Once Again, The Old World Doesn’t Understand That Unrestriction Is Just A VPN Away

Four pieces of news in the past week show just how little the lawmakers and courts continue to understand of the Internet: Australia introduced Data Retention, Spain ordered The Pirate Bay censored, courts in Ireland ordered people disconnected from the net, and Denmark ordered another eleven sites blocked. The old guard actually seems to think that the net can be controlled, or that it has chokepoints that can be controlled. They don’t understand that everybody’s an equal on the Net and that providers aren’t anything like phone companies.

First, and most alarming, the Australian senate voted to introduce Data Retention. This – pre-emptive surveillance of suspects-to-be – was in effect in Europe for about a decade, but was found to violate human rights at the most principal level (presumption of innocence, right to privacy) by the European Court of Justice in April last year. (The European Court of Justice can be described as the Supreme Court of the EU.) The Court even went as far as to nullify the law retroactively – not just saying “this law no longer exists”, but going one step further and saying “this law has never existed in the first place”.

So in this environment, when most countries are saying “Oops, my bad, this was actually a rather egregious violation of rights” and walks away whistling conspicuously in embarrassment, Australia introduces the violation instead. What AU lawmakers don’t get is that insisting on your rights and evading the pre-emptive wiretapping is just a VPN connection away.

This is not circumventing the law or acting like a criminal. On the contrary, it’s just a tangible non-acknowledgement of a command to submit your liberties at the door. Noncompliance with such nonsense is absolutely key; lawmakers and courts will take all liberties they can get away with taking at the moment. Technical means to retain your privacy, exercising analog-equivalent rights, are absolutely paramount.

The second piece of news is that Spain required its ISPs to censor The Pirate Bay. Again, something that violates analog-equivalent rights – a court order requiring a utility to lie about directions? – and just again, something that is trivially fixed with a VPN. (In this case, it was fixed in minutes by users just switching DNS services to a public non-lying service instead.)

Third, courts in Ireland have required the Irish UPC to implement “three strikes”, cutting any household off from the Internet en masse if somebody in the household is found to violate the copyright monopoly. This is really, really questionable from a legal standpoint (collective punishment, and essentially sending somebody into exile from modern society) – but just again, is easily defendable with a VPN connection.

Fourth and finally, Denmark required censorship of another eleven sites. Guess what you can use to ignore that completely.

Privacy, as always, remains your own responsibility.