals. Your name is reliabilityguy so I'm going to assume you've read the 500Mile email lore already. A responsible person will dig in and engage and try to figure out why emails only work for 500 miles. Even though that's clearly absurd, and they don't have any concrete evidence that's what's going on.
Which is exactly what you're doing. "Your evidence doesn't fit into my context or check my boxes so you obviously don't know anything!"
That's that's the behavior of children, and people who care more about proving their ego over learning something new. You could choose to ask open questions, or ignore people who aren't trying equall...
> Sure, lol. So, what do you do with other "evidence" that does not fit the prediction you are trying to make? You just discard it as "error"?
> No, I understood you quite well. You said that I am just argumentative for the sake of it,
> I do. I open minded. Show me the evidence of your claim, and let's discuss it on its merits. Not "heuristics" and "predictions".
then from higher in the thread
> Show me the tweet please this is all I am asking
> So, basically, you are saying that they are openly racist?
> I didn’t make my mind. I’m very much against racism, and any other form of discrimination. I’m also against intellectually lazy forms of debate.
but mostly, you respond like an argumentive asshole. None of these are open or exploratory comments. They all seek to win the debate, not to learn anything.
I guess the end of it is; the conversation you have with someone is exactly on you as much as you want it to be. You say that you are, but you definitely are not understanding what I'm trying to explain. Right, doesn't matter in this context, so right or wrong, part of that is on me, and part of that is on you. Xkcd has a comic for you already https://xkcd.com/1984/ You're welcome to shout "WRONG" into the microphone before wandering off on a tangent. But you don't learn anything that way.
This is fine. If successful, the next administration can just leverage it for a different kind of agenda. In fact, by the time we know whether it's successful, this admin will likely be gone.
I'm a bit conflicted though. I hated the last admin's censorship efforts for wrong think. Now, looking at the online discourse landscape, I'm starting to think we might have thrown out the baby with the birth water. Why can't we just be normal!
I have no idea why they would do this, but I often wonder if maybe soft power becomes less valuable in a world where more countries are able to empower themselves on their own. Perhaps soft power itself is only valuable as long as this asymmetry is sustained. Otherwise, it’s all about hard power.
Exactly. We are heading out of a time where soft power is stronger than hard. We are going back to the days of hard power being the only thing that really matters. As resource competition becomes more intense, and economies stagnate, you can no longer afford to play “nice” with your countries’ future. It’s pretty annoying to me a lot of commenters on the internet are apparently too ideological or immature to grasp that.
Hard power was always stronger.
That’s why the US was so successful in the past century - they just have a lot of weapons and little hesitation to use them. It’s a pretty bellicose culture too.
I still think that soft power helped the US tremendously. For all their faults i really had a very positive view on the US, most of it was coloured through soft power. “Inventing” modern democracy, liberating EU from the nazis, Rock’n’Roll, hippie movement, Hollywood, early internet culture - all that overshadowed the imperialism.
Now the mask has come off. And I believe you are right that it ultimately may not matter too much. But then again I doubt the US will be able to style itself again as the “good guys”, the ones who spread democracy to all the oppressed people and and so on without significant effort.
Modern democracy is screwed because of hyperpropaganda and political parties. Liberating EU from Nazis, a long time ago, no one cares anymore. Rock’n’roll not that popular now. Hippie movement is dead, replaced by woke. Hollywood is becoming devalued due to AI and other countries creating their own content, and most things are remakes now. Early internet culture is gone, everything is siloed into social media apps.
The United States has nothing now, back to imperialism it seems.
Look at the state of affairs that swept a cretin like trump into power, the us was rotting away ever since 1990, it needed external competition, that threatened the social fabric to stay stable. Now every utopist living in play pretend land can declare his reality absolut and ignore all the piled up problems.
Propaganda (noun): Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is being presented. Propaganda can be found in a wide variety of different contexts.[0]
I tried accessing betfair site. It's not your ISP or govt blocks it but betfair themselves blocks traffic from countries they are not legally have business.
Scount mindset: the discovery of the truth to the best of our ability without fear or favour.
The metaphor is: A scout who tells the general his troops are strong when they are weak, that the enemy is weak when it is strong, is a bad scout.
The opposite is a soldier mindset: a soldier who fears to fight when ordered, no matter the strength of the enemy, isn't a good soldier.
You can call the search for truth an agenda in its own right if you wish, but it lacks the "primarily used to influence or persuade" aspect of propaganda.
Why do you see the negative in everything, even metaphors? There's no slavery here. There's not even "slavery" even in actual scouts working for actual generals.
And a general needs the same *mindset*, even if they must also engage in performative ho-rah-ing to the troops.
A general may need to order their troops to die for the greater good, they may need to lie to the troops to up morale, but if a general lets themselves believe they're strong when they're weak, they're bad at being generals. If they don't listen to their scouts, if they shoot the messenger, they're bad at being generals.
My ego prefers to be the kind of person who ends up at truth over being one who has fooled themselves into thinking they have already found it, which makes changing my mind easier than others find it.
I am pleased to say, others have also remarked that I am closer to this ideal than others they know.
