The hysteria is reaching HUAC levels. You can read the statements from the congresspersons in support of the bill [0] and they all read like one variant or another of General Jack D Ripper in Dr. Strangelove quavering about how the communists want to sully our precious bodily fluids. Won’t someone think of the helplessly feeble median voter who cannot be entrusted to not let something dissenting from the Washington consensus not stymie my chance to harvest their vote.. woe is me.. /s
If they believed Americans shouldn’t be surveilled then they should pass a law enshrining our right to freedom from surveillance with teeth to match. But they would never do that because that’s not really what this is about.
Nor would they encourage smartphone manufacturers to better sandbox users from profiling by apps, nor would they pass laws placing restrictions on the seedy data broker industry, nor would they pass laws preventing telcos from selling your data to the data brokers.
Nor would they pass laws that publicly refer to the USA’s own public influence campaigns in non-adversary countries (remember the SinoVax scandal [1] ? Where we seeded antivax sentiment on Facebook in the Philippines etc so that nobody would want to get the Chinese covid vaccine? Which probably actually led to people dying? I guess this type of story only has legs if it’s hypothetically plausible that our adversaries are doing it - not when we actually did it, smoking gun and everything)
The additional irony now that there is a serious likelihood this incoming administration is going to be against the fluoridation of water too is not lost upon me..
[0] https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/media/bills/bill-p...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...
If they believed Americans shouldn’t be surveilled then they should pass a law enshrining our right to freedom from surveillance with teeth to match. But they would never do that because that’s not really what this is about.
Nor would they encourage smartphone manufacturers to better sandbox users from profiling by apps, nor would they pass laws placing restrictions on the seedy data broker industry, nor would they pass laws preventing telcos from selling your data to the data brokers.
Nor would they pass laws that publicly refer to the USA’s own public influence campaigns in non-adversary countries (remember the SinoVax scandal [1] ? Where we seeded antivax sentiment on Facebook in the Philippines etc so that nobody would want to get the Chinese covid vaccine? Which probably actually led to people dying? I guess this type of story only has legs if it’s hypothetically plausible that our adversaries are doing it - not when we actually did it, smoking gun and everything)
The additional irony now that there is a serious likelihood this incoming administration is going to be against the fluoridation of water too is not lost upon me..
[0] https://selectcommitteeontheccp.house.gov/media/bills/bill-p...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-covi...