Category: reason

It is easy to see why Americans may be uneasy about Chinese technology companies. Setting aside recent policy efforts to ban or reorient Chinese apps like ByteDance’s TikTok and Tencent’s WeChat, Westerners worry that these companies may engage in certain activities on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party. Laws such as the Cybersecurity Law and Encryption Law do compel Chinese companies to share certain data with the government on request.

It’s easy to see the threats that can emanate from a technology company that is openly aligned with a decidedly non-liberal state, particularly when it is viewed at a competitor or even an enemy. It may be harder to see these same threats coming from the companies or policies native to your own country.

At the same that the U.S. government is cracking down on Chinese technology companies, our legislature is considering new policies that would increase controls on American technology companies.

For example, the EARN IT Act would chip away at platform liability protections in the name of protecting children; if a company does not change its platform upon recommendation of a government panel, it would open itself up to major, possibly debilitating lawsuits.

Then there is the Law Enforcement Access to Encrypted Data Act. This one tries to get at the “unbreakable device” problem by compelling technology companies to … break devices. In other words, it wouldn’t be enough for a technology company to provide standard forensic services to help law enforcement gather evidence from a secure device. If encryption stands in the way, well, developers will just have to compromise it.

These policies bring many downsides for Americans. Crude changes to Section 230 liability protections may result in more content filtering, not less, since platforms would have an incentive to be extra cautious. And of course, undermining encryption always comes at a cost to security, regardless of the justification.

One thing that goes less discussed is how such policies affect the reputation and competitiveness of American technology firms. Not only is Silicon Valley a key engine of U.S. growth and innovation, our technology platforms are viewed as ambassadors for American values and priorities, for better or worse. If people are suspicious of Chinese companies’ links to the CCP, why wouldn’t they also be worried about American companies’ links to our political actors?

I hadn’t thought too much about this dimension of proposed new tech controls until it was brought to my attention by Ashkhen Kazaryan of TechFreedom during our recent panel conversation on these bills for the James Madison Institute. She put it in the context of U.S. jurisprudence, but it’s easy to see how the principle can be extended.

The EARN It Act purports to help crack down on child abuse online. Yet one of the reasons that prosecutors in these cases are even able to get evidence admitted is because technology companies shared it with the government on a voluntary basis. Defense attorneys had previously tried and failed to argue that tech companies have essentially been state actors, and therefore the defendants’ Fourth Amendment rights to due process had been violated. If tech companies are in fact deputized as state actors by legislation like the EARN It Act, these legal arguments could hold more weight in court.

Might non-Americans also view things like the EARN It and Law Enforcement Access to Encrypted Data Acts as ways to cement American tech companies as de facto state actors? It’s plausible. If it’s not these two pieces of legislation in particular, it could be some other proposal to promote good-sounding goals like fairness or representation or national security. To Americans, these pretexts make perfect sense. To a non-American, it looks like another way to weaponize technology companies in ways that benefit state interests.

Actually, this is probably how much of the world has viewed our tech companies for a long time. Edward Snowden’s revelations that Silicon Valley had been deputized as an ersatz surveillance agency for the intelligence community provoked outrage in the States—imagine how much more of a scandal this was for people in other countries that were caught in our web of snooping.

Years later, there is a renewed interest in pardoning Snowden—from President Trump of all people—for what many people view in retrospect as a very patriotic act. One of the controversial phone logging programs revealed through the leaks has since quietly folded for ineffectiveness. FISA reform has largely left the national consciousness. Unfortunately, it is a very good bet that the intelligence community still has access to most of the data from our tech companies that they want.

It may not be as “official” as in China, but American tech company’s the impression that American tech companies serve the interests of the US government is surely not an uncommon opinion in much of the world.

It’s worth keeping this in mind as we debate new controls on technology companies. This is not to say that legislation is never warranted. Rather, we should scrutinize proposals to distinguish public-minded rule-making from government-interested controls. If we don’t, we shouldn’t be surprised if American companies come to be more generally viewed as another, perhaps more liberal, flavor of government-aligned actors.

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8/18/1920: The Nineteenth Amendment is ratified

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Stockton University, a public college in New Jersey, has charged doctoral student Robert Dailyda with disruption for a Facebook post that read: “We are a diverse, yet assimilated population from all backgrounds. I believe all must have the same opportunities and I commit to make that a priority. Beyond that, I am done with the leftist agenda of BLM and the white self haters. I have seen it in action in my doctoral classes at Stockton and the general media. I’m not backing down. If we can’t get past this, OK, I’m ready to fight to the death for our country and against those that want to take it down.” University officials say other students found the post to be “offensive, threatening and concerning.” He faces a semester of probation, a $50 fine or community service. The university had also charged Dailyda with discrimination, harassment, hostile environment and harm after he used a photo of President Donald Trump as a Zoom background during a virtual class. The school dropped those charges after the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) protested but is pressing on with the disruption charge.