>My ego prefers to be the kind of person who ends up at truth over being one who has fooled themselves into thinking they have already found it, which makes changing my mind easier than others find it.
One of my childhood life-lessons, which took far too many examples to internalise, was all the people who are very happy to follow the crowd because it is the crowd.
In fact, what you're doing now suggests my approach is so alien to you that you yourself are right now not only not even telling yourself this but also labelling yourself as someone who does not say this.
I don't think so. I strive to lay the facts out neutrally so people can decide what to do with that information, even if the outcome is not ideal for me.
Preventing non-ideal outcomes is not about lying, but not doing things you might regret in the future.
It took Boris Yeltsin, who had just become the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, actually visiting a random grocery store in Houston before he realised what the truth was:
> Its like showing truth to MAGA people. Most wont accept it.
Could be. That was the other example I was considering using besides Yeltsin, but I figured it would immediately get met with "no u" responses from those who, as you say, won't accept it. That makes for boring conversations where I learn nothing.
see it this way. Yelzin's reaction was very surprising. You can see how other communist burocrats reacted to facts.
Even in democratic societies politicians don't change their beliefs so fast (maybe most human?). But luckily we can vote them out so this is not a big problem.
> You don't have to worry about projecting truth. The truth gets through. This is about projecting lies.
I wouldn't be so sure. Significant part of Russian population believes that they are purging Ukraine of evil nazis, for example. Or that WW2 started on 22 June 1941.
In other words, a free system is inevitably ruled by hypocrites, while in dictatorships they are rejected that opportunity. This is another variant of “in democracy, people cannot rule because they’re stupid.”
Statists, failing to admit their guilt, blame everyone but themselves.
And no, the truth does not get through, even after centuries.
That's why diversity of sources is the only way to escape censorship: you get one half truth from one source, another half truth from another source, then two halves make whole truth.
That's also trivial to manipulate; control the narrative, and you control the Overton window. People picking the middle of two fake options are still under the influence of whoever chose those options — just ask any stage magician.
Propaganda works when it's the only source of information. This situation is created by censorship, especially in internets, where you don't need to walk to open a distant site.
Taking a step back, there is another way for propaganda to function that doesn't even require being the main source, but simply to make the lie so huge that people can't process the idea someone would be *that* level of dishonest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_lie
Consider your own previous comment:
> you get one half truth from one source, another half truth from another source, then two halves make whole truth.
What happens when one source says that the Alpha Party* consists of child-eating devil-worshiping lizards from Alpha Ceti 5 who caused the 9/11 attacks to cover up how the mind-control chemtrail fluid they were making in the WTC burned hot enough to melt steel beams, and the other source says the Alpha Party is standing on a platform of reducing the tax burden on hard-working families?
The latter can be a half-truth, but you don't get even a little closer to a full truth by adding any part of the "other side".
* A made-up party, any similarities to actual persons is coincidence and all the usual disclaimer.
Your links give examples of campaigns that happened, but didn't quite work. You think the problem is their very happening? And the very fact that you know about child-eating devil-worshiping lizards from Alpha Ceti 5 shows that an opinion is available no matter what propaganda you use against it as long as it's not censored. You can suppress it only by censorship, not by propaganda. In any case using shitposting sites as a source of information is tricky, journalism isn't that bad yet.
> Your links give examples of campaigns that happened, but didn't quite work. You think the problem is their very happening?
They clearly did work, though.
Problem? No, the problem isn't their very happening, it's more that they are effective strategies. Some also used by advertising agencies.
> And the very fact that you know about child-eating devil-worshiping lizards from Alpha Ceti 5 shows that an opinion is available no matter what propaganda you use against it as long as it's not censored.
I don't know anything about child-eating devil-worshiping lizards from Alpha Ceti 5, that doesn't mean I can't talk about them. It's called "making stuff up".
Not sure where you're going with that sentence though. You do realise, I hope, that this was supposed to be a string of nonsense? That the point was that no matter which half you take from a string of nonsense, you can't combine it with a half-truth to get a full truth, you just get a half truth with a different false part.
Which in this example might be something like "the Alpha Party* caused the 9/11 attacks to cover up how the mind-control chemtrail fluid they were making in the WTC burned hot enough to melt steel beams, and wants to reduce the tax burden on families where the parents earn more than double the national average income between them".
The half-truth remains, at best, a half-truth. But that's the best case, and you only get that if you already knew what part was less than honest before you considered what to dismiss, at which point you didn't need anything from other statements in the first place.
> You can suppress it only by censorship, not by propaganda.
That's the point of disagreement: you, as a human, can only pay attention to so much. For example, if I buy all the ad space around you and fill it with only my own message, that is propaganda that denies the same space to anyone who wants to tell the truth.
> In any case using shitposting sites as a source of information is tricky, journalism isn't that bad yet.
This assumes you have the cognitive resources to do that. Most people just switch to someone they trust to avoid exactly this. Matter of fact, that was the major advantage of the net back in the day.
I think people have to deal with pluralism of opinions in everyday life too, since different people have different opinions. Aren't they socially maladapted if they can't do that?
