[gruez]

>I think you are severely downplaying the risk here. Using vague language like that opens the door for them to crack down even harder.

>The government wants to monitor everything people do online and VPNs give people a way to opt out of that surveillance. It is a typical legislative move to add extra provisions all in the name of “banning the evil, Chinese spy app”. There is no reason to believe this will stop at TikTok. What if people use VPNs to get around other censorship? What if people use VPNs to access copyrighted content using BitTorrent? Who is to say that they won’t crack down on that that stuff next?

I'm not downplaying the risk of the bill, only pointing out the rhetoric is false and misleading. Based on the tweets and the article there aren't any anti-VPN or anti-anti-censorship tool provisions in the bill. Now, you can still argue that passing this bill sets us on a slippery slope to get encrypted chats banned or whatever, but it's dishonest to say that people are facing "20 year jail sentences" for using VPNs when they're not. Pointing that out isn't "severely downplaying the risk ".