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Much of the first night of the Democratic National Convention pitched the nomination of former Vice President Joe Biden as a “return to normalcy” as viewers were bombarded with politicians, celebrities, and ordinary Americans expressing their belief that Biden is a decent and honorable guy who might restore some sense of dignity to the country’s highest office.

The most notable exception to that theme came from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), the democratic socialist who finished second to Biden in this spring’s primary campaign.

Sanders, of course, paid the necessary lip service to Biden’s centrist, restorative avatar as well, but the senator also used his speech to look forward, effectively committing a future President Biden to an impossibly long list of progressive policy goals, from promising a $15 national minimum wage to a nationwide shift to renewable energy sources:

Joe supports raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour. This will give 40 million workers a pay raise and push the wage scale up for everyone else.

Joe will also make it easier for workers to join unions, create 12 weeks of paid family leave, fund universal pre-K for 3- and 4-year-olds, and make child care affordable for millions of families.

Joe will rebuild our crumbling infrastructure and fight the threat of climate change by transitioning us to 100 percent clean electricity over the next 15 years. These initiatives will create millions of good-paying jobs all across the country.

As you know, we are the only industrialized nation not to guarantee health care for all people. While Joe and I disagree on the best path to get to universal coverage, he has a plan that will greatly expand health care and cut the cost of prescription drugs. Further, he will lower the eligibility age of Medicare from 65 to 60.

To help reform our broken criminal justice system, Joe will end private prisons and detention centers, cash bail, and the school to prison pipeline.

Biden has shifted noticeably to the left during the past year—and he’s done so by working closely with Sanders and some of Sanders’ top campaign advisers to craft a 110-page proposal that does indeed include many of the ideas Sanders touched on in his convention speech. The Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force’s recommendations also include some things Sanders did not mention, like canceling up to $50,000 in student debt for individuals who find work as educators and adopting more restrictive trade policies, as Reason‘s Peter Suderman has noted.

But even after Biden has been forced to tack left by an increasingly progressive Democratic Party, it seems unlikely that he would be able to accomplish much of what Sanders has described. Transitioning to 100 percent renewable energy within 15 years would require effectively banning fossil fuels. Someone should ask California how that is working out. Ending cash bail is a good idea, but it’s a state policy that the president has little control over. And raising the minimum wage (a mixed federal/state issue) when the unemployment rate is around 10 percent will likely only make it harder for unemployed people to find work. Indeed, some states are facing pressure to freeze planned minimum wage increases due to the economic disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Specifics aside, Sanders’ speech at the virtual convention on Monday night was probably meant to accomplish two things: First, it’s a signal to his most hardcore supporters that they should set aside any misgivings and vote for Biden in November—his lack of a full-throated endorsement for Hillary Clinton may have hurt her in 2016 (or at least she seems to think so). Second, it was meant to give Biden’s rusty weather vane one more shove to the left.

But if progressives expect Biden to do all that, they will likely end up disappointed.

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Democratic National Convention host Eva Longoria introduced Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Monday night as the man who led New York “with clear direction and memorable powerpoints” during its coronavirus outbreak. Cuomo then spoke for a few minutes about how his state “climbed the impossible mountain, and now we are on the other side.”

He did not mention that the path to the summit involved the deaths of more than 30,000 New Yorkers—an appallingly high death toll that was likely worsened by Cuomo’s executive order forcing nursing homes to readmit elderly citizens who were sick with the virus. Far from being a beacon of sane leadership, Cuomo has continuously beclowned himself at all stages of the pandemic.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Cuomo failed to address his myriad failures. But at the very least, he should not have minimized the horror of what occurred under his watch. It was something of a shock, then, when Cuomo referred to COVID-19 as “just a metaphor” for the country’s more serious political divisions.

“We know that our problems go beyond the COVID virus,” said Cuomo. “COVID is the symptom, not the illness. Our nation is in crisis, and in many ways, COVID is just a metaphor. A virus attacks when the body is weak and cannot defend itself. Over the past few years, America’s body politic has been weakened. The divisions have been growing deeper. The anti-Semitism, the anti-Latino, the anti-immigrant fervor, the racism in Charlottesville…and in Minnesota, where the life was squeezed from Mr. [George] Floyd.”

It’s true that the country is facing plenty of other problems, including the government’s ongoing mistreatment of immigrants, lack of accountability in law enforcement, racism, and anti-Semitism. But to say that the coronavirus is, like these other problems, merely some symptom of a larger problem is absurd and offensive. It minimizes the comparative horror of COVID-19—a once-in-a-century disaster that has already killed more than 170,000 Americans and will undoubtedly kill many more. The coronavirus is neither a metaphor, nor one issue among many, nor a symptom of some other disease. It is the disease and by far the most important issue facing the next president.

Our political divisions are frustrating but thankfully nowhere near as fatal.

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