> That's why diversity of sources is the only way to escape censorship:
No, it's a page out of the old fascist playbook where flooding the stage with propaganda generates enough confusion to help fascists further their hateful agenda.
I find it hilarious when people who are pro censorship bring up Karl Popper and the Paradox of Tolerance.
You can tell they've never read his work because his conclusion in the end is that you should tolerate intolerance up and until it promotes specific violence.
So total freedom of speech up and until it starts inciting violence. It's basically the same stance the US Constitution has.
Fascists in the original sense, Mussolini, didn't tolerate opposition.
I'm not sure about modern fascists, but US politics does look rather Kayfabe-y to me. Fake opposition, there for the purpose of being an opponent.
Of course then you get all the discourse about what even counts as fascism, and someone brings up that the origin of the word is the Roman "fasces" (bundle of sticks) and how that etymological root points to the concept of "strength through unity" which is also why the Lincoln memorial has Lincoln resting his hands on them[0] and why trade unions often use the "strength through unity" phrasing (and get annoyed/upset by the connection).
The world is yet to find a single piece of truth coming out of the Trump administration. I mean, shall we discuss how Trump claims the Epstein files exonerate him when he is reported as directly, deeply, and personally involved in every single gruesome aspect of the criminal organization?
American culture can access Europeans at any time. Europeans consume American culture daily.Just to clarify. Website banned are often hostile propaganda or extremists.
This is only cringy lousy provocation for appearance of moral superiority.
Coming from a government notorious for spying on it's citizens it seems pretty ludicrous.
"Europe" is a continent made up of independent nation states. Each of those nations has chosen to have its own rules about what is and is not legal, which is the right of every country. Those nation states want companies operating within their territory to follow their rules. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, it is up to each individual country.
At the same time, I do not understand how what you wrote is in any way relevant to the topic.
Sorry, I clearly misunderstood the intent of your comment. I thought you were saying they should just build their own platform if they want to moderate it. My mistake.
In any case, you’re right. The only concern is that projects like this that start in Europe often end up being acquired by American companies, so I’m worried it could end up the same way.
It might do that too, but access to information is just so utterly critical, and exponentially moreso in circumstances where government brutally cracks down on it, as we saw in Egypt during the Arab Spring and we're seeing in Iran presently.
Then again, Egypt was definitely driven by Western agitators, as was the case Iran recently. Iran probably got Russian tech to trace starlink users during the blackout which put a target on many Western assets in Iran. I'm not saying the Iran government didn't also kill and torture independent actors nor that I support state violence (against its citizens, in this case). Just saying that any government will use violence to stay in power and to ensure regime change doesn't happen outside of whatever system the state upholds.
> If they didn't have a hand in the protests, that seems like a stunning failure on the part of the US State Department to support their own policies
This is nothing but evidence free speculation. What you’re doing is undermining the validity of the protest movement and parroting the line of the Iranian government. It’s disgusting. Take this shit somewhere else.
No my point is that the idea that the protests aren’t organic is deeply fucking ignorant and gross. It’s this whole line of thinking that everything turns on US action in the world, which is how 19 year olds think after they read Howard Zin or some essay by Chomsky for the first time. It’s unserious on top of robbing a lot of brave people of their own agency.
> No my point is that the idea that the protests aren’t organic is deeply fucking ignorant and gross.
Scott Bessent, at the WEF [0], explained that:
> President Trump ordered treasury and our OFAC division, (Office of Foreign Asset Control) to put maximum pressure on Iran, and it’s worked because in December, their economy collapsed, we saw a major bank go under, the central bank has started to print money, there is a dollar shortage, they are not able to get imports and this is why the people took to the streets.
So it is organic insofar as the US is working hard to water and nourish something. This has been a huge push to destabilise and unseat the Iranian regime, the idea that they didn't have some people involved in the protests is hard to countenance. It'd be incompetence of the grossest variety. Technically possible? Yeah. A reasonable prior? No.
It's hardly evidence-free, this stuff [0, 1, 2] has been making international news headlines for months. And the last time the US was involved in toppling Iran they used paid-for protests [3] so it is barely speculative to say they'd do again what worked last time. That is just common sense on their part. If they haven't done that, then people will be fired in the US executive for incompetence because that is the cheapest way to achieve their rather clear goals of rolling Iran's power structures. If you don't believe that they did that, who do you think is responsible for that failure on the US government's part?
It is unfortunate that the US's actions right now undermined whatever validity you feel the protests had. I certainly agree it is disgusting - and also bad for US interests so it is curious why they're doing it. Take it up with them if you have a problem with the idea, I'm not a US general or policy maker.
Evidence to the contrary abounds regarding Egypt. Secretary of State Clinton famously rejected the popularly-elected Muslim Brotherhood government and pledged support to Mubarak. This tacit approval led him to have a successful coup against the popularly elected government.
If by "western" you meant some other power then you should be specific. Western as a term is imprecise and can be interpreted differently depending on the audience.
I wish more people volunteered to moderate online communities. Especially political ones.
It’s taking way too long for normal people to realize they have a stake and imperative to be part of these communities. Speech is shaped here, and many God awful decisions have to be made at scale.
