Age Verification is Another Nail in the Coffin of Privacy | Rob Braxman

➡ Rob Braxman talks about how Texas has passed a law requiring age verification on adult websites, aiming to protect minors from explicit content. However, this law has sparked concerns about increased internet surveillance and the loss of online anonymity. Critics argue that parents should be responsible for monitoring their children’s internet use, rather than implementing widespread surveillance measures. They warn that such laws could lead to a loss of privacy, increased censorship, and a shift towards a more controlled internet, similar to China’s social credit system.

➡ This text talks about the dangers of losing our online privacy. It warns us about the push from certain groups to link our real identities to our online activities, which could lead to control over our thoughts and actions. It also discusses the use of technology to scan our devices for illegal content, which is seen as an invasion of privacy. The author encourages us to protect our privacy and offers tools through his company to help us do so.

It’s very interesting that when politicians want to convince you of some questionable move, they invoke the child card. They always say we need to protect our kids. So this was the same justification recently for the infamous CSAM, which was the reasoning given for client side scanning or direct scanning of your device content. I can’t even define what CSAM is on this video or I get demonetized. The new push now comes from Texas, though this was pushed from the EU just last year.

This is the demand for Internet age verification. Just recently we saw this in the news. Texas can enforce a law requiring age verification systems on porn websites, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled Thursday. In a two to one decision, judges ruled that the age verification requirement is rationally related to the governments legitimate interest in preventing minors access to pornography. Therefore, the age verification requirement does not violate the First Amendment.

This obviously was the law challenged by the owners of Pornhub. And when the Court of Appeals ruled on this, Pornhub block access to people in Texas. And of course that caused a rapid increase in VPN subscriptions to circumvent this. So basically another waste of time. But Internet age verification is not some simple topic that you might think it is. In fact, it is a great thing to push on the masters if you want to push more Internet surveillance, more tools for the state, and the same pool of conservatives pushing this will be the main target that will suffer the consequences of this move.

Sad that the average person doesn’t understand. I’m gonna tell you why. This kind of law is misguided, very misguided, and this will keep getting promoted over and over again as it was in multiple countries last year. If this ever gets implemented fully, it will destroy the Internet as we know it. Are you interested in this discussion? If so, stay right there. Can you protect kids from things like porn? Well, of course you can.

But the typical approach is to put wide reaching Internet surveillance to implement this. When the answer is simple. Protection is the responsibility of the parent. Let me repeat that you, the parent, are responsible. The cause of failure in protecting against child access to pornography is the parent. Some years back I was a content creator in the platform Periscope, which was a video live streaming app owned by Twitter.

I witnessed two young girls, which I guess were around the age of twelve to 13, doing live streaming. And of course this app, Periscope was full of worldwide weirdos and you can see the stream of comments from men all over ogling the girls and pushing them to show some skin. The innocent but stupid young girls, of course, wanted popularity, so they were suggesting that they might do something to satisfy the viewers.

This livestream was being done in a yard at their house on a mobile phone. But in the background we could hear the adults. They weren’t that far away. They were also in the backyard somewhere. And you can see the girls glancing towards the adults regularly to make sure they weren’t observed. These kids were live streaming right under their noses. And this, folks, is triggered by the fact that most parents now feel that kids need to be on social media at the age of nine or ten, and they are given access to the Internet without supervision.

Well, how stupid is this? Do you think the Internet is some toy? Why would you give kids free reign access to the Internet? So they can be cool on their Instagram and TikTok early in life? These parents are so insecure about their kids social development that they go with what’s popular without thinking. And here we want the government to cover for the parents fault. Let me remind you of Snapchat.

In the 2012 era, this app became so popular with teenagers. And by the way, those teenagers are the parents of today. And parents were so unaware. This app was the sexting app. Teenagers sent nude pictures of each other or even others, and the promise was that the image was ephemeral on this app and would self delete. Yeah right. Fooled again. Were the parents aware of this? Obviously not.

The point is, folks, you protect your kids by not giving them access to social media or phones until they are older, at least high school age. And you can add further protections by doing active filtering of content on your home network, using hardware to do the filtering. Even by now, I imagine there are AI based filtering tools that can clean up the content on your network. But the approach to just block everyone with Internet age verification is completely wrong.

Let me explain this clearly to you. Age verification means you show government id to someone to access parts of the Internet. We already do this in many places, like banking. But to require age verification all over the Internet means that anonymity in Internet access will be gone. The only Internet platform we will have access to is zucking Zuckbook because they have profiled you and know exactly who you are and the AI can discern your age.

Let me repeat that. No more anonymity. No more pseudo anonymity either. You can’t post on the Internet without using a real name. You can’t lurk anywhere on the Internet without a real name. In fact, under this scenario, someone will know precisely every thought you have at all times. Since every access at every site will be nicely recorded under your name and filed away under your social score. When this happens, I assure you your freedom to research, learn, and even to respond to any idea will be under the threat of someone physically coming to your house and hurting you physically.

If they don’t agree with you, you will be put on FBI domestic terrorists which they do today, but it will get worse if you go speak loudly about your opposition to whatever the hot list topic is of today. Our entire right to privacy will be completely eliminated and every action on the Internet will be subject to fear. Stupid, stupid, stupid. You cannot implement some age verification system that can pass through litigation without a pretty intensive KYC or government id checking, likely with a photo.

