Some US lawmakers have joined the hyperventilation of personal privacy on TikTok. It seems that same level of concern doesn’t apply to Section 702 renewal.
When US President, Joe Biden, signed the unconstitutional TikTok ban, the story to the public was that it was an effort to safeguard people’s personal privacy and to prevent foreign interference from China.
Yet, everywhere a reasonable and informed person looks, there are a growing number of reasons to believe that such a ban would prove ineffective even if it were constitutional. For instance, as we noted yesterday, Microsoft research said that Chinese foreign interference is also happening on Facebook and X/Twitter. Further, when it came to US intelligence offering any actual evidence of foreign interference and spying on US citizens, those agencies turned up nothing. For something that should be as easy as showing Chinese foreign interference on TikTok, there sure seems to be a distinct lack of evidence to support these conspiracy theories.
One perspective that I see others expressing that I find especially perplexing is this idea that the US government is acting in this way because they have the best interests of the American people in mind when it comes to personal privacy. This is a perspective I nearly fall out of my chair over. What’s more, they’ll defend this perspective by accusing people like me of being stupid and how so expert, much knowledge they are in this area. Let me explain something to you: if the US government is telling you that a policy is there to protect your personal information, that is just an obvious red flag that something is amiss. It should be really REALLY freaking obvious that the US government is not acting in good faith. Why is that? Simply put, my years and years of personal experience in dealing with issues of personal privacy in the online environment.
My own experience in these debates dates clear back to the 2000’s. At the time, there were growing concerns of the American governments warrantless wiretapping program. Some people dismissed such concerns as either conspiracy theories or simply a harmless program only meant to go after “the bad guys”. It wasn’t until a whistleblower names Mark Klein did American’s learn of some of the extent to which American surveillance has been going on. In short, AT&T’s main cable that passes all of their network traffic on to the greater internet had a splitter installed. All that data was copied and sent directly to the NSA. This happened in a room known as Room 641A. It was quite the moment when it became clear that the so-called “conspiracy theories” of the US government spying on its own citizens in bulk was actually a fact instead of a baseless claim.
The (at the time) shocking revelation sparked litigation to sue ISPs for violating the privacy rights of American citizens. One such case is Hepting vs. AT&T. The US government immediately knew that such lawsuits had a very good chance at being successful. In response, they tabled the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. This to directly shield ISPs with legal immunity from prosecution. The goal was to make it legal to spy on the daily lives of American citizens with warrantless wiretapping. Yeah, so much for being all “concerned” about your personal privacy.
The American governments war on privacy was far from isolated to that case, too.
Another example is the notorious EARN IT Act which we covered back in 2022. Essentially, the American government, through EARN IT, wants to make encryption they don’t have a back door to illegal. That debate had echo’s of earlier debates on whether or not to classify encryption as a munition from years earlier.
Another incident involved Facebook’s end-to-end encryption. When Facebook announced that they would be moving forward with deploying such technology, US lawmakers freaked out and hauled its executives in for a hearing. In that hearing, lawmakers attacked Facebook for daring to finally do something to protect the privacy of citizens. The US lawmakers response to Facebook even planning on protecting the privacy of users (even if you don’t really believe it would be effective) pretty much says all you need to know about US lawmakers “concerns” about personal privacy.
The bottom line is that, with a few exceptions, US lawmakers generally hate any kind of privacy rights for American citizens and have been working for years to undermine those rights at every turn. Yet, somehow, when this TikTok debate arrived, US lawmakers pretended to care about your personal privacy and the US mainstream media, the Canadian mainstream media, and parts of the public naively went along with it – even going so far as to say anyone questioning the approach should be looked at with suspicion. It’s completely insane.
Still, some people out there will want evidence of the US government doing something that is against the privacy rights of users, potentially arguing that maybe things have changed lately and now they care oh so much about your personal privacy. Well, if you want recent evidence to the contrary, well, the US government handed that over to you on a silver platter.
Recently, there was debate about the renewal of Section 702 which is part of the mass surveillance program going on in the US. The efforts to renew the mass surveillance program were quickly rushed through Congress, the Senate, and Biden quickly signed it into law. The move infuriated the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) who had this to say about the development:
One week after it was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, the Senate has passed what Senator Ron Wyden has called, “one of the most dramatic and terrifying expansions of government surveillance authority in history.” President Biden then rushed to sign it into law.