There is no cost to holding the position you stated, and no one wants to get their hand dirty, or see how the sausage is made. You have to regular decide if this comment is actually hate speech, actual debate, or someone “asking questions”. Who knows what the actual false positive/negative rates are.
The sheer amount of filters, regexes and slur lists needed to stay abreast of toxicity and hate speech are absurdism at its best.
Nothing happens without an informed citizenry. The foundations of speech online are collapsing and weak. There need to be more citizen view points from the ground, deciding how they want this domain to operate.
> It was a 2021 case involving Andy Grote, a local politician, that captured the country's attention. Grote complained about a tweet that called him a "pimmel," a German word for the male anatomy. His complaint triggered a police raid and accusations of excessive censorship by the government.
A police raid for calling a politician a dick. Let it sink.
That was a overall very rarely occurring abuse of power of a politician in charge of leading local law enforcement. It was declared illegal later. And you take that as a proof for what about the whole of Germany?
> > His unit has successfully prosecuted about 750 hate speech cases over the last four years.
> But sure, abuse of power is so rare. Nothing to see here.
This would make your point if those hate speech cases were all the same as your Andy Grote example.
Otherwise it's like pointing at one defendant winning a road traffic law case due to dashcam footage showing the police were making things up, as evidence that all road traffic law prosecutions are abusing power.
You're missing the point. That's exactly how democratic governments cloak fascist behavior everywhere: The punishment IS THE PROCESS.
People in Germany (and the UK and other places) have to self censor because they don't want to be visited by the police and then dragged through courts for months/years, even though it eventually gets thrown out and you get to walk away innocent, you still had to suffer the entire prosecution process, which nobody wants to, so they keep their mouth shut.
The stress toll of having to go through all that annoying grind through the legal system, even though you did nothing wrong and what the government is doing will be considered illegal, is how the government preemptively keeps people in line.
>That was a overall very rarely occurring abuse of power
Very rare?! Unless there's direct consequences with actual punishment on government officials for illegally abusing the legal system on citizens just because they hear stuff they don't like, then they will keep throwing prosecutions at innocent people just to keep them in check since currently they have nothing stopping them from this abuse turning from rare to being the norm.
Except for the Grote case you can very well criticize politicians, even in somewhat questionable language without LE raiding your home. That one case was an exception.
Just look at any political thread in any social media in German language. There is plenty of criticism or even insults regarding government officials, without them getting raided. It is only extreme cases (often with calls for violence) which trigger LE. So the chilling effect is missing or at least it has little influence.
A little bit like a country's leader calling for the death penalty for a decorated pilot and astronaut who reminded service members of their duty to reject unlawful orders.
In Italy there's a politician named Gasparri who has made a career (30+ years) of barring himself behind Parlamentary immunity and insulting on citizens/journalists. When they respond he sues them for libel or similar asking moral damages.
It does. That's why GrapheneOS left France; Signal is considering doing so to if ChatControl passes. Von Der Leyen and Breton clearly mentioned the possibility of banning X. And there are many other "signals".
But yeah we get it, there's bad censorhip (Iran, China, Russia), and there is the good censorhip, sorry, i meant "protection of children", when it's the EU. :o)
> there's bad censorhip (Iran, China, Russia), and there is the good censorhip
I understand that you're being facetious here, but this is literally true.
Words kill people sometimes, and in the same way that my right to swing my arm stops where your nose begins your right to say whatever you want stops where my safety begins.
Or to rephrase it, nobody can have free speech at all if others are allowed to threaten your health and safety for it, which automatically implies that violent and hateful speech must be curtailed. It is a variation on the paradox of tolerance.
Yes, there is room to debate exactly where the line is, but the fact that there is a line is fairly well settled except amongst the rabid.
I dont need Thierry Breton or Van Der Leyen to tell me which podcasts I am allowed to listened to, but thanks for the well-intentionned thoughts for my safety anyway.
I dont care at all for your safety, I care for mine and that of my family and I think it's fair to insist that you don't get to put my life in jeopardy because you feel like you should be immune to the consequences of your speech.
I would be very interested in hearing some of these words capable of killing. I have only heard of such words in fiction so I am quite surprised to learn they are real.
In the 1950s, the Reverend Ian Paisley would organise rallies in the streets of Belfast and when speaking at those rallies, read out the addresses of Catholic homes and businesses on those streets. The crowd would then attack those homes and businesses.
If there is a direct call to action then they should be held responsible, but like I said I don't know what the context is or what was said in the Belfast situation.
The words the Nazis said were irrelevant. They directed people to kill and as such they were guilty.
I think someone who goes and attacks somebody is guilty. They cannot use the excuse they were following orders. The words didn't take control of them like a spell. They made the conscious choice to commit violence and as such the guilt is on them, not the bat.
We've had several World Wars (so far) thanks largely to words. I'm not sure what your contention really is, except that maybe you dont like the idea of freedom coming with responsibility for the ways in which you use it.
World War 1 and 2 were both the result of actual military actions, alliances, invasions, etc.
If you want to censor the internet, claiming it is "to protect the children" is still a much better bet than claiming that it is because free speech causes world wars, if you want my opinion.
