Comment by schoen
5 days ago
I just chaired a session at the FOCI conference earlier today, where people were talking about Internet censorship circumvention technologies and how to prevent governments from blocking them. I'd like to remind everyone that the U.S. government has been one the largest funders of that research for decades. Some of it is under USAGM (formerly BBG, the parent of RFE/RL)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Agency_for_Globa...
and some of it has been under the State Department, partly pursuant to the global Internet freedom program introduced by Hillary Clinton in 2010 when she was Secretary of State.
I'm sure the political and diplomatic valence is very different here, but the concept of "the U.S. government paying to stop foreign governments from censoring the Internet" is a longstanding one.
But part of Agency has just been defunded
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/19/us-funding-for...
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> very explicitly stated goals of sowing discord within the US's former "allies", to weaken Europe, and to promote racist and fringe-right views.
The US government explicitly said that they seek to promote racist and fringe-right views? Do you have any sort of evidence to back it up?
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This is fine. If successful, the next administration can just leverage it for a different kind of agenda. In fact, by the time we know whether it's successful, this admin will likely be gone. I'm a bit conflicted though. I hated the last admin's censorship efforts for wrong think. Now, looking at the online discourse landscape, I'm starting to think we might have thrown out the baby with the birth water. Why can't we just be normal!
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This new "portal" will most likely only allow de facto government controlled sites like X.
"government controlled sites like X" - I thought the control was the other way around?
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It’s a clear way to project soft power: make sure your message and culture can get through.
So far the current admin has been very successful in obliterating all the soft power the US built up through the decades.
I have no idea why they would do this, but I often wonder if maybe soft power becomes less valuable in a world where more countries are able to empower themselves on their own. Perhaps soft power itself is only valuable as long as this asymmetry is sustained. Otherwise, it’s all about hard power.
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Because that softpower spread a toxic culture, that has poisoned western civilization from within?
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And lies.
And truth.
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American culture can access Europeans at any time. Europeans consume American culture daily.Just to clarify. Website banned are often hostile propaganda or extremists.
This is only cringy lousy provocation for appearance of moral superiority.
Coming from a government notorious for spying on it's citizens it seems pretty ludicrous.
Europe should just create their own social media companies where the government can act as a moderator of content then.
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It might do that too, but access to information is just so utterly critical, and exponentially moreso in circumstances where government brutally cracks down on it, as we saw in Egypt during the Arab Spring and we're seeing in Iran presently.
Will it work when the US government is the one cracking down, banning interviews, etc?
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Then again, Egypt was definitely driven by Western agitators, as was the case Iran recently. Iran probably got Russian tech to trace starlink users during the blackout which put a target on many Western assets in Iran. I'm not saying the Iran government didn't also kill and torture independent actors nor that I support state violence (against its citizens, in this case). Just saying that any government will use violence to stay in power and to ensure regime change doesn't happen outside of whatever system the state upholds.
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Access to information is dangerous when the information is controlled propaganda.
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Yet the US president unilaterally shut down Voice of America because he didn't like its message
Freedom of speech for me, not for thee
Huh? Voice of America is a basically a government organization blasting out US propaganda.
The president runs VOA, it's not some separate entity he decided to censor.
> US president unilaterally
The whole truth here would be that technically he did not do it unilaterally but as a representative of his voters, so basically almost as far from unilaterally as possible.
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> It’s a clear way to project soft power: make sure your message and culture can get through.
You're talking about an administration that actively tries to censor candidates of opposition candidates through both state regulatory institutions such as the FCC and business collusion, a typical play out of the fascist playbook with state and oligarchs colluding to strong arm their political goals.
It's also the same administration who is actively involved in supporting other dictatorial regimes and destabilize Europe, including with very explicit and overt threats of war of invasion to annex territories.
It's also the same administration that is clearly a puppet administration controlled by another totalitarian regime - Russia.
There is no soft power in this stunt. Only further self-destructive actions to further kill the US's relevance as an European ally.
Didn't Doge gut the USAGM?
Yep! Maximally closed as much as possible under the law. They also shut down other programs which aim to sidestep propaganda (including US propaganda), though some of those are starting to come back. Radio Free Asia, for example, https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/radio-free-asia-s...
Thanks for the link. This should be indeed understood in the context of stations like Radio Free Asia, Voice of America etc.
This is somewhat counterintuitive: The US is the only country I know where most newspapers and government services use strict geoblocks to prevent me from accessing US sites in Europe. Conversely, I've never had any problems accessing European sites from the US. I know this is for a different set of reasons (likely GDPR cookie law or similar), but it's funny that anyone thinks blocks like this are relevant. Most people I know use VPNs these days to make their traffic appear to come from whatever country they need.
And imgur has geoblocked the UK, which is extremely annoying as it was the reddit image host of choice.
It's going to be a weird set of content on this website. Are they going to livestream La Liga sports?
This. I regularly face geo blocks from American websites. Like literally at least once a week. It's very common for whatever reason for smaller US shops, newspapers any size and other random sites.
The geoblocks happened because of our (EU) governments making punitive rules of the website doesn't follow European standards. It's easier for an American website targeted at Americans to just not bother with Europeans.
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Only EU site I had a problem accessing that i can remember was from my electricity provider. Strangely enough they didn’t geoblock me but login threw an error because my local time didn’t match the local (German) timezone.
