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Comment by kanox | Hacker News Reader

I can't believe business deals with such explicit political motivations are being considered.

Every single piece of law granting the US government authority on national security grounds has enjoyed bipartisan support for a very long time. I'm only surprised it hasn't been used like this earlier.

Treating foreign media as a "national security issue" is extremely scary. This is not something that free societies do.

> Treating foreign media as a "national security issue" is extremely scary.

Not really. RT and Al Jazeera has (rightfully) suffered much of the same scrutiny. There's a fundamental difference between something extremely partisan (think Breitbart or HuffPo) and something state-sponsored. Let's not bury our heads in the sand here.

RT and Al Jazeera may suffer scrutiny, but the US government cannot ban Americans from reading them.

> There's a fundamental difference between something extremely partisan (think Breitbart or HuffPo) and something state-sponsored.

Not really, free speech should apply even to hostile foreign propaganda.

But this is tantamount to banning Americans from accessing the Al Jazeera website. It’s obscene.

The new thing is the explicitness of the political motivations. There are plenty of countries where if you want to have a sufficiently large business, you have to pay off all the people with their hands out, right up the chain. And that's what this is.

(The fact that this is illegal in the US and even for US companies to do abroad under FCPA will, I suspect, be rendered irrelevant)

Bribes are about money, this appears to be about media control. Much worse.

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