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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

My only consolation in this shitstorm is that it's been expanded to include "all social media applications that collect and provide users' personal information or data to a foreign adversary, or a person or entity located within a country designated as a foreign adversary."

So, yeah. I guess it's time to shut 'em all down.

Now we just wait for the "I didn't mean American companies" retraction.

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Where do you see that? As far as I can tell from the Montana legislature site, this motion to amend it along those lines failed: https://leg.mt.gov/bills/2023/AmdHtmH/SB0419.002.002.PDF

The 'current bill text' is this: https://leg.mt.gov/bills/2023/billhtml/SB0419.htm

And what it covers is:

Tiktok may not operate within the territorial jurisdiction of Montana. An entity violates this prohibition when any of the following occurs within the territorial jurisdiction of Montana:

(a) the operation of tiktok by the company or users; or

(b) the option to download the tiktok mobile application by a mobile application store.

Greg Gianforte's own words, as recorded here:

https://www.npr.org/2023/05/18/1176805559/montana-tiktok-ban

Refers to a separate ban - just a gubernatorial directive - that bans TikTok from government devices:

> Last December, Gianforte banned TikTok on state government electronic devices. On Wednesday, he added that the ban would expand to include "all social media applications that collect and provide users' personal information or data to a foreign adversary, or a person or entity located within a country designated as a foreign adversary."

Hmm. It doesn't identify which ban, a good point.

That such bans don't include domestic companies spying on people and providing that data to domestic entities says everything about how bankrupt this whole thing is.

Mainstream conservatives/Republicans swung hard in the direction of supporting domestic spying and surveillance in the early 2000s and have never swung back. They hate the government but (with some justification) assume that law enforcement is on their side.

> They hate the government

Judging by their positions and actions, they don't hate government at all. They love government. They just hate it when government doesn't enthusiastically support what they want.

Given how much distrust there is of DHS/FBI among Trump supporters/GOP base, I’m not sure this is true; especially with many neocons returning to the Democratic Party they came from originally.

Elected GOP officials are a completely different beast from much of their own base.

I'm making a generalization that doesn't include every single element of the right, but these days the rhetoric against federal law enforcement has no chance of getting turned into policy. Distrust of government is an integral part of conservative rhetoric, and incidents like Waco and Ruby Ridge remain a cherished part of their mythology, but there's a big difference between the 1990s, when they were demanding investigations and limitations on the FBI's power to surveil and act against American citizens, and anytime since 9/11, when they have wanted the FBI to have more power to surveil and act against American citizens, even under Democratic administrations.

You wouldn't be able to get Republican support for reducing the power of federal law enforcement even if Joe Biden died and Kamala Harris became president. Maybe their paranoia would get sufficiently revived if they were facing a President-Elect AOC in 2024... but I'd rather not think about how they would behave under those circumstances.

It would be nice if the Democrats would tear this down, but they seem happy having the opportunity to spy domestically now that it's in place.

That the US is illegally spying on its own citizens is bad, but not as bad as allowing an explicitly hostile, autocratic foreign power to turn a massive propaganda and surveillance platform on US citizens.

The US has many problems, but I'd still rather live in its admittedly somewhat rough approximation to transparent liberal democracy than under a completely and explicitly unaccountable regime like the Chinese Communist Party.

It would be foolish to allow the CCP to abuse our liberal values in a way which undermines the security upon which liberal society depends.

> the US is illegally spying on its own citizens is bad, but not as bad as

I disagree. I think they're both roughly equally as bad.

> I'd still rather live in its admittedly somewhat rough approximation to transparent liberal democracy

Me too! I'm not sure what the relevance of that is, though.

The relevance from my perspective is that I'm much more alarmed by spying and manipulation by a hostile foreign entity which explicitly places securing its own power above all else, than I am by spying and manipulation by agents of the US government, which is explicitly founded on principles of transparency and accountability to its citizens and has many institutional guardrails intended to serve those principles, even if those guardrails aren't fully effective. At least in the US there is the ideological possibility of peacefully voting in representatives who would strengthen and improve those guardrails. That's not something an agent of the CCP is even supposed or motivated to think about.

The US has the grasp and reach to punish me based on things about my privately generated data. The CCP has the grasp but not the reach. They are entirely different threat models. Neither one is excusable, but the US spying on me is a lot more immediately applicable.

Also I find it funny to the point of parody that China is the country under an unaccountable regime when they are signatories to the Hague System. The United States and Russian Federation are not, and the US goes so far as to have an affectionately nicknamed "Hague invasion clause".

In my lifetime the US has invaded several countries and replaced their democracies with friendlier governments. I'm not sure how we get to stand on any moral high horse about "liberal values". I'm not sure how leaving Libya with open-air slave markets is reconciled under said values.

I hope one day people can look at their own governments more critically than foreign ones, not least because our own government is at least on paper allowed to exist via consent of the governed.

I agree that these are all terrible things about the US which need to change, but at least we have the institutional tools to effect that change, if we can muster the political will. Any power the CCP establishes will be far more immutable and hostile to critique or adjustment.

> The CCP has the grasp but not the reach.

CCP has extraterritorial police stations that regularly surveil the Chinese diaspora and have sent agents to assault individuals. It's particularly bad for expats with domestic families, expats are known to be challenged or coerced using the threat of harm to family members. It's especially bad for uighur and tibetan expats.

Here's the thing. The US has certainly done bad shit. By and large it reckons with it and is subject to corrective action. And we see the effects of that: The current administration (so far) and the previous administration have not started wars in any new countries. Libya was less bad than Iraq was less bad than Vietnam. The direction of us policy is getting better. The direction of Chinese foreign policy is getting worse and their domestic policy is trending genocidal, and there is limited internal dialogue and thus less of a forcing function for amelioration (Hard to make that comparison since CR policies killed millions more than genocide, albeit indiscriminately)

> I hope one day people can look at their own governments more critically

Yes, I hope that one day too, Chinese citizens can look at their country in as critical a way as us citizens can.

> By and large it reckons with it and is subject to corrective action.

What kind of corrective action? The US has never faced any backlash for helping Brazil (my country) to maintain a dictatorship because of communism fears, for example.

Corrective action != Punishment. The US really doesn't seem to do as much of that stuff these days. It's very unpopular and not doing these things any longer is in bipartisan political discourse. Do you disagree?

Please be clear what you're talking about. There's a difference between "service providing targeted advertising based off what it knows about you" and "service that sells data it has collected about you". The former wouldn't sell that data, because it's their most valuable asset.

Yes, those two things are different, but I don't think that difference really matters that much.

I agree, this is a distinction without a difference, especially if your aim is to prevent influencing discussion and policies.

An ad targeted at "young democrats" and sending targeted emails to "young democrats" has the same effect (one could argue that the ad would be more effective since it's less easily filtered out)

The article I read in WSJ last night said otherwise. It said that the lawmaker who introduced the bill wanted to modify it to include that language but it was too late in the process to do so. The lawmaker believed having the language would have made it more easier to avoid legal scrutiny.

Yep, the "lets ban TikTok because they're foreign and might potentially misuse data." is a silly, shallow reaction that doesn't deal with the real problems and the known, not potential, issues. It seems like a distraction.

Data misuse is real concern. But TikTok is not the main problem, it's industry-wide. A good Data Protection legislation that applies to all, and is applied to TikTok if they warrant it (and also to FaceBook, etc) and the next social media that starts up next year, would be much better. EU GDPR style.

If none of these companies can live with that, then so be it, shut 'em all down.

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