I changed my system timezone to Germany and it worked without issues, so I was wondering if it’s a very bad geoblock or something else entirely
That's actually a related issue. European governments routinely and sometimes illegally attempt to enforce their laws against American websites, so if you run a website it's easier to just block the entire continent than to deal with that.
It makes sense to me. They're blocked in Europe because of European government polices, not American ones.
Maybe there's some sort of legal immunity the US government could grant to domestic sites which would allow them to lift those blocks without fear of reprisal?
> but it's funny that anyone thinks blocks like this are relevant. Most people I know use VPNs these days to make their traffic appear to come from whatever country they need.
The search AIs tell me it's around a third of people.
The EU has problems reaching non-US sites. RT for example. The block isn't on RT or Russia's side.
Which US newspapers and which governments websites?
I happen to write this from Poland and I don't recall a single newspaper being geo blocked here. Not nyt, not washington post not anything I've ever accessed.
And didn't see US gov website geo blocked either.
So I ask again: which newspapers and which gov websites?
I don't browse US newspapers that often, but I regularly observe blocked ones, particularly smaller ones. Non-deterministic, e.g.: New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Dallas Morning News, Virginian-Pilot. Beyond that, a lot of CA and San Francisco Government and local utility services are geo-restricted (which I think, from a security standpoint, makes at least somewhat sense..).
Btw. asking once is enough ^^
Nexstar's stations blocked access from European IPs, providing a 451 Unavailable for Legal Reasons response code; Nexstar are the largest TV station owner in the US, so a large number of sites for local affiliates were unavailable. I think other networks (Sinclair) may have also one so.
Here's a HN thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27854663
(I worked with Nexstar and experienced this directly. Looks like this may have changed recently.)
https://github.com/DandelionSprout/adfilt/blob/master/GDPR%2...
That's a good start (might not be 100% up-to-date, but vast majority of them are still 451 blocked).
"has been" => "had been" (since a few days ago)
I suppose COPPA is a form of internet censorship we help children bypass?
But will it let me torrent? /s
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Shortly after the American version of TikTok was established in January of 2026, users began reporting that certain content was creating error messages, including using words like "Epstein" in direct messages, which news outlet CNBC was able to replicate and confirm, with the error message reading: "This message may be in violation of our Community Guidelines, and has not been sent to protect our community." Other users reported similar messages for content critical of U.S. President Donald Trump or other topics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_by_TikTok
Can you be more specific?
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It goes deeper than that. The U.S. Government funds it, discourages other nations from using it, and spies on all web traffic as a result of it.
Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA. Within a quick drive to Langley, Quantico, DC, and other places that house three letter agencies I’m not authorized to disclose.
> Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA
Nobody who understands the scale of the internet could possibly believe this is true.
Routing internet traffic through a geographical location would increase ping times by a noticeable amount.
Even sending traffic from around the world to a datacenter in VA would require an amount of infrastructure multiple times larger than the internet itself to carry data all that distance. All built and maintained in secret.
He was likely referring to the claim that 70% of the internet flows through Loudon County, Virginia, where AWS us-east-1 is located, although the more accurate number is probably somewhere around 22%.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudoun_County,_Virginia#Econo...
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> Nobody who understands the scale of the internet could possibly believe this is true.
Neither would anybody have believed that 8 out of 10 hard drive chips can contain any rootkits. Yet, here we are, and the insanity of it is that we've found lots of malware attributed to EQGRP, and the Snowden leaks (from the perspective of Booz Allen) have confirmed it.
You should read up on quantum routing.
They don't have to route through any specific location if they can just infiltrate the routers of your neighbors. Any data packet from the originating server will arrive slower at your location than the data packet of your neighbor. In that scenario TLS becomes pretty useless if the CA itself is also exchangeable, because you can't rely on TCP or UDP. Ironically the push for UDP makes it much easier to implement in the underlying token ring architectures and their virtual routing protocols like VC4 and later.
That's how the internet and a star topology (or token ring topology on city level) was designed.
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Just because your client is in Switzerland and your data center is in Germany, doesn’t mean a data center in Virginia doesn’t have a copy.
https://youtu.be/JR6YyYdF8ho
That was 14 years ago…
We have MUCH more capabilities today.
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Never tapped a port, eh?
Edited to not be so flippant: I work in HFT/finance where recording all traffic is required I think by law and definitely for one's own sanity. We're able to maintain nanosecond trades while capturing ALL the traffic. It has zero impact on the traffic. This is normal, widely used tech. Think stuff like Ixia passive taps and/or Arista Metamako FPGA-based tap/mux devices.
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Speed of light establishes certain latency minima. Experimental data can falsify (or not) at geographical locations far enough from VA.
"Going through" doesn't necessarily imply store and forward. It could be tapped elsewhere and shipped to WVA. fwiw the idea of running a network in order to tap it is hardly new. The British operated largest telegraph network in the world in the 1800's for that reason.
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Correct but local governments using Palantir will need to provide it to them somehow.
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Most of the replies to this seem to think it's referring to some kind of secret government datacenter. It's us-east-1, and every other cloud provider's US East and GOV zones, which are all in NVA
So they… drive the data around NOVA?
No, but if you want to collaborate with the federal government it makes it more convenient to be located where the federal government resides.
No, but you can visit a “clean room” and look at the data at any number of sites.
When I worked for a CLEC (during that moment in history when they were briefly a Thing), we had a USG closet at our main datacenter, and we are nowhere even close to NoVA. I expect they still handle it this way rather than try to funnel any significant amount of traffic to a particular geographical region.