The perhaps ironically named “Reforming Intelligence and Security America Act (RISAA)” does everything BUT reform Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). RISAA not only reauthorizes this mass surveillance program, it greatly expands the government’s authority by allowing it to compel a much larger group of people and providers into assisting with this surveillance. The bill’s only significant “compromise” is a limited, two-year extension of this mass surveillance. But overall, RISAA is a travesty for Americans who deserve basic constitutional rights and privacy whether they are communicating with people and services inside or outside of the US.
RISAA’s passage is a shocking reversal—EFF and our allies had worked hard to put together a coalition aimed at enacting a warrant requirement for Americans and some other critical reforms, but the NSA, FBI and their apologists just rolled Congress with scary-sounding (and incorrect) stories that a lapse in the spying was imminent. It was a clear dereliction of Congress’s duty to oversee the intelligence community in order to protect all of the rest of us from its long history of abuse.
After over 20 years of doing it, we know that rolling back any surveillance authority, especially one as deeply entrenched as Section 702, is an uphill fight. But we aren’t going anywhere. We had more Congressional support this time than we’ve had in the past, and we’ll be working to build that over the next two years.
Too many members of Congress (and the Administrations of both parties) don’t see any downside to violating your privacy and your constitutional rights in the name of national security. That needs to change.
It’s hypocritical when, on the one hand, freak out about personal privacy on TikTok, then, on the other hand, are falling over each other trying to pass mass surveillance laws that violate those very same privacy rights they are supposedly vowing to protect. The hypocrisy of it all isn’t going unnoticed, either. In The Atlantic, the author of that article points out the hypocrisy of this whole situation:
Even by the standards of Congress, the past few weeks have been a lesson in hypocrisy. Last Wednesday, President Joe Biden signed legislation that will require TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to sell the app or face a ban in the United States—all over concerns that the Communist Party of China uses the app for surveillance. Yet just a few days earlier, Biden had renewed a law synonymous with American surveillance: Section 702.
You may never have heard of Section 702, but the sweeping, George W. Bush–era mandate gives intelligence agencies the authority to track online communication, such as text messages, emails, and Facebook posts. Legally, Americans aren’t supposed to be surveilled through this law. But from 2020 to 2021, the FBI misused Section 702 data more than 278,000 times, including to surveil Americans linked to the January 6 riot and Black Lives Matter protests. (The FBI claims it has since reformed its policies.)
The contradiction between TikTok and Section 702 is maddening, but it points to lawmakers’ continued failure to wrestle with the most basic questions of how to protect the American public in the algorithmic age. It’s quite fair to worry, as Congress does, that TikTok’s mass collection of personal data can pose a threat to our data. Yet Meta, X, Google, Amazon, and nearly every other popular platform also suck up our personal data. And while the fear around foreign meddling that has animated the TikTok ban has largely rested on hypotheticals, there is plenty of evidence demonstrating that Facebook, at least, has effectively operated as a kind of “hostile foreign power,” as The Atlantic’s Adrienne LaFrance put it, with “its single-minded focus on its own expansion; its immunity to any sense of civic obligation; its record of facilitating the undermining of elections; its antipathy toward the free press; its rulers’ callousness and hubris; and its indifference to the endurance of American democracy.”
Some people ironically push back against me when I point out that what is needed is across the board federal level privacy rules when it comes to things like privacy and the handling of personal information. Not only is a ban on TikTok destined to be completely ineffective for all the “concerns” raised about the platform, but it also ignores what is actually needed today in both Canada and the US. A broad, effective, federal privacy law would be infinitely more useful in tackling these very issues we are discussing. If a clear set of rules were in place that told every platform to handle personal information in a specific way, that would give platforms a chance to respond and change the way they do business accordingly. Violating such rules would garner little sympathy because then the federal government will finally have a book to throw at platforms that continue to participate in the surveillance capitalism system that rightly gets pushback from the public.
Instead, we get TikTok bans that will solve exactly nothing while, at the same time, potentially destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands of creators while putting tens of millions in economic activity in jeopardy. Today, we are witnessing a debate that condemns TikTok for violating privacy, while at the same time, turning a blind eye to other platforms when they do the very same thing that has earned TikTok the ire of the US mainstream media. US mainstream media seems generally supportive of using a TikTok ban to protect people’s privacy, yet continue to remain silent on why the renewal of Section 702 is a huge threat to the privacy rights of ordinary American’s with few exceptions. Maybe, just maybe, this really is a case of “it’s only OK when we do it.”