Nobody died from the words? Did Hitler say millions should die and millions dropped dead? It was the war, the concentration camps, etc that killed people.
Yes, words led to that, but the onus of the deaths are on those who did the killing, not the words. Could the Nazis in the Nuremberg trials have used the excuse that it was actually the words doing the killing and as such they were innocent?
If you want to say words kill, in the way you are saying, then words have killed most people that have been killed. If we take an example where somebody gets turned down and then gets killed for it, would you say words killed that person? Should we ban turning people down? You do want words that kill to be banned after all.
I'm reminded of a phrase I leaned as a kid that starts with sticks and stones...
Ahhh. Another of Elon's absolutists? Fine all words are ok now. So we make all these things legal:
Obscenity in any context - Won't someone not think of the children?
Child sexual abuse material - Fine in the new regime as long as you didn't record it yourself, right?
Incitement to imminent lawless action - You only told them who to murder, right?
True threats and harassment - All those people can just die. Speech is the ONLY freedom that matters. Serious expressions of intent to commit unlawful violence be damned.
Fighting words - Sure - Bait them till they hit you then the cops can come arrest THEM. Aren't you clever! And totally free from consequences for your actions! Ideal!
Defamation - Why CAN'T we just make stuff up about our enemies, friends, and loved ones? Those suckers rights are far less important than ours after all!
Fraud and false commercial speech - All legal now! Finally the freedom to rip off old ladies and the mentally unwell! Thank god for liberty!
IP violations - Again, free speech is absolute now so nobody can own anything that can be conveyed via language. Yay!
Or... we could just be reasonable about it and say that the limit's of free speech are where they start to impinge on other peoples liberties. Your call.
First, let me start off saying I don't like Elon and think he is a terrible person.
Next, my issue is primarily on your issue with hateful speech, I should have been more clear. I wrote it on my phone and didn't feel like expanding upon what I was trying to say. I should have conveyed my thoughts better.
I will explain my position more clearly.
I think pushing what you are when it comes to hateful speech is dangerous. Using your own logic the comment I am replying to could be illegal. You said "hateful speech must be curtailed". What you said about Elon is clearly derogatory and could easily be considered hateful. If the laws were in place, I think with how petty Elon is, he would go after people who are critical of him like yourself.
Having emotional harm is not really something that can be determined which is the primary harm that hate speech causes. Every person is different so you wouldn't have a way to know what you could say. The only way to know if something is hateful is to ask the person if they were intending it to be hateful or if the recipient found it hateful.
When you have vague terms that could be determined by emotion rather than an objective measure you are going to run into issues. Obviously sometimes there will be subjective measures, but we need to minimize them whenever possible.
If somebody is directing somebody to kill somebody that is causing physical harm towards an individual and should be illegal.
Going back to the world war examples. Hitler would be guilty of directing people to cause physical harm.
If Hitler said to kill somebody I don't consider that to be different than if Hitler just pointed and somebody and then turned his finger into a gun. The issue wasn't what he said or didn't say, it was what he was directing somebody to do.
If Hitler said something like we have economic issues and Jews run the banks, that would probably be considered hateful by many people. I don't think it should be illegal. If Hitler added let's kill the Jews, that would be directing people to commit violence and would not be legal.
Hitler hating the Jews in the first statement doesn't mean he should go to jail. It didn't cause a normal person to go out and commit the Holocaust.
> What you said about Elon is clearly derogatory and could easily be considered hateful.
It was from an actual quote of his in which he claimed to be a "free speech absolutist." I did mean it in a derogatory way, because just repeating it makes him seem silly, but it's an actual quote so not slanderous or anything.
That said, I agree that nobody has the right to live a life free of criticism and some folks need thicker skin (including myself from time to time).
>If somebody is directing somebody to kill somebody that is causing physical harm towards an individual and should be illegal
Well there you go. We both agree that some speech has to be illegal, we just disagree as to exactly where that line is. I think it's perfectly reasonable for us to disagree about *exactly* where the line is, as long as everyone understands that there is a line.
To me that line is very simple: My rights end where yours start, and vice versa. As far as I can tell it's the only sensible basis for any kind of society. You can make it more complicated if you want, but the only way to get more "freedom" than with my plan is to take away someone else's and I'm not cool with that.
>"[...] But we should claim the right to suppress them [intolerant ideologies] if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
The paradox of tolerance is not about censoring others. If anything, censorship lands on the side of the intolerant of this paradox.
If educating people worked there wouldn’t be any obese people, or drunkards, or smokers, druggies, gamblers, people addicted to doomscrolling or video games or ragebait "news" or…
Education is as useful as preaching abstinence at horny teenagers instead of providing access to contraceptives
Cause and correlation, education gives you options, it always comes to a choice, I know the donuts lead somewhere but I choose to eat two anyway.
Education doesn't cause good choices but it is sometimes correlated to better situations, the difference between the criminals in prison and the ones in the C suite is only education.
> If educating people worked there wouldn’t be any obese people, or drunkards
This assumes that a) everyone is the same, and b) education would always work. Matthew Perry explained that this is not the case. Some people respond differently to drugs. Whether these people are educated or not, changes very little. Education helps, but not in the way as to be able to bypass physiological aspects completely.
