Der Kongress erwägt die Abschaffung Ihres Rechts auf Anonymität im Internet | Der parteiübergreifende Vorstoß, die Anonymität aus dem Internet zu entfernen, läutet eine Ära beispielloser Massenüberwachung und Zensur ein

“Whenever imperialist governments go to war, they become more authoritarian at home” 👀

Some of the main issues here:

>This narrative of online safety, particularly in relation to children, has become central to the bipartisan effort to censor and deanonymize the internet for everyone. Today, a package of a dozen “child online safety” bills is moving forward in the House of Representatives with bipartisan support. The laws, framed as a way to crack down on harmful content and make the internet safer, would force social media companies to enact invasive identity verification measures in order to keep children from accessing online spaces.
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>The problem is that there’s no way to reliably verify someone’s age without verifying who they are. A platform cannot magically discern that a user is 16 without collecting identifying information, whether through government documents such as a passport, payment information like a credit card, or other identity-disclosing data. Whether that data is stored by the platform itself or outsourced to a vendor, the result is always the same: A user’s offline identity is forever linked with their online behavior.
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>Stripping anonymity from the internet would constitute one of the most sweeping rollbacks of civil rights in recent history. It would allow for unprecedented levels of mass surveillance and censorship, endangering the most marginalized members of society. Whistleblowers exposing corporate wrongdoing could be tracked and fired, government employees speaking out about illegal behavior or bad policies could face prosecution, and activists organizing protests could be identified and surveilled before ever setting foot on the street.
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>Not only will a de-anonymized internet be valuable to the government as it seeks to tighten control, it will also make it easier for any corporation or bad actor to intimidate, blackmail, or exploit people by leveraging their own data against them.
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>The quest to remove anonymous speech from the web is not new. Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, formerly known as Morality in Media, have long pursued these laws, arguing that online anonymity fuels pornography, exploitation, and general moral decay. In recent years, Democrats have become integral to advancing these proposals, falsely claiming that surveillance laws will crack down on Big Tech or curb social media addiction.
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>The laws would create a massive new market for third-party identification vendors, many funded by the same tech investors who backed social media giants, such as Peter Thiel, who funded ID verification platform Persona via his investment group Founders Fund. Smaller apps will be forced to shoulder the enormous cost of enacting identity verification measures, hindering their ability to operate, and making it harder to compete with Big Tech companies that are leveraging these laws to consolidate power.
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>It’s no surprise then that Big Tech companies are also heavily involved in lobbying for various versions of these laws. Elon Musk has endorsed KOSA. The Digital Childhood Alliance, a group that frequently posts about the dangers of “Big Tech,” is secretly funded by Meta, and has played a role in pushing the App Store Accountability Act. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told a court that Apple and Google should verify the identity of every smartphone user at the operating system level, which would permanently end anonymous internet access for everyone.
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>“The through-line couldn’t be clearer: destroying online anonymity is a way for government to be able to identify ­— and ultimately punish — dissenters,” said Ari Cohn, lead counsel for tech policy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a civil liberties group. “In the United States, the federal government’s recent demands that online services identify critics of DHS and ICE serves as a chilling example of the types of attacks on lawful speech that such laws will only enable further.”
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>The harms of widespread government censorship, he said, are only compounded by the “massive privacy and security threats posed by collecting personally identifiable information en masse.” Systems built to remove anonymity in the name of “child safety” will be used to identify whistleblowers, protest organizers, and critics of federal agencies, Cohn said. “At this point, not seeing the planet-sized red flags is more a result of willful blindness than anything else,” he said.
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>For journalists, dissidents, and vulnerable communities, the ability to gather and share information anonymously online is critical. Just this week, The Atlantic reported that the Pentagon is seeking to use powerful AI models from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI to mass surveil U.S. citizens by harvesting broad swaths of commercially available data. Age verification laws would dramatically expand the collection of identity-linked browsing and speech data, endangering users and creating new troves of data for commercial and government exploitation.
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>The push to eliminate online anonymity is ultimately a fight over whether the internet remains a space for dissent and free expression or further becomes a dystopian digital panopticon that operates as an arm of the surveillance state. A free society depends on the right to publish and consume information anonymously and to organize and speak privately. Age verification policies only bolster the power of Big Tech and give the government complete authority to surveil and censor online speech.

Implemented hastily or without proper considerations to the privacy issues that these types of laws might impact, this push is likely to significantly degrade people’s freedoms online and increase the hold that private companies and the government have on members of the public. Policymakers should be working more diligently to determine what is legitimately in the public interest, and working towards those directions rather than rely on the whims of oligarchs and other well connected individuals to determine the course of public policy.

Well, they are all paid off by the corporations that have already ruined the Internet, so this should not be a shock to anyone.

Quickest way to get congress to kill this would probably mirror what hustler did about porn

And it’s a bipartisan effort, don’t be fooled. We are surrounded by authoritarians on both sides of the aisle.

This age verification fascism is so exhausting.

This will just push companies to host their data in other countries and push consumers to use VPNs or tor. Legislation will never keep pace with evolving technology. What is the end-game here? Creating a US-only Internet that can be heavily controlled? That would just destroy the entire utility of the Internet.

They can’t implement a way to remove anonymous phone calls. They sure as shit won’t be able to remove anonymity online.

*Yeeaaah* and how many of these assholes are gonna leave their *own* digital identity wide-open to the internet? The rest of us are getting our shit stolen left & right and doxxed while were at it knowing damn well each and every one of these assholes is hiding behind layers of anonymity.

are Democrats who support this out of their goddamn minds?

Utter hypocrisy, as usual. They’re all about transparency when it comes to them knowing about everything *we’re* doing, but try to get an ounce of transparency/accountability from them about ACTUAL CRIMES which they’re implicated in and it’s nothing but obfuscation and feigned indignation.

I would bet good money that there will be exemptions carved out for themselves in the legislation. Any guesses as to why? 

I’m sick and tired of the utterly massive hypocrisy of screaming about „the children“ to push for crap like this.

When, to avoid kicking a hornet’s nest, it’s fair to say the current „administration“ is taking constant actions to make the lives of children far worse.

Then I guess I’ll either be a pirate or won’t go online. These fuckers do not realize how stubborn we are when it comes to our personal identity and guess what I’m sure there’s more than enough people out there that will gladly flip the script on the politicians and their privAcy. Whats good for us is good for them right? 

Nobody hates freedom as much as Republicans.

I’ve had people come to my house for saying I was a atheist online

They want vigilantes killing the woke for speaking their mind

Hard to believe that this is being done for children’s protection when you have a pedophile in charge of the White House.

DO NOT GIVE AWAY YOUR IDENTITY ONLINE

This is safety 101

If I have to get a government ID to use basic ass applications, they’re dead to me.

How the hell can they pretend they care about child safety while ignoring the largest global pedo ring the world has ever seen?? Just stop pretending. No one’s buying it.