| ▲ | schoen 11 hours 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. |
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| ▲ | pasc1878 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| But part of Agency has just been defunded https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/feb/19/us-funding-for... |
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| ▲ | Waterluvian 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It’s a clear way to project soft power: make sure your message and culture can get through. |
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| ▲ | Mikhail_Edoshin 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | And lies. | | | |
| ▲ | nomilk 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | exe34 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Will it work when the US government is the one cracking down, banning interviews, etc? | | |
| ▲ | AdamN an hour ago | parent [-] | | In some cases yes. Tor for instance was created by the USG and is not easily controlled by the USG. |
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| ▲ | NuclearPM 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Access to information is dangerous when the information is controlled propaganda. | | |
| ▲ | ceteia 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Would educating people instead and giving them more options for information, not be better than banning access to information? | | |
| ▲ | stein1946 35 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | What if educating people takes decades and lies can be prompted in a few minutes? | |
| ▲ | glwiththat 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | If educating people worked there wouldn’t be any obese people, or drunkards, or smokers, druggies, gamblers, people addicted to doomscrolling or video games or ragebait "news" or… Education is as useful as preaching abstinence at horny teenagers instead of providing access to contraceptives | | |
| ▲ | shevy-java 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > If educating people worked there wouldn’t be any obese people, or drunkards This assumes that a) everyone is the same, and b) education would always work. Matthew Perry explained that this is not the case. Some people respond differently to drugs. Whether these people are educated or not, changes very little. Education helps, but not in the way as to be able to bypass physiological aspects completely. > Education is as useful as preaching abstinence at horny teenagers instead of providing access to contraceptives Education can still help. For instance, I decided very early on that the best way to avoid e. g. addiction is to not "give in and try once". So I never tried drugs (ok ok, I did drink a beer occasionally). This was the much simpler and easier strategy to pursue, simply via avoidance behaviour. Thus I disagree that the premise can be "if educating worked" - people will always respond differently to drugs. And they will have different strategies to cope with something too - some strategies work, others don't work. One can not generalize this. | |
| ▲ | schiffern 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >If educating people worked there wouldn’t be any [bad stuff]
I think you're confusing "works" and "works perfectly."Education works. It doesn't work perfectly. | | |
| ▲ | pwndByDeath 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Cause and correlation, education gives you options, it always comes to a choice, I know the donuts lead somewhere but I choose to eat two anyway. Education doesn't cause good choices but it is sometimes correlated to better situations, the difference between the criminals in prison and the ones in the C suite is only education. |
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| ▲ | MASNeo an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Oh my, that is a depressing view on the human condition. | |
| ▲ | ceteia 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | But can't you then set up a system such that if a person only picks one source or a few sources, and that turns out to be bad, that it primarily impacts negatively only themselves? Letting it be their own responsibility? |
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| ▲ | synecdoche an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That depends on what "education" entails. If it's one source only chances of it being propaganda is high. | |
| ▲ | ffsm8 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Intuitively yes, but it's possible that this is one of our biases speaking From my memory (might be mistaken) there have been attempts to somewhat study this via polls etc, and determined that coverage via propaganda (specifically Fox News) is less helpful then randomly guessing what actually happened... But ymmv, social studies are always hard to trust, because it's borderline impossible to prove cause and effect | | |
| ▲ | AnthonyMouse 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > From my memory (might be mistaken) there have been attempts to somewhat study this via polls etc, and determined that coverage via propaganda (specifically Fox News) is less helpful then randomly guessing what actually happened... Ironically the studies of that nature are often themselves a form of propaganda, because it's entirely straightforward to structure the study to produce your preferred outcome. There is a well-known human bias where people use information they know to try to guess information they don't. If you're given three random people and the only thing anyone has told you about them is that one is a drug addict and then you're asked to guess which one is a thief, more people are going to guess the drug addict. So now all you have to do is find a situation where the thief isn't actually the drug addict, let the media outlet tell people which one is the drug addict, and you'll have people guessing the wrong answer a higher proportion of the time than they would by choosing at random. | |
| ▲ | shevy-java 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | People need to decide on their own, so I am against censorship. | |
| ▲ | ceteia 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | ffsm8 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Your phrasing implies someone spook out against that, but nobody did? |
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| ▲ | whattheheckheck 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | For real... the species is not going to last long if a subset of it gets to control the information flow of the other part... literally unsustainable |
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| ▲ | simianparrot 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes Europe is in a really bad spot propaganda-wise. See Germany’s latest crusade against online «hate speech» — ie. unapproved political views. | | |
| ▲ | shevy-java 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | That does not compute. | | |
| ▲ | raincole 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It computes quite well. > It was a 2021 case involving Andy Grote, a local politician, that captured the country's attention. Grote complained about a tweet that called him a "pimmel," a German word for the male anatomy. His complaint triggered a police raid and accusations of excessive censorship by the government. A police raid for calling a politician a dick. Let it sink. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/germany-online-hate-speech-pros... | | |
| ▲ | generic92034 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | That was a overall very rarely occurring abuse of power of a politician in charge of leading local law enforcement. It was declared illegal later. And you take that as a proof for what about the whole of Germany? | |