> Education is as useful as preaching abstinence at horny teenagers instead of providing access to contraceptives
Education can still help. For instance, I decided very early on that the best way to avoid e. g. addiction is to not "give in and try once". So I never tried drugs (ok ok, I did drink a beer occasionally). This was the much simpler and easier strategy to pursue, simply via avoidance behaviour.
Thus I disagree that the premise can be "if educating worked" - people will always respond differently to drugs. And they will have different strategies to cope with something too - some strategies work, others don't work. One can not generalize this.
Many people believe their mind is a passive reflection of reality, thus any change that happens to mind is infallible by definition. I wonder how can they possibly resist addiction with such mindset.
Clearly education doesn't work, so Europe must ban any speech concerning fattening foods, drinking alcohol, smoking, drugs, gambling, upsetting news and video games.
If you oppose these speech bans... Why you're as silly as a preacher telling teens not to fuck!
But can't you then set up a system such that if a person only picks one source or a few sources, and that turns out to be bad, that it primarily impacts negatively only themselves? Letting it be their own responsibility?
Intuitively yes, but it's possible that this is one of our biases speaking
From my memory (might be mistaken) there have been attempts to somewhat study this via polls etc, and determined that coverage via propaganda (specifically Fox News) is less helpful then randomly guessing what actually happened...
But ymmv, social studies are always hard to trust, because it's borderline impossible to prove cause and effect
> From my memory (might be mistaken) there have been attempts to somewhat study this via polls etc, and determined that coverage via propaganda (specifically Fox News) is less helpful then randomly guessing what actually happened...
Ironically the studies of that nature are often themselves a form of propaganda, because it's entirely straightforward to structure the study to produce your preferred outcome.
There is a well-known human bias where people use information they know to try to guess information they don't. If you're given three random people and the only thing anyone has told you about them is that one is a drug addict and then you're asked to guess which one is a thief, more people are going to guess the drug addict. So now all you have to do is find a situation where the thief isn't actually the drug addict, let the media outlet tell people which one is the drug addict, and you'll have people guessing the wrong answer a higher proportion of the time than they would by choosing at random.
In this thread, which comment gave you the impression they were in favor of censorship?
I hope it's not me, whom you responded to, because I cannot fathom how you could've gotten that impression considering my phrasing...what's up with this topic getting so many people with arguing via complete strawmen
Then you failed at education if a prompt can undo decades of education.
And the failure of education was an intentional feature, not a bug, since the government wants obedient tax cattle that will easily accept their propaganda at elections, not freethinkers that question everything because then they might notice your lies and corruption.
It's like building a backdoor into your system thinking you're the only one who gets to use it for the upper hand, but then throw fits when everyone else is using your backdoors to defeat you.
The whole truth here would be that technically he did not do it unilaterally but as a representative of his voters, so basically almost as far from unilaterally as possible.
> It’s a clear way to project soft power: make sure your message and culture can get through.
You're talking about an administration that actively tries to censor candidates of opposition candidates through both state regulatory institutions such as the FCC and business collusion, a typical play out of the fascist playbook with state and oligarchs colluding to strong arm their political goals.
It's also the same administration who is actively involved in supporting other dictatorial regimes and destabilize Europe, including with very explicit and overt threats of war of invasion to annex territories.
It's also the same administration that is clearly a puppet administration controlled by another totalitarian regime - Russia.
There is no soft power in this stunt. Only further self-destructive actions to further kill the US's relevance as an European ally.
Yep! Maximally closed as much as possible under the law. They also shut down other programs which aim to sidestep propaganda (including US propaganda), though some of those are starting to come back. Radio Free Asia, for example, https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/radio-free-asia-s...
This is somewhat counterintuitive: The US is the only country I know where most newspapers and government services use strict geoblocks to prevent me from accessing US sites in Europe. Conversely, I've never had any problems accessing European sites from the US. I know this is for a different set of reasons (likely GDPR cookie law or similar), but it's funny that anyone thinks blocks like this are relevant. Most people I know use VPNs these days to make their traffic appear to come from whatever country they need.
This. I regularly face geo blocks from American websites. Like literally at least once a week. It's very common for whatever reason for smaller US shops, newspapers any size and other random sites.
The geoblocks happened because of our (EU) governments making punitive rules of the website doesn't follow European standards. It's easier for an American website targeted at Americans to just not bother with Europeans.
That may explains the news sites with thousands of cookies and tracking bullshit, but it doesn't explain small brick and mortar stores blocking traffic
Why wouldn't it? It exposes them to unknown risks because they're not lawyers while providing negligible returns since they are not geared towards a European audience.
Only EU site I had a problem accessing that i can remember was from my electricity provider.
Strangely enough they didn’t geoblock me but login threw an error because my local time didn’t match the local (German) timezone.
I changed my system timezone to Germany and it worked without issues, so I was wondering if it’s a very bad geoblock or something else entirely
It makes sense to me. They're blocked in Europe because of European government polices, not American ones.
Maybe there's some sort of legal immunity the US government could grant to domestic sites which would allow them to lift those blocks without fear of reprisal?
