[noir_lord]

> It's enough to point the finger at commercial VPN providers and claim the the users are doing suspicious things.

The problem there is we live in a containerised world, how would they stop someone running a 'recipe' that creates a VPN on something like AWS/Digital Ocean and uses that as the VPN exit point.

The only way to deal with that is to have a central licensing authority for VPN's where you have to hand over the keys, that's going to be a massive and expensive fight for them.

[eeZah7Ux]

> how would they stop someone running a 'recipe' that creates a VPN on something like AWS/Digital Ocean

They don't need to. Even if 10% of citizens were able to do that, controlling and censoring information for the 90% is way more than enough to manipulate people perceptions and ideas, and thus, democracy.

Not even Stasi or the "great firewall" of China aimed at 100% success rate - they simply don't need to.

[pbhjpbhj]

>controlling and censoring information for the 90% //

What you appear to be alleging is that by being able to access the threads I saw on Al-Jazeera or Reddit or what-have-you that the government can somehow control the information I'm receiving enough to manipulate me to serve their political ideals. Freedom of the press may not be perfect in the UK but it seems close enough that a government can't manipulate democracy simply by monitoring internet use.

UK population is 65M. Reported crimes (which includes littering and traffic violations AFAICT) is about 1 per mille in the UK [1]. There's no way the gov are using the criminal justice system to control the population to a significant extent, they certainly can't control the criminals. The prisons are full. The establishment can try to jump up crimes but the scale they need to do that to control the population seems enormous compared to the resources available.

If you can write a lie on the side of a bus and have the country vote against their best interests then why on Earth would you try and carefully contrive criminal activity in order to stop people from visiting websites you don't like to subtly alter a few people's perception of the political situation. Seems entirely bonkers.

[1] http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Total-c...

[eeZah7Ux]

> Seems entirely bonkers

Throughout the last 100 years there has been examples across many dictatorships and engineered democracies where incredible amount of efforts has been spent on achieving information control. Dragnet surveillance proved many times to be effective at chilling free speech and intimidating dissenters.

[pbhjpbhj]

Did those places have a strong rule of law, free press, legislation giving human rights freedoms, very open government. We're not really talking about information control either, it's data gathering. I hear you on the chilling effect but can't really believe that anything i say in my lifetime will be sufficient to prompt a judge to allow a warrant against me.

Sure, with a huge regime change this sort of law could later prove troublesome but we'd have to have changed our entire way of life first it seems.

Your reaction seems reasonable if you're in a malevolent dictatorship, despite its problems I don't find the UK being anywhere close to that politically.