Comment by archagon 12 hours ago
Respectfully, I should be able to install whatever the fuck I want on my phone. Regardless of which apps I choose to rot my brain with, neither the US nor Chinese government should have any say in it, period.
If a red line is not drawn, websites will be next, then VPNs, then books. And then the Great Firewall of America will be complete.
That's not a problem in my mind.
I'd agree that forbidding individuals from installing it would be an overreach, because it would be a more restrictive step then is reasonably necessary to eliminate the legitimate government interest of counter espionage.
I don't think that the governments actions here are more restrictive than necessary for that. The fact that they make some legitimate actions more difficult is completely acceptable (inevitable even).
For most people the Venn Diagram of cars they can acquire, and road legal cars, is a single circle. The government mandating all cars, even those driven solely on private property, be road legal would be an absurd overreach. At the same time they have no obligation to make it easy to acquire non road legal cars just because their legitimate regulations have happened to make that difficult.
The problem is that the rhetoric around this law from its promoters is that of an app ban, not a business sanction. And indeed, the app is being banned from Apple and Google's app stores despite it being free to download and use.
The government currently lacks the ability to yank a binary from computing devices en masse, but the technology to do so is already mostly in place. (See Apple’s notarization escapades in the EU, for example. And I think Microsoft is working in a similar direction: https://secret.club/2021/06/28/windows11-tpms.html) I have a sickening feeling that this is only step one, and that the government will eventually mandate the ability to control and curate all software running on desktop and mobile devices within the country for “security” reasons. National security goons are salivating at the prospect, to say nothing of US corporations that are getting clobbered by foreign competitors.
I believe Google Play does actually have the ability to remove apps if it wants to, intended for malware.
If the government were to mandate that they use that feature, or Apple use that feature, especially to prevent future side-loaded installs, I'd be much more sympathetic to the overreach arguments. But that's not what they did. Rather this is a narrow law that prevents these companies from assisting in wide scale espionage. The fact that they could do some other bad thing doesn't mean the thing they did is bad.
The courts use phrases like "narrowly tailored to achieve the governments legitimate interest" to describe the balancing test here...
I think a democratic nation is well within its rights to restrict its citizens access of certain systems.
There is no such thing as unlimited liberty, especially with regards to systems under control of hostile nations such as China and Russia. Would you be comfortable allowing mass release of unrestricted Hamas / ISIS, Russian propaganda content to North American teenagers? National security is a real thing and geopolitics always play a critical role in people's lives.
One could perhaps argue that we must educate our citizens better, however I think rather than being naive, it's better to implement realistic regulations (within _democratic_ means of course) to contain the threats.
> Respectfully, I should be able to install whatever the fuck I want on my phone.
Like every other right, your freedom ends where other peoples freedom begins. You can install whatever you'd like on your phone... unless it prevents others from exercising their rights. That's how we all get to stay free from the "might makes right" crowd.
Joining your phone to a botnet belonging to a hostile foreign power might very well prevent others from enjoying the very rights you're trying to preserve.
You have a point about avoiding the slippery slope though. I do hope that the deciders are taking that risk seriously.
Sometimes we aren't the boss and we don't get to see the evidence. That doesn't mean there isn't any.
Can you think of any reason a government engaged in cyberwarfare might want to ensure there was informational asymmetry? I sure can.
To me, the 'profiles on the next generation of leaders, throughout their formative years' argument is stronger than the botnet one.
I don't particularly trust Google or Apple to firewall a malicious and determined nation-state actor (0 days being 0 days), but it seems lower probability than the technically trivial data collection.
Websites and books are already being banned in the US. Ask anyone who can no longer access PornHub or who has seen books being removed from libraries.
But it's not about what you install, or even what you say. It's what you're told and shown. The US and China want control over that, for obvious reasons.
Meta has been 'curating' - censoring - content for years. TikTok is no different. X isn't even trying to pretend any more.
The cultural noise, cat videos, and 'free' debate - such as they are - are wrappers for political payloads designed to influence your beliefs, your opinions, and your behaviours, not just while consuming, but while voting.
A library choosing not to carry a book isn't a ban. The government making it ILLEGAL for anyone to distribute the book would be a ban. As far as I know that is not happening anywhere in the US with some extremely narrow exceptions like CSAM.
If TikTok turned out to be State sponsored spyware, would you reconsider?
I support your slippery slope argument. I wonder where your red line is relative to "state sponsored spyware" and "typical advertising ID tracking" or "cool new app from company influenced by an adversarial super power".
All spyware should be illegal. A law to reign in the ubiquitous data collection on everyone's computing devices would be great. Maybe start by requiring all data collection to be opt-in and for a specific purpose. Make it illegal to deny functionality that doesn't strictly require the requested data. "Paying with your privacy" shouldn't be a thing. Crush every data broker.
This law is different to that, it's all about specific actors, not about behavior and actions. A "people we don't like" list. CNN could be on a similar list soon. All constitutional of course - the law will specifically mention how this is all for national security. And no one's speech is being suppressed, the journalists can always write for a different news channel.
I agree, you should be able to install whatever the fuck you want.
Google and Apple shouldn't be helping China get you to do that, by hosting and advertising it in their app store though*. Oracle shouldn't be helping China spy on Americans by hosting their services.
This isn't a law against you installing things on your phone. You're still free to install whatever you want on your phone.
*And if there is a valid first amendment claim here, it would probably be Google and Apple claiming that they have the right to advertise and convey TikTok to their users, despite it being an espionage tool for a hostile foreign government. Oddly enough they didn't assert that claim or challenge the law.