I recently saw that in Brazil, people who use VPNs to access X/Twitter after the ban could apparently be fined. I’m no expert whatsoever, but isn’t the whole point of VPNs to encrypt all of your activity? If so, how would the offenders, so to speak, even be caught and fined??
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Everyone seems to think that their ISP doesn’t look at the data at all. That the encrypted connection, which is the whole point of the VPN and the main selling point, that bad actors in public places on public wifi can’t snoop your data; just isn’t going to be something that pops up to people.
The ISP knows you are using TOR, they see an encrypted connection and get suspicious. They know you are using a VPN from one of the commercial providers, they see the encrypted traffic.
Making it a finable offense to use a VPN means they just need to prove you are using one. Making it an offense to use Twitter on a VPN means they just have to prove you are using Twitter. Difficult, but not impossible.
To break it down, imagine a fleet of delivery vans. All taking packages to and from a destination. You have the mail van, the Amazon van, the various food delivery vans. Now imagine someone sets up a service where all your deliveries are routed through a warehouse and are delivered by special vans. They have no markings, but everyone got different deals on color. All your boxes are plain cardboard too. Now you can’t tell if it is your mail, your Amazon delivery, or your pizza. Everything comes in plain boxes by unmarked vans. The police watching your house don’t know what you are ordering or from where. They do know you are ordering things and they can figure out the service. So they demand the records. And find out everything delivered.
Realistically, wait for people to tell on themselves (and they will), seize their devices and issue fines. Also as likely, bust people for a different crime then search their devices, and add fines onto whatever the original charge was.
Theoretically, there are other options on the table, none of which are great. They could subpoena the VPN providers, but most would pull out of brazil rather than betraying their clients. They could create a honey pot VPN service, and get the suckers that sign up. They could outlaw VPN services with exit points outside of the country, and then bust anyone using a VPN that didn’t comply.
Most failures of VPN products happen at the consumers computer, stupid stuff like not deleting tracking cookies, not using the VPN for all traffic, etc.
Just go to any pop star twitter account and wait for the eventual “come to Brazil” comments, that’s how they’ll get them, they can’t help it 😐
They changed the rulling: you can access through a VPN, you cannot use this subterfuge to post falsehoods on Twitter.
why would anyone want to access x? what a trash heap.
Like with most other things in the tech world, the weakest link is not the tech but the human. Brazilian makes tweet while in Brazil. The only way to achieve that is to use a VPN. Caught red-handed.
If they know your Twitter account is from a brazilian person and you post in there, then it’s obvious how that happened. 😛
Don’t worry too much though. They’re looking for the users that X didn’t block as requested. Those are the ones who will probably be fined, if at all. They do want to put pressure on X to fix their shit though and a general threat do make people avoid the site. 😛
Well, if you know they were in Brazil at the time they posted or responded to a post or a DM on X, you’d know they broke the law.
I don’t think this is the kind of law you enforce as it’s happening, this is the sort of thing that gets tacked on later when investigators upend your life for some other reason.
You might be using a VPN, but if there’s activity on your account. Dissing the Brazilian president and liking posts that mock him. At a time that they can prove you are in Brazil, you may have some questions to answer.
I think a lot of people here are missing the point of the law.
The point is not to make it technically impossible to post on Twitter from Brazil – yes, one can imagine a number of workarounds, such as using a VPN, establishing a service to post on your behalf from outside the country, etc.
The point is to make it inconvenient and risky enough to go through your feed and post, so most people will just give up. Plus, a social network like Twitter gets its value from the network effect – even if you’re technically savvy and find a bulletproof way to use Twitter, if 99% of your countrymen (and in particular your friends) can’t / don’t bother, is there still that much value in using Twitter anyway?
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