Late January, the U.S. Department of Commerce published a notice of proposed rulemaking for establishing new requirements for Infrastructure as a Service providers (IaaS) . The proposal boils down to a ‘Know Your Customer’ regime for companies operating cloud services, with the goal of countering the activities of “foreign malicious actors.” Yet, despite an overseas focus, Americans won’t be able to avoid the proposal’s requirements, which covers CDNs, virtual private servers, proxies, and domain name resolution services, among others.
The current administration and its agencies have clear contempt for any sort of crypto privacy they have shown in a variety of ways. The Tornado Cash sanction and criminal charges, recent Bitcoin mixer criminal charges, the proposed rule putting a “Primary Money Laundering Concern” black mark on people seeking crypto privacy in virtually any way… if it’s possible to still purchase online services privately after this, I’m sure they will go on to take further measures to try to close the “loophole”. They don’t want anyone doing things without being able to monitor them.
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Relevant Snowden quote:
I pay for vpn service anonymously even though I probably don’t need to, as my main use is torrenting. I can see a remote possibility that vpn payment records at some point end up being used against pirates, even just as some kind of risk factor flagging, in the same vein as what you are saying: “If someone is paying for a vpn, surely they’re doing something bad?” In countries that really want to crack down on speech and human rights, vpns get banned outright to varying success, and if you can’t pay anonymously in that situation you’re pretty screwed, this hurts those people.
In general I think everyone should be trying for some level of actual privacy online as a matter of principle, just because of how everyone being fully tracked and observed puts way too much power in the hands of those watching.