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A comment on Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs–and They Have No Idea What They're Doing. Parent comment

Re:Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs–and They Have No Idea What The... by exasperaited on Saturday November 15, 2025 @12:52PM (#45939193)
> The key takeaway is that arrests have risen since 2020 while convictions have not.

Yes, but this also coincides with the pandemic which put more people online and created a lot of anger and harassment of nurses, doctors, government officials, and it also coincides with growing activism in the trans debate space, which has undoubtedly led to more actual harassment.

> But it looks like people are being arrested and later released for perfectly legal speech.

But you just said we don't know, because offence type is not provided?

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Re:Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs–and They Have No Idea What The... by rgblambda on Saturday November 15, 2025 @04:35PM (#45940769)
If there has been a rise in the amount of harassment due to the pandemic, then why have actual convictions dropped compared to before the pandemic. I refer to the graph of convictions per year in the HoL report linked above.

>But you just said we don't know, because offence type is not provided?

If someone is arrested but not convicted, we must presume innocence. "Legal speech" isn't a type of offence.

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