Everyone should be very clear on exactly what this means. Everyone here will be doxxed in a government database linked to every comment or post you ever made. You will no longer ever really be anonymous. If you ever said anything critical of Israel, Trump, the DNC, anything, a quick AI search will come up with everything you ever said. I'm guessing forums like this will die because most people don't want to share their opinions that much. The no holds barred exercise in free speech and debate was fun while it lasted.
Update, May 11, 2026: Utah has agreed to not enforce the VPN law until Sept. 3, 2026 after Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub.com, challenged the law in court.For the last couple of years, we’ve watched the same predictable cycle play out across the globe: a state (or country) passes a clunky...
www.eff.org
"For the last couple of years, we’ve watched the same predictable cycle play out across the globe: a state (or country) passes a clunky age-verification mandate, and, without fail, Virtual Private Network (VPN) usage surges as residents scramble to maintain their privacy and anonymity. We've seen this everywhere—from states like Florida, Missouri, Texas, and Utah, to countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, and Indonesia.
Instead of realizing that mass surveillance and age gates aren't exactly crowd favorites, Utah lawmakers have decided that VPNs themselves are the real issue.
Next week, on May 6, 2026, Utah will become, to EFF’s knowledge, the first state in the nation to target the use of VPNs to avoid legally mandated age-verification gates. While advocates in states like Wisconsin successfully forced the removal of similar provisions due to constitutional and technical concerns, Utah is proceeding with a mandate that threatens to significantly undermine digital privacy rights. "
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The first step to understanding the sudden rush toward Internet “age verification” is to discard the notion that it has anything to do with child safety.
publius297744.substack.com
Flash: The Sudden Push for New “Child Safety,” Age-Verification Laws for Internet Has Nothing to do With Child Safety. It is Surveillance and Control.
The first step to understanding the sudden rush toward
Internet “age verification” is to discard the notion that it has anything to do with child safety. The politicians pushing it are the same ones remaining silent on the lack of prosecutions after release of the Epstein files.
A moment’s thought would tell us that there is nothing these laws would do to “protect children” that the use of “parental control” settings on devices would not.
A simpler solution is to take away smartphones from young children altogether, and to block social media and harmful sites from devices, using the broad array of effective tools made for this purpose.
Some call it good parenting. There is no way to remove 100% of the risk of childhood. When you give your teenager the car keys for the first time, a part of you is terrified. But that is part of life.
But instead of recommending common sense measures, Big Tech is determined to create a problem by pushing smartphones and computers into the hands of children of all ages, i.e., a “car,” with the solution being to demand that anyone who turns the key has what in essence is a digital ID, linked to a high-resolution facial scan, to prove you are “old enough.” “Old enough” are the
words of Bill Gates, a leading proponent of “age verification.”
Such a clever ruse betrays how much elites think about this, and how much they want it. Why?
“Age verification,” “child safety” laws are nothing more than the government’s latest attempt to build out an all-encompassing, total surveillance and social control system of the kind now being perfected in China.
The familiar “Are you a robot?” spot-checks used by many websites, which consist of checking a box to confirm “no I am not a robot,” will turn into spot facial scans, and presenting your digital ID QR code, so that all comments you make or actions you perform on the Internet, even searches, are now part of your permanent record.
Perhaps to be analyzed by AI or law enforcement at some point in the future, in the pursuit of “thought-crimes” like ”spreading misinformation,” as defined by the government of course.
The US government has shown that it has no qualms about abusing any power to collect US citizens’ personal communications. Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed that the NSA, after enactment of the Patriot Act, had been sweeping up the communications of millions of Americans, with no probable cause or warrants.
The Jacobin said of the episode in 2023 that the NSA:
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The Jacobin reported that the FBI had used the NSA database to look for information on Black Lives Matter protesters. According to the
Times of Israel, Snowden also revealed that the NSA had shared millions of raw data files on Americans with Mossad, the Israeli secret service.
Using such a system, expanded to every corner of society, the Chinese Communist Party has eliminated all dissent and serious criticism of the government and its policies.
All ordinary Chinese are assigned a unique digital identity number at age 16, which is linked to a facial recognition scan, and all financial, medical, and other personal information.
CNET wrote in 2020:
In the name of “protecting the children,” politicians say it is now necessary to verify age. It does not take a rocket scientist to see that in order to verify age, they must know exactly who you are, through the upload of official ID documents, linked to a biometric facial scan, which puts you into a system which, coincidentally, can follow you around, know who you are seeing, what you are saying on the Internet, whether you have taken the latest injections touted as “vaccinations,” whether you own a firearm, and for “other purposes.”
