“Under the terms of the bill, someone must be engaged in ‘sabotage or subversion’ of American communications technology products and services, creating ‘catastrophic effects’ on U.S. critical infrastructure, or ‘interfering in, or altering the result’ of a federal election, in order to be eligible for any kind of criminal penalty … To be extremely clear, this legislation is aimed squarely at companies like Kaspersky, Huawei, and TikTok that create systemic risks to the United States’ national security—not at individual users.”
Don’t forget that there is no administrative or federal court oversight either! This gives massive power to the president with no accountability.
This is talked about to “ban TikTok” because the powers that be know most of us hear that and just go “meh, I don’t really care about TikTok, don’t need to worry about this, whatever”. It’s an intentional misdirect. This bill is FAR worse than the PATRIOT act!
VPN’s are an easy headline, but the real danger in this bill is all the other powers it grants to unilaterally deem any website, service, or app a risk. The changes to FOIA. Not to mention the xenophobic targeting of anything Chinese.
If they want a bill to ban TikTok, write that. Hell start with Facebook since it sold US citizen data abroad for many years now. This is just a blatant power grab by those in power to keep it.
I don’t talk about it because I am german so it doesn’t affect me. But from what I understand this sucks really for you. Hope the other instance can/will stop.
AFAIK (not defending it or anything) this just means that if they decide to ban Tik Tok, using a VPN to get around the ban would be illegal, not the act of using VPNs themself. At least that’s how I read it
Given that the bill doesn’t even mention VPNs, let alone criminalize regular citizens’ lawful activities. I’m not sure they’ll do anything about the amount or companies that need VPNs just foe their business purposes… unless the aforementioned companies are breaking the law.
Yep. It’s a crappy bill (and has little chance of passing in its current state if at all) but it’s clear there’s a concerted attempt to muddy the waters here. Try to question the sensational response and provide a more measured and productive critique, and you get shouted down by people who didn’t actually educate themselves on the issue.
The title of this post is misinformation and should not have been allowed on this sub, let alone pinned, as written.
Doesn’t work like that. Let’s assume someone somewhere uses a VPN for something less legal. If this law is then used to add some years by then precedent is created and can be used in any future cases regarding a VPN.