Iirc this happened at a border crossing outside of American jurisdiction where the officers argued that those laws do not apply (while insisting that the american laws he is being charged for breaking do)

100%. From the arstechnica piece:

Making Old Reddit users log in could impact Reddit scraping but also will address Reddit’s interest in connecting as much traffic as possible to specific users—a strategy that is common among companies like Reddit that rely on advertising for revenue.

I just found this out naturally and immediately came to lemmy to see if someone’s posted about it.

Seriously I don’t want a reddit account and old.reddit.com without logging in has been a great way of checking up on the odd thing without having an account and being stuck in the dark patterns that keep you engaging

Six Democratic lawmakers are pressing the nation’s top intelligence official to publicly disclose whether Americans who use commercial VPN services risk being treated as foreigners under United States surveillance law—a classification that would strip them of constitutional protections against warrantless government spying.

As if Snowden didn’t already prove constitutional protections don’t matter to the glowies anyway. Also, don’t expect privacy by placing your trust in strangers. Use trustless systems for that.