VPN services are also officially banned in China (except for a small number of exceptions), but everyone who knows even the slightest about tech probably uses one.
> ... how authoritarianism shapes public discourse
See I was onboard with this reasoning until last week - we arrested the boss of Telegram and charged him with allowing illicit activity, which obviously happens on WhatsApp and other apps too. Isis was literally recruiting members on western social networks!
And we spent months discussing banning of TikTok, my major politicians in mainstream parties. so we aren’t far
Reuters, for example[1]: “[Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de] Moraes ordered that those who continued to access X via VPNs be fined up to 50,000 reais ($9,000) per day.” I don’t get how a thing like that could effecrively be ordered into law at a judge’s discretion, but evidently it was.
The only ways for a service to be banned in the US are by court order (i.e. judge says the site has to come down) which carries no penalties for visitors, and sanctions in which case visiting is generally still OK but paying the site is a no-no.
In general, users never face fines in the US even for visiting "banned" pages.
>In general, users never face fines in the US even for visiting "banned" pages.
You might be oversimplifying. Yes, the US does have particularly free speech, and especially for listening to it. But using kiddie porn sites, president threatening sites, ISIS recruiting sites, US govt leaked secrets sharing sites, perhaps ghost gun or bomb making sites, stalking ex girlfriends... I think a good bit of that has legal consequences for people under many circumstances. Evidence used to convict you is not much different than... evidence.
The only one of those that's illegal just to visit in the US as far as I know is the child porn one, and even that only if you receive or attempt to receive actual child porn, as opposed to some other random content that might be on the site.
Some of the things you list are actual criminal acts, not Web sites. Yes, if you stalk your ex, that's criminal, but simply visiting some Web site is not in itself illegal.
If there is some US law that might purport to forbid just visiting a Web site, I've never heard of any attempt to enforce it.
What the hell is a "president threatening site"? Threats to public officials as a service?
if you internet searched "how do you dispose of a body" and then a body is discoved having been disposed of, and you are suspected in the killing, that evidence is introduced at your trial, and a jury will be influenced by it, even though all you did was visit and read the site. That evidence will be even more damning if the page you visited described a particular method that was seen in the case in question. This would be very strong evidence in favor of your guilt. Same for all the other ones I mentioned.
... and yet it is not illegal to do that search. You will not be fined, imprisoned, or whatever, for doing the search.
The fact that something can, in some circumstances, be evidence doesn't mean it's a crime, and the distinction is absolutely critical in the context we're dealing with here.
all of the evidence taken together is what convicts you of a crime. People have been convicted of murder where no body was ever found. You can't point to any piece of the evidence that was used to convict and say "well that was not a crime, so leave it out". My explanation here of how evidence is used in court in gaining convictions is more accurate and realistic than the distinction you are are trying to make.
This started with somebody snarkily asking what the US fine was for just visiting a "forbidden" Web site, in the context of a Brazilian court order applying a large fine for just visiting Xitter. Not visiting Xitter in the course of planning a murder, not visiting Xitter in the context of sedition or whatever, just visiting any content on Xitter for any reason whatsoever.
It's pretty clear that this person thought there were such penalties, but in fact the US has absolutely nothing analogous. No order remotely like that would be issued in the US, because it's so obviously unconstitutional. If some third-tier hick judge did issue such an order, it would be overturned on appeal. If it were issued by the Supreme Court (and, no, not even the current Supreme Court would do that), all hell would break loose throughout the political system. It'd be a constitutional crisis. There are no such fines in the US. The US does lots of things wrong, but this is one of the areas the US tends to get right.
You're dredging up unrelated scenarios involving not-even-hypothetically-existent crimes that nobody was talking about. This is not about trying to use Web site visits to set somebody up for some crime they didn't commit, or even for some crime they did commit. Your weird scenario about, I don't know, being wrongfully charged with something else because your Web history somehow made somebody think you'd done it, is completely out of left field. The issue is entirely whether there's a penalty for visiting a Web site, and what you're talking about is totally irrelevant. And the hypothetical you seem to be trying to spin sounds less like being convicted of murder when there's no body, and more like being convicted of murder when the victim is known to be alive.
>Can you visit a Pro North Korea/ISIS/Iran website?
How about the website for Iran's supreme leader[1], with headlines like "ZIONIST REGIME FACES SEVERE CONSEQUENCES FOR ITS ACTIONS"? It's not blocked in the US.
How is it not? The original question was asking for a "a Pro [...] Iran website". If the website of the Iranian government doesn't count as "pro Iran", I don't know what does.
In 2006, a satellite repairman in New York City was imprisoned for allowing people to watch the television channel al-Manar, which is run by a political party which holds over 10% of the seats in Lebanon's parliament - Hezbollah.
That's not what happened. Javed Iqbal wasn't imprisoned for allowing people to watch Al Manar. He pled guilty to received payments from Al Manar. Hizbollah is a terrorist organization, regardless of their political status in Lebanon.
His name was Javed Iqbal. The charge was "providing material support to Hizballah". He plead guilty and was sentenced to 69 months. The government's story was that:
"From approximately 2005 through 2006, IQBAL, through a Brooklyn and Staten Island-based satellite transmission company he helped operate, HDTV Limited, provided satellite transmission services to al-Manar, in exchange for thousands of dollars in payments from al-Manar. IQBAL provided these services knowing that al-Manar is Hizballah's television station."[2]
It's hard to work out exactly what this means.
Another article[4] does some sleuthing and claims that Iqbal had an FCC licensed earth station that was uplinking in the Ku-band to "ALSAT". That implies that he was actually repeating the al-Manar broadcasts onto a satellite that had a footprint over the US.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism links[5] to some documents for the case, including the original indictment[6]. Some of the "overt acts" listed in this indictment included signing a contract in Lebanon in which his company agreed to provide broadcasting services for al-Manar in exchange for a fee. Additionally, he was charged with providing access to these broadcasts to satellite customers.
I wonder if he would have gotten in trouble if he had only done the latter - helped consumers to tap into al-Manar without actually being part of the technical broadcast chain.
Very interesting case, thanks for the rabbit hole!
Yet there is bipartisan action to ban TikTok in the US. We have effectively banned the import of Chinese electric vehicles. Does that make us authoritarian?
I'm always surprised why I constantly see messages downvoted (not only here), just because they feel unconvenient for the bubble?!
Imho you should all stop that. It's too simple. It doesn't really increase credibility.
Why not start dealing with actual discussions there, and maybe have a little less "everything was already said; just not yet by everyone" discussions in other places?!
... how authoritarianism shapes public discourse