Also, there used to be 10000 ISPs and you'd literally know the the first names of the people who did customer service at yours. Now, like everything in modern capitalism, there are like five.
The government can just turn off the internet for you personally by making a few calls. They could make you show digital id before every access. They could make in a felony to provide internet to somebody on the proscribed list. They could just make a few grants dependent on it, and never make it a law.
People who think the internet is magical have Marvel-movie brain. I'm wondering whether we're going to station troops in fabs to make sure no chips leave that haven't been backdoored, or whether we'll have to register hard drives with the state (with sniffer dogs looking for violations.)
Tor isn't going to save us. Tor is a US Navy project. If Tor and bitcoin weren't useful for the government themselves to do secret communications and money transfers, they could just announce (again) that crypto is terrorism, and shoot people who get caught running exit nodes or mining.
Once in the US, every piece of mail with a book in it was opened, and the book checked to see if it was on a banned list or looked like it should be. They were primarily concerned about birth control information and dirty literature with too many double entendres. Do we really think that no hypothetical future US government would do that over trans, Israel, Russia, Russia, Russia or China? We've done it to keep people from wearing condoms.
Still shocks me that the big cases that broke US censorship in literature were in the mid-60s. Miller's Tropic of Cancer still had the potential to put you in jail in 1965. And people are like "it's literally impossible to keep me from pirating anime."
The government can just turn off the internet for you personally by making a few calls. They could make you show digital id before every access. They could make in a felony to provide internet to somebody on the proscribed list. They could just make a few grants dependent on it, and never make it a law.
People who think the internet is magical have Marvel-movie brain. I'm wondering whether we're going to station troops in fabs to make sure no chips leave that haven't been backdoored, or whether we'll have to register hard drives with the state (with sniffer dogs looking for violations.)
Tor isn't going to save us. Tor is a US Navy project. If Tor and bitcoin weren't useful for the government themselves to do secret communications and money transfers, they could just announce (again) that crypto is terrorism, and shoot people who get caught running exit nodes or mining.
Once in the US, every piece of mail with a book in it was opened, and the book checked to see if it was on a banned list or looked like it should be. They were primarily concerned about birth control information and dirty literature with too many double entendres. Do we really think that no hypothetical future US government would do that over trans, Israel, Russia, Russia, Russia or China? We've done it to keep people from wearing condoms.
Still shocks me that the big cases that broke US censorship in literature were in the mid-60s. Miller's Tropic of Cancer still had the potential to put you in jail in 1965. And people are like "it's literally impossible to keep me from pirating anime."
They can turn off your bank account.