The recently introduced RESTRICT Act (S. 686, Sen. Warner and Sen. Thune) rightfully is causing a lot of concern. This bill is being called a “TikTok ban,” but it’s more complicated than that. As we wrote in our initial review of the bill, the RESTRICT Act would authorize the executive branch to block “transactions” and “holdings” of “foreign adversaries” that involve “information and communication technology” and create “undue or unacceptable risk” to national security and more.
We’ve explained our opposition to the RESTRICT Act and urged everyone who agrees to take action against it. But we’ve also been asked to address some of the concerns raised by others. We do that here in this post.
At its core, RESTRICT would exempt certain information services from the federal statute, known as the Berman Amendments, which protects the free flow of information in and out of the United States and supports the fundamental freedom of expression and human rights concerns. RESTRICT would give more power to the executive branch and remove many of the commonsense restrictions that exist under the Foreign Intelligence Services Act (FISA) and the aforementioned Berman Amendments.
But S. 686 also would do a lot more.
EFF opposes the bill, and encourages you to reach out to your representatives to ask them not to pass it. Our reasons for opposition are primarily that this bill is being used as a cudgel to protect data from foreign adversaries, but under our current data privacy laws, there are many domestic adversaries engaged in manipulative and invasive data collection as well. Separately, handing relatively unchecked power over to the executive branch to make determinations about what sort of information technologies and technology services are allowed to enter the U.S. is dangerous. If Congress is concerned about foreign powers collecting our data, it should focus on comprehensive consumer data privacy legislation that will have a real impact, and protect our data no matter what platform it’s on—TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, or anywhere else that profits from our private information. This article has been indexed from Deeplinks
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