Can you imagine that being a requirement to go to any social media site? Do you think this will be effective? Hell no. And this is because people just have no understanding of how the Internet works. The effect of this will be to restrict the average law abiding good citizen. Since they dont understand technology, they will feel the immediate restriction that they cant do anything on the Internet without an id.

Now the rest of us techy types will know how to circumvent this easily. We will start expanded use of the dark web and most websites will exist in the dark web where there is no identification and location tracking. Illicit websites will abound and they will be from unknown jurisdictions so they cannot be sued. In the meantime, this will expand criminal opportunity. Just like during prohibition, this kind of law will result in more crime.

All because you want to restrict access to a few, the ones to suffer the majority. This isnt about a limited topic like porn. And even this is so stupid since porn can be distributed by teenagers among themselves without the need for some entity that can be sued. Just again to emphasize this, what Internet age verification pushes is an extreme form of the surveillance state, something that some in politics push because they have a different agenda.

One of the presidential candidates pushed that Internet identification be a requirement. I get it. This is another member of the cabl that pushed the Patriot act through and now we live in the surveillance environment both at the public and private level. Because of them, the whole idea of privacy has been threatened forever. This of course is already a reality in China where over a billion people are now subject to the social score.

Behave as defined by the state. Everything is about conformity. Freedom of thought is not allowed. Not only will this put a restriction on thought because someone is always watching, there will always be a financial stick attached to the social score. Carrot again already implemented in China. Speak against your superiors and you lose access to your money. Everything in China now is maintained through through the WeChat app, including spending.

Hardly anyone uses cash in China. That, by the way, is part of the formula CBDC that is coming central bank digital currency. So it is easy to cut anyone off with just a simple block on an app controlled by the state. What is interesting about this saga today is that the main group pushing these age verification laws are, I presume, a group of conservatives in Texas, and these same conservatives are the ones being censored and identified in Google Maps and put on domestic terrorists.

So go ahead, shoot yourself in the foot. Lose the chance for some pseudo anonymity. Lose the chance to speak freely without consequence. Because when this is implemented, everything said will have a consequence. There will be a public record of every communication for the rest of your ducking lives. Try running for public office then. If you’re not an angel. Could you even tolerate the fact that every place you go on the Internet would ask you to upload your id? Doesn’t that mere fact bother you? I’m pretty upset now that I have to give my phone number to every website.

This is why I created the Brax virtual font so I don’t have to give my real number. Everything I teach on my channel is that we need to separate our real identity from all our online identity. I call this pseudo anonymity. Stop. The attribution of posted ideas to our real identity and the push from these anti freedom groups is the exact opposite. Make no mistake, the powers to be that promote this are not necessarily the well meaning but technologically uninformed parents.

It is planned out by the ones who seek control over us like big brother, control our thoughts and control our actions. That’s what they want. And this to them means stability to the nation. Let me talk about the related topic I mentioned earlier, which is called CSAM or roughly defined as illicit photos related to children. So apparently this is such a big issue in the mind of government officials that they want to allow the direct scanning of all your content in phones and computers to see if you have this illicit content.

Now it should be plain to most of us that the vast majority of people will not have such illicit content on their phones and computers, but notice that the technology they want implemented is intended to scan all people’s devices. Is it really a crisis as they describe? No, it is pushed in the press as a crisis because this is what the three letter agencies want. Let me tell you the real reasons for moves like Internet age verification and client side content scanning the reason is that the three letter agencies have hit a wall because the majority of Internet traffic is now encrypted.

So governments don’t like that. China has eliminated the encryption issue because they have fake root certificates that can break any Internet encryption. This is another thing they are pushing lately in the EU and fortunately this has not passed. This folks, is the real thing going on here. Parties interested in surveillance want access to our data and they want to see everything we do. Having Internet ids will override VPN’s, eliminate encryption problems.

Having client side scanning will allow direct examination of our devices. The Internet ids will allow very targeted surveillance so that those with ideas not in the interest of the state will be eliminated from visibility. Let me remind you now that the device currently equipped with the capability for client side scanning is the iPhone, something preferred by 56% of us people. All these are connected approaches. And as much as you think that what I’m saying sounds like a conspiracy theory, unfortunately the heads of the three letter agencies actually said all this.

They said in the past that this is what they need. They’ve been pushing for a way to bypass encryption and these set of tools will allow that. So from here on, listen closely. They will invoke the child card often and consistently. And as shown last year, it was simultaneously considered in all five eye countries in the same year. Various child card issues as I discuss here, like client side scanning and age verification.

You think the timing and appearance of these topics is random? Think again. Dont be a tool. Think for yourself. Entities like the Electronic Frontier foundation and other freedom groups reject these ideas. They know that these approaches are here to curtail freedom. Just to remind you folks, I created a company to give you tools to protect your privacy. These are all available on my site. Brax me. Join our community there, which now has grown to 100,000 people.

We have products like the Google phones, the Brax, virtual phones, bytes, VPN, Brax mail, Brax routers, all made to do exactly the opposite of what is discussed in these videos. These products are made to protect your identity, not to reveal them. Thank you for watching and I’ll see you next time. .

See more of Rob Braxman Tech on their Public Channel and the MPN Rob Braxman Tech channel.