I often find it hard to tell if authoritarian governments are strengthened or weakened by internet... The mass shutdowns tells me it's the latter.
I think you are more right than most people here want to admit. Sure, surveillance is bad, and so is censorship, and we should fight it, and not let short-term moral panics like drug wars and terrorism forfeit our fundamental rights.
But let's realize how impossibly hard information is to contain and control. With maybe the exception of China, let's imagine sitting in the Iranian or Saudi secret service. You might have vast funds at your disposal, but you also have a rapidly increasing sophistication in your populations technological awereness. Every day, New VPN technologies spring up and things like sudden critical mass of mesh networking threatens to turn everything upside down. You whack new exist points, but you also know, fundamentally, hundreds of thousands of you people have unrestricted access, and you best weapon is a frustrating shutdown, whenever things truly get out of hand.
things like Starlink will make access to information even harder to control/shutdown. I suppose it could be jammed but signal will still squirt out here and there. It's not as easy as controlling the physical fiber crossing your border.
I think you are more right than most people here want to admit. Sure, surveillance is bad, and so is censorship, and we should fight it, and not let short-term moral panics like drug wars and terrorism forfeit our fundamental rights.
But let's realize how impossibly hard information is to contain and control. With maybe the exception of China, let's imagine sitting in the Iranian or Saudi secret service. You might have vast funds at your disposal, but you also have a rapidly increasing sophistication in your populations technological awereness. Every day, New VPN technologies spring up and things like sudden critical mass of mesh networking threatens to turn everything upside down. You whack new exist points, but you also know, fundamentally, hundreds of thousands of you people have unrestricted access, and you best weapon is a frustrating shutdown, whenever things truly get out of hand.