Yes, exactly.

I've said this before, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47127261 But I think – a few true believers aside – these bills are part of a systematic, global push to put the internet genie back into the bottle. It's actually a very boring, humdrum type of "conspiracy" being done out in the open by vendors pandering to the state.

It's easier to have it laid out when it's the outgroup. Here are a few resources on the topic from The Atlantic Council, the NBER, US officials, and The Economist talking about China's push to "export" its "surveillance state."

https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/is...

https://www.economist.com/international/2025/11/13/chinas-cr...

https://www.chosun.com/english/world-en/2025/11/25/CPLM4FFKQ...

This paper talks about the numbers / shows the exports are occurring, https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31676/w316...

Of course, it's easier to point at the out group than the in group; so what's left unsaid is that we're doing it too. Because the charade of saving the children is really about power. Real power. Karp-ian "scare enemies and on occasion kill them" power.

I wrote this in the context of the Discord ID fiasco; but I invite people to examine the why and how these systems are being implemented. For example, why Discord? Why Twitch? Why now? These platforms aren't actually that important. Not as much as messaging platforms like Telegram and Whatsapp. So why them?

I think it has something to do with Nepal and the global, persistent fears of another Arab spring.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/15/more-egalitarian-ho...

Discord's goose was cooked when 20-somethings and teenagers used Discord to overthrow the Nepalese government and elect a new PM.

It used to be that superpowers would export arms and fighter jets to align other states with their interests. It's how superpowers turn their customers into client states.

In the modern world, the surveillance state is starting to fulfil that role. If you buy a surveillance state from the US or China, you are now dependent on updates, maintenance and upkeep from US and/or China. You are also directly uploading all of your intelligence data to the US and/or China. And there's – of course – the nice little ancillary benefit of state aligned contractors making a bit of dough on the side.

Age verification keeps popping up everywhere, because connecting online activity to IDs is essential for establishing ground truth. If it's truly about age verification, then why don't they ask people to verify with a credit card?

Adult entertainment services have been doing tacit age verification this way for a very long time now. Seems to work just fine. Yes, minors can get credit cards in the US, but they can be identified by the block / number.

These age verification systems could also have been a new zero-knowledge proof system; and only that zkp system. Or, ideally, the formerly libertarian tech industry could have banded together to tell the authorities to get bent.

But that's not what's happening. Instead, we're getting the rollout of very specific asks, via Discord's documentation,

    If you choose Facial Age Estimation, you’ll be prompted to record a short video selfie of your face. The Facial Age Estimation technology runs entirely on your device in real time when you are performing the verification. That means that facial scans never leave your device, and Discord and vendors never receive it. We only get your age group.

They're getting the user to move the device laterally to extract facial structure. The "face scan" (how is that defined??) "never leaves the device," but that doesn't mean the biometric data isn't extracted and sent to their third-party supplier, k-Id.

Even if that data is hashed, as the human face can only be so many values, you can brute force it and establish exactly who the user is with the help of the trillions of other images people have been uploading everywhere.

For some reason, people are still stuck in a human-first world. They assume that as long as it's not an image or it's not the whole text; it's fine. It's not.

We're anthropomorphising machines. A machine doesn't need pictures; "a bunch of metadata" will do just fine.

Collectively, the public imagination is still stuck in the era where the surveillance state would have required tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of humans sitting in a shadow-y room going over pictures and videos. Today, a bunch of vectors and a large multi-modal model will do just fine. Servers are cheap (for a nation state) and never need to eat or sleep.

Certain firms are already doing this for the US Gov, https://x.com/vxunderground/status/2024188446214963351 / https://xcancel.com/vxunderground/status/2024188446214963351

As inference gets more efficient, these capabilities will only expand. And now suddenly, everyone gets a personalized Stasi LLM looking over their shoulder, forever.

I think an early version of this has already seen operational use in places like Dubai. There were recently stories about people getting arrested for photos they shared in private group chats:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/03/31/expats-fle...

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15693741/Paranoid-Dub...

https://www.dailymail.com/news/article-15739739/airline-work...

People were running around in paranoia that their friends are snitching on them to the authorities, but the number of cases and distinct groups were too large and too foreign for it to be Emirati patriots leaking it. A bunch of british flight attendants are very unlikely Emirati patriots. Or any of these groups,

    According to official figures released alongside the announcement, the 109 arrests form part of a broader enforcement campaign that has seen 189 individuals detained since the beginning of the conflict on February 28. Of those arrested, 67 are UAE nationals, while 122 are foreign residents or visitors representing 23 different nationalities. The largest groups among the foreign detainees include Indian nationals (31), Pakistani nationals (22), Filipino nationals (18), Egyptian nationals (14), and British nationals (9). The remaining 28 detainees come from a mix of other nationalities including Americans, Canadians, Australians, and various European and Asian passport holders.

I doubt folks from the Philippines are also feeling the Emirati nationalist fervor. Here's a more likely hypothesis,

Fact 1) We know the gulf states have access to Whatsapp messages, https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/insight/dubai-police-use-what...

Fact 2) They are clearly somehow identifying drone damage photos and videos shared in private chats and using that to arrest people.

But the Emirati population isn't that large. They import their labor. So I doubt they have humans going through the millions of messages that their system captures. Or, viewing these images and videos one at a time.

My hypothesis is that this is the first publicly recognizable case where a state actor has used a multi-modal model for mass surveillance.

I think models are being used to flag photos and conversations; and flagging them so that the senders can be imprisoned.

This is the future. That's what this is all about. The perfect watchers watching everyone everywhere forever. And yes, of course, it needs your ID.

It's official: Utah is the U.S. state closest to banning VPNs