It’s just Akamai being overzealous against bots.

It could simply be you read more pages and it may have triggered anti-scraping rules.

I cannot access many .gov websites either, and maybe it was after 5 pages or so.

This honestly seems kinda fun. If one was really dedicated: buy new device with cash; purchased and used outside city of residence; don’t drive there, non-electric bike or walk; only use device to connect to the website from public wifi; never connect to own wifi; don’t use same VPN service as usual. Not sure if I missed anything. Probably did.

Or walk into an internet cafe. Cafe membership systems, if any, probably aren't yet connected enough to prevent showing you the raw Internet for first few minutes, for few more years. Everyone who's vocal online should try this once in a while. Even Google search results noticeably change depending on your social classes inferred from location and whatnot.

This seems like a good way to learn what information your system is leaking that it shouldn't be leaking, eg if you use a VPN and they still block you, your VPN is probably not doing what it claims to be doing. (AFAIK a correctly implemented VPN would not send any of your computer or browser information to nsa.gov.)

VPNs do not do what you seem to think they do. A VPN is a privacy tool as much as restarting your router to get a new IP lease is a privacy tool.

> and they still block you, your VPN is probably not doing what it claims to be doing.

Of course it's doing what it should: binds IP address to a credit card used to pay for VPN! It's much solid that browser fingerprinting.