That's actually a related issue. European governments routinely and sometimes illegally attempt to enforce their laws against American websites, so if you run a website it's easier to just block the entire continent than to deal with that.
> but it's funny that anyone thinks blocks like this are relevant. Most people I know use VPNs these days to make their traffic appear to come from whatever country they need.
The search AIs tell me it's around a third of people.
Which US newspapers and which governments websites?
I happen to write this from Poland and I don't recall a single newspaper being geo blocked here. Not nyt, not washington post not anything I've ever accessed.
And didn't see US gov website geo blocked either.
So I ask again: which newspapers and which gov websites?
I don't browse US newspapers that often, but I regularly observe blocked ones, particularly smaller ones. Non-deterministic, e.g.: New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Dallas Morning News, Virginian-Pilot. Beyond that, a lot of CA and San Francisco Government and local utility services are geo-restricted (which I think, from a security standpoint, makes at least somewhat sense..).
Nexstar's stations blocked access from European IPs, providing a 451 Unavailable for Legal Reasons response code; Nexstar are the largest TV station owner in the US, so a large number of sites for local affiliates were unavailable. I think other networks (Sinclair) may have also one so.
Shortly after the American version of TikTok was established in January of 2026, users began reporting that certain content was creating error messages, including using words like "Epstein" in direct messages, which news outlet CNBC was able to replicate and confirm, with the error message reading: "This message may be in violation of our Community Guidelines, and has not been sent to protect our community." Other users reported similar messages for content critical of U.S. President Donald Trump or other topics.
It goes deeper than that. The U.S. Government funds it, discourages other nations from using it, and spies on all web traffic as a result of it.
Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA. Within a quick drive to Langley, Quantico, DC, and other places that house three letter agencies I’m not authorized to disclose.
> Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA
Nobody who understands the scale of the internet could possibly believe this is true.
Routing internet traffic through a geographical location would increase ping times by a noticeable amount.
Even sending traffic from around the world to a datacenter in VA would require an amount of infrastructure multiple times larger than the internet itself to carry data all that distance. All built and maintained in secret.
He was likely referring to the claim that 70% of the internet flows through Loudon County, Virginia, where AWS us-east-1 is located, although the more accurate number is probably somewhere around 22%.
Every cloud provider worth talking about is there too. Both public and sovereign/gov data centers.
And of course all the privately owned ones too. It is bananas. Not just because of government either - low ping times to the biggest population center of North America.
> Nobody who understands the scale of the internet could possibly believe this is true.
Neither would anybody have believed that 8 out of 10 hard drive chips can contain any rootkits. Yet, here we are, and the insanity of it is that we've found lots of malware attributed to EQGRP, and the Snowden leaks (from the perspective of Booz Allen) have confirmed it.
You should read up on quantum routing.
They don't have to route through any specific location if they can just infiltrate the routers of your neighbors. Any data packet from the originating server will arrive slower at your location than the data packet of your neighbor. In that scenario TLS becomes pretty useless if the CA itself is also exchangeable, because you can't rely on TCP or UDP. Ironically the push for UDP makes it much easier to implement in the underlying token ring architectures and their virtual routing protocols like VC4 and later.
That's how the internet and a star topology (or token ring topology on city level) was designed.
Do you have a single actual source for anything you’re saying about this happening today?
I’m well aware of the historical surveillance programs. I’m asking for a source for all of your claims about what’s happening today regarding 80% of internet traffic.
That claim makes no sense in today's world. For over a decade, the likes of Youtube, Netflix and short form video make the majority of throughput. Why in the world would anyone want to monitor known catalogs of content? Most of which are delivered by POPs in data centers distributed all over the world.
As for traffic, I can’t cite numbers, you’ll just have to trust me when I say it. I can’t give you packet breakdown or IP4 vs IP6. To have that discussion requires a secret clearance at least.
You have clearance enough to imply that these things are going on but not enough to actually prove anything? Surely the requirements of your clearance would come with some basic terms like "don't use winks and nudges to implicate us in vast conspiracies on public forums," or the far more simple "don't mention this to anyone."
Edited to not be so flippant: I work in HFT/finance where recording all traffic is required I think by law and definitely for one's own sanity. We're able to maintain nanosecond trades while capturing ALL the traffic. It has zero impact on the traffic. This is normal, widely used tech. Think stuff like Ixia passive taps and/or Arista Metamako FPGA-based tap/mux devices.
I have. I have a background in high speed networking.
Have you ever paused for a moment to consider how much infrastructure would be required to send 80% of data on the internet across the country and into a single datacenter in Virginia?
If you've worked in HFT, you can probably at least start to imagine the scale we're talking about.
I have no data or information on the topic, but the use of English was fine for the apparent intended meaning:
"Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in X"
Does not mean that all traffic goes through a single data center in X. Just that it goes through one of potentially many data centers that happen to be in X.
You're right. It's fantastic to see how English comprehension is decaying, even in groups that supposedly are smarter than average. There's a fast decaying tendency in language comprehension overall, and I can only point to the fact that much of the new generation is unable and unwilling to read even a single book.