| ▲ | abraae 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | A little bit like a country's leader calling for the death penalty for a decorated pilot and astronaut who reminded service members of their duty to reject unlawful orders. |
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| ▲ | jasonvorhe 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | linkregister 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Evidence to the contrary abounds regarding Egypt. Secretary of State Clinton famously rejected the popularly-elected Muslim Brotherhood government and pledged support to Mubarak. This tacit approval led him to have a successful coup against the popularly elected government. If by "western" you meant some other power then you should be specific. Western as a term is imprecise and can be interpreted differently depending on the audience. | |
| ▲ | ch4s3 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The claim that Iranian protesters were western agitators is a pernicious lie. | | |
| ▲ | roenxi an hour ago | parent [-] | | Are you suggesting the US intelligence services are negligent in this instance? The US launched an unprovoked attack last year to try and force regime change, they look for all the world like they're about to do the same thing again this year. If they didn't have a hand in the protests, that seems like a stunning failure on the part of the US State Department to support their own policies. It'd be a lot cheaper and far less risky than the current military buildup. Unless I suppose your interpretation of the purge of USAID, etc, by the Trump administration house-clearing a bunch of people because they failed to position assets in Iran. That'd be evidence in favour of them missing the boat on the Iran protests, I suppose. But even then, they've had a few months to get their act together and at least try something. |
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| ▲ | 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | Aloisius 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Didn't Doge gut the USAGM? |
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| ▲ | 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | learingsci 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | mossTechnician 10 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 | |
| ▲ | motbus3 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Can you be more specific? |
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| ▲ | bzhxb45 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Its also proven ineffective. But since its easy the chimp troupe keeps doing it out of habitus. History will teach it has no basis in information theory and the info processing constraints of a 3 inch chimp brain. But carry on. |
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| ▲ | reactordev 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | Aurornis 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | n2d4 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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... | | |
| ▲ | RajT88 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Every cloud provider worth talking about is there too. Both public and sovereign/gov data centers. And of course all the privately owned ones too. It is bananas. Not just because of government either - low ping times to the biggest population center of North America. |
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| ▲ | reactordev 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | petcat 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The datacenter is in Utah, not Virginia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center | | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Do you have a single actual source for anything you’re saying about this happening today? I’m well aware of the historical surveillance programs. I’m asking for a source for all of your claims about what’s happening today regarding 80% of internet traffic. | | |
| ▲ | mc32 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That claim makes no sense in today's world. For over a decade, the likes of Youtube, Netflix and short form video make the majority of throughput. Why in the world would anyone want to monitor known catalogs of content? Most of which are delivered by POPs in data centers distributed all over the world. | |
| ▲ | reactordev 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93dnnxewdvo As for traffic, I can’t cite numbers, you’ll just have to trust me when I say it. I can’t give you packet breakdown or IP4 vs IP6. To have that discussion requires a secret clearance at least. | | |
| ▲ | nozzlegear 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You have clearance enough to imply that these things are going on but not enough to actually prove anything? Surely the requirements of your clearance would come with some basic terms like "don't use winks and nudges to implicate us in vast conspiracies on public forums," or the far more simple "don't mention this to anyone." | |
| ▲ | IAmGraydon 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Let’s be serious for a minute here. If you’re claiming to have secret clearance on an Internet forum, you don’t. | | |
| ▲ | mwilliaams 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | You may be surprised how cavalier some people are about their clearance. | | |
| ▲ | dmoy 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Secret is also like... really common to have. 5 million people or whatever. |
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| ▲ | cookiengineer 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | Henchman21 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Never tapped a port, eh? I have. I have a background in high speed networking. Have you ever paused for a moment to consider how much infrastructure would be required to send 80% of data on the internet across the country and into a single datacenter in Virginia? If you've worked in HFT, you can probably at least start to imagine the scale we're talking about. | | |
| ▲ | reactordev 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | It’s not a single data center, it’s about 200 of them. | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Just minutes ago you said this: > Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA Where are you getting this new 200 numbers? Share a source please. | | |
| ▲ | Mtinie 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | https://broadbandbreakfast.com/dateline-ashburn-data-centers... “Loudoun County currently has 199 data centers, with another 117 in development, according to Michael Turner, vice chair of the board of supervisors transportation and land use committee and Ashburn’s district supervisor.” https://virginiabusiness.com/loudoun-county-advances-changes... | |
| ▲ | reactordev 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | One of… Ashburn, VA is the data center capital of the world. When you type and hit submit, even on this site, your data will hit one of those data centers. The few exceptions are government networks and China. | |
| ▲ | jen20 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I have no data or information on the topic, but the use of English was fine for the apparent intended meaning: "Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in X" Does not mean that all traffic goes through a single data center in X. Just that it goes through one of potentially many data centers that happen to be in X. | | |