The breathtakingly vague language “for other purposes” is the precise language used in the most recent federal “age verification” bill, the outlandishly named
Parents Decide Act H.R. 8250, sponsored by
Rep. Josh Gottheimer [D-NJ-5],
Rep. Elise Stefanik [R-NY-21], and
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick [R-PA-1.]
Most importantly, the facial scan, digital ID system presumably for the “protection of children” will have teeth. The political and banking elites make no secret of their desire for a
purely digital currency financial system, devoid of cash, which could allow or disallow purchases in real-time.
Larry Fink, CEO of Blackrock, the world’s largest and most powerful investment company, and now also the president of the World Economic Forum, has described, in glowing terms,
the coming “tokenizaton” of all assets from houses to currency, into one global ledger, linked to all individuals by a digital ID.
Former Bush Sr. administration official
Catherine Austin Fitts says the system
will be like “the company store,” where there is only one place to spend the money that you earn and all transactions are on the store’s terms.
Anyone “spreading misinformation,” as determined by the government, could be punished by shutting off their ability to buy or sell. Age verification will require the creation of a de facto digital ID, which would eventually link to all bank accounts and determine the ability to access them. Cash would be non-existent.
The eagerness of governments to weaponize the financial system as a tool to force compliance with arbitrary, executive branch mandates and rules has been clearly shown. During the Canadian trucker’s protest against COVID vaccine mandates, which
millions of pages of newly released documents indicate were far more harmful than health agencies were telling the public, truckers and their supporters were having their bank accounts and credit cards
frozen by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in retaliation for opposing the mandate.
In January, 2026, outspoken UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter revealed on
Judge Napolitano’s show that he had been “de-banked,” and had his primary 26 year bank account with Citizens Bank suddenly terminated without explanation. Ritter is a harsh critic of the US-Israeli attack on Iran, and regularly accuses these governments of war crimes. Ritter says he believes pressure from the federal government played a role.
December 13, 2025, mass protests in UK against China-style digital ID.
Former Fox News reporter Clayton Morris on “age verification” Trojan horse
China is the Model
The model for handling citizens which Western elites make no secret of wanting to emulate is China, where one’s digital account can be debited, with no due process, for any infraction specified by the government, or suspended completely. In 2023 Bill Gates praised China’s
admittedly “authoritarian” COVID response. Klaus Schwab, founder of the powerful World Economic Forum,
praised China for imposing harsh “COVID control measures” on citizens.
This is why governments and bankers have been pushing for what is called “central bank digital currency (CBDC,)” a scheme in which all cash is abolished, and the government determines who can spend how much money, on what, and when. If it is determined that your greenhouse gas “carbon footprint” is excessively high, for example, your gas purchases can be instantly rolled back. Likewise, if your facial scan profile has been spotted at a protest, whether a J6 or “No Kings,” expect a knock on your door within hours.
If a journalist, or anyone, has spoken out against government corruption, he suddenly might not be able to shop for food, if the accusations have been deemed “misinformation.”
Even some central bankers who are more concerned with the future of their country than their own power, such as
Neel Kashkari, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, have warned that a CBDC would allow the federal government to:
“
monitor every one of your transactions. I get why China would be interested. Why would the American people be for that?”
The Chinese System Works
Investment Watchblog reports in May 2023:
According to
China Undercover, in China new legions of homeless are being created of people who did not toe the government line, and have had their ability to rent,buy or sell shut off.
Banned, Broke, and Homeless: The Human Cost of China’s Social Credit System
The Chinese system works, and Chinese politicians and government officials face very little criticism of themselves or their policies.
Even in the middle of massive corruption, in which massive numbers of people are barely subsisting or starving, there are no protests or social unrest.
CNET describes how all speech in China, literally what you can say and not say, is ruthlessly controlled.
CNET writes:
“No allowed space” to say bad or mean things about me, behind my back and in private, even if they are true. What else could be a politician’s most dearly held dream since time immemorial?
“Any package, pallet or container can now be equipped with a sensor, transmitter or radio frequency identification (RFID) tag that allows a company to track where it is as it moves through the supply chain—how it is performing, how it is being used, and so on….In the near future, similar monitoring systems will also be applied to the movement and tracking of people.” - Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, in his book The Fourth Industrial Revolution
Below: BBC reporter tests China surveillance system
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