“Loudoun County currently has 199 data centers, with another 117 in development, according to Michael Turner, vice chair of the board of supervisors transportation and land use committee and Ashburn’s district supervisor.”
So every ISP in every country in the world is feeding thousands of terabits of data to a hostile American intelligence agency. Not just netflow, the actual contents, and not a single ISP employee has actually come out with this evidence.
I can believe IXPs in many countries will send netflow data to their state's intelligence org, but that's a long way from what was being suggested.
Another way to think about it, many websites the data gets transmitted before you hit submit, between various type ahead reactive frameworks, soft keyboards with networked spell checking, your AI powered mood ring, always listening smart watch/car/home etc. Grandad always said don't say anything on the radio you wouldn't say in public, well we're up to don't think out loud or see how your crazy idea looks in text before you edit the Mel Gibson tones out of it. Tinfoil hats are off, on, locked!
the time it takes for light to travel from los angeles to virginia is 12 - 16 ms, round trip is 30ms lets say - that is a noticeable delay, and it could be easily disproven that 80% of traffic is literally routed through VA
now.. could they just copy the traffic and send it to VA on a side channel? probably?
There is the small possibility that the NSA has found cracks in some of the popular cyphers and could actually make sense of the encrypted data. It's not completely out of the question, their cryptanalysis has been shown to be ahead of the public best efforts in the past. They demonstrated it back in the 70s with DES S-boxes hardening them against a technique no one publicly knew about until the 80s.
i used to work, 15 years ago, on a (permissive, not covert) monitoring service for a UK national public service, the NHS spine core. We used switches to mirror ports and capture traffic in promisciouse mode on a few dozen servers
split across a few datacentres that all the traffic went througg. We had certs installed to decode https. We could get enough hardware to do this step easily, but fast enough storage was an issue, we had 1 petabyte of usable storage across all sitesn that could hold a few days of content. We aimed to get this data filtered and forwarded into our central Splunk (seperate storage) and also into our bespoke dashboards within 60s. We often lagged...
You can only decode those https certificates if you are mitming them (and have a compromised certificate)
A copy of the certificate and private keys won't help thanks to the magic of Diffie–Hellman, you can't passively (assuming you haven't got a practical quantum computer) read the stream
Your company will have deployed root certificates to devices and run as a MITM. This is standard corporate firewall behaviour.
The point they were making was that you could tell via ping times if the traffic was literally being routed through VA unnecessarily because the extra unavoidable light speed delay that extra distance would add between a user and the server if they weren't already very near to VA. Could be mirrored via the type of monitoring you're talking about but that'd only get you mostly encrypted traffic unless the 90s cypherpunk paranoia turns out to have been true.
"Going through" doesn't necessarily imply store and forward. It could be tapped elsewhere and shipped to WVA. fwiw the idea of running a network in order to tap it is hardly new. The British operated largest telegraph network in the world in the 1800's for that reason.
You just don't have imagination. Google, just by itself, controls 89% of the traffic in the Internet. And we know that the government can get any information they want from them, without even asking too much. If you combine this with other major companies operating very close to the US government, it is probable that more than 95% of the web traffic outside China that is easily within reach of these sinister 3 letter organizations.
No. That isn't required at all. Fundamentally you lack understanding of how this happens. Yes, there is some port duplication. Yes it costs money. But it is not anywhere near as onerous as you assume.
> Fundamentally you lack understanding of how this happens. Yes, there is some port duplication. Yes it costs money. But it is not anywhere near as onerous as you assume
No, I understand networking hardware quite well actually. I'm also familiar with Room 641A. Room 641A did not capture 80% of internet traffic. If you think 80% of internet traffic could be routed through Room 641A you're not thinking about the infrastructure required to get it all there. It was a targeted operation on backbone lines that were right there.
While the most well known, there are other points of presence doing the same thing. Easy and trivial to duplicate traffic at line speed. It doesn't affect the traffic flow itself.
A decent number of people reading this probably do have secret clearance. But that's not really the relevant point.
Simply having secret clearance doesn't mean you can just go digging around arbitrary secret classified info that you have no business reading. And it certainly doesn't mean that discussion can be had on hackernews.
That is simplifying it to the point of a lab experiment. It’s a bit more complicated but yes, you can split light and route that light anywhere you want.
What you can't do is ship 80% of the traffic across the world to the US without either the ISPs agreeing, and thus a conspiracy of thousands of people in thousands of ISPs, or doing it outside the data centres, meaning millions of taps in various ducts around the globe, which would be found on a daily basis.
Most of the replies to this seem to think it's referring to some kind of secret government datacenter. It's us-east-1, and every other cloud provider's US East and GOV zones, which are all in NVA
When I worked for a CLEC (during that moment in history when they were briefly a Thing), we had a USG closet at our main datacenter, and we are nowhere even close to NoVA. I expect they still handle it this way rather than try to funnel any significant amount of traffic to a particular geographical region.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_Globa...
and some of it has been under the State Department, partly pursuant to the global Internet freedom program introduced by Hillary Clinton in 2010 when she was Secretary of State.
I'm sure the political and diplomatic valence is very different here, but the concept of "the U.S. government paying to stop foreign governments from censoring the Internet" is a longstanding one.