| ▲ | coliveira 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | You're right. It's fantastic to see how English comprehension is decaying, even in groups that supposedly are smarter than average. There's a fast decaying tendency in language comprehension overall, and I can only point to the fact that much of the new generation is unable and unwilling to read even a single book. |
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| ▲ | suhputt 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | the time it takes for light to travel from los angeles to virginia is 12 - 16 ms, round trip is 30ms lets say - that is a noticeable delay, and it could be easily disproven that 80% of traffic is literally routed through VA now.. could they just copy the traffic and send it to VA on a side channel? probably? | | |
| ▲ | metadat 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | And how useful would this information be? srcIP:port_dstIP:port pairs with almost all traffic encrypted. Pretty boring from a sigint pov. Instagram, YouTube, misc Web traffic, and torrents, with a side of minutae. I'm certain the three letter agencies yearn for the days before letsencrypt was de facto. | | |
| ▲ | rtkwe 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | There is the small possibility that the NSA has found cracks in some of the popular cyphers and could actually make sense of the encrypted data. It's not completely out of the question, their cryptanalysis has been shown to be ahead of the public best efforts in the past. They demonstrated it back in the 70s with DES S-boxes hardening them against a technique no one publicly knew about until the 80s. |
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| ▲ | NGRhodes 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | i used to work, 15 years ago, on a (permissive, not covert) monitoring service for a UK national public service, the NHS spine core. We used switches to mirror ports and capture traffic in promisciouse mode on a few dozen servers
split across a few datacentres that all the traffic went througg. We had certs installed to decode https. We could get enough hardware to do this step easily, but fast enough storage was an issue, we had 1 petabyte of usable storage across all sitesn that could hold a few days of content. We aimed to get this data filtered and forwarded into our central Splunk (seperate storage) and also into our bespoke dashboards within 60s. We often lagged... |
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| ▲ | rtkwe 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The point they were making was that you could tell via ping times if the traffic was literally being routed through VA unnecessarily because the extra unavoidable light speed delay that extra distance would add between a user and the server if they weren't already very near to VA. Could be mirrored via the type of monitoring you're talking about but that'd only get you mostly encrypted traffic unless the 90s cypherpunk paranoia turns out to have been true. | |
| ▲ | wasabi991011 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | But you are only tapping your own data that's already passing by you not? Not 80% of the internet that has nothing to do with you. |
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| ▲ | ascorbic 35 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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 | |
| ▲ | recursive 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Speed of light establishes certain latency minima. Experimental data can falsify (or not) at geographical locations far enough from VA. | | |
| ▲ | dboreham 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | "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. | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | You think there's an entire shadow infrastructure across the United States or world that carries 80% of all internet traffic all the way to VA? It would have to be several times larger than the internet infrastructure itself due to the distances involved. All built and maintained in secret? | | |
| ▲ | coliveira 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You just don't have imagination. Google, just by itself, controls 89% of the traffic in the Internet. And we know that the government can get any information they want from them, without even asking too much. If you combine this with other major companies operating very close to the US government, it is probable that more than 95% of the web traffic outside China that is easily within reach of these sinister 3 letter organizations. | |
| ▲ | Henchman21 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No. That isn't required at all. Fundamentally you lack understanding of how this happens. Yes, there is some port duplication. Yes it costs money. But it is not anywhere near as onerous as you assume. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A | | |
| ▲ | Aurornis 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Fundamentally you lack understanding of how this happens. Yes, there is some port duplication. Yes it costs money. But it is not anywhere near as onerous as you assume No, I understand networking hardware quite well actually. I'm also familiar with Room 641A. Room 641A did not capture 80% of internet traffic. If you think 80% of internet traffic could be routed through Room 641A you're not thinking about the infrastructure required to get it all there. It was a targeted operation on backbone lines that were right there. | | |
| ▲ | PenguinCoder 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | While the most well known, there are other points of presence doing the same thing. Easy and trivial to duplicate traffic at line speed. It doesn't affect the traffic flow itself. | | |
| ▲ | reactordev 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | They will never believe you until you show them and that requires a clearance. | | |
| ▲ | ta20240528 24 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | No need for a clearance, merely explain that 1. fibre-optic traffic is a beam of light 2. this beam can be passed through a glass prism… 3. the prism splits off say 20% of the light by intensity 4. this 20% is identical to the 80% 5. both the 20% and 80% component are 'bright' enough to be used 6. the 80% continues on its merry way, the 20% is redirected for 'other' uses. | |
| ▲ | dmoy 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | A decent number of people reading this probably do have secret clearance. But that's not really the relevant point. Simply having secret clearance doesn't mean you can just go digging around arbitrary secret classified info that you have no business reading. And it certainly doesn't mean that discussion can be had on hackernews. | |
| ▲ | 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | reactordev 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Correct but local governments using Palantir will need to provide it to them somehow. | | |
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| ▲ | Den_VR 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | So they… drive the data around NOVA? | | |
| ▲ | shimman 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | No, but if you want to collaborate with the federal government it makes it more convenient to be located where the federal government resides. | |
| ▲ | reactordev 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | No, but you can visit a “clean room” and look at the data at any number of sites. |
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| ▲ | rootusrootus 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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