Comment by firesteelrain
Comment by firesteelrain 8 hours ago
It’s a great question. Gorsuch goes onto say
"But before seeking to impose that remedy, the coordinate branches spent years in negotiations with TikTok exploring alternatives and ultimately found them wanting. Ante, at 4. And from what I can glean from the record, that judgment was well founded."
Maybe that was one of the alternatives. I wasn’t on the task force but if I was asked to then I would have went one on one with their tech lead’s and asked them to stop collecting this.
But it seems it is greater than that. How you interact with it, your likes and dislikes can be used as a fingerprint and against you.
This fingerprint can then be used against firesteelrain some time in the prophetic future.
Gorsuch says
“To be sure, assessing exactly what a foreign adversary may do in the future implicates 'delicate' and 'complex' judgments about foreign affairs and requires 'large elements of prophecy.' Chicago & Southern Air Lines, Inc. v. Waterman S. S. Corp., 333 U. S. 103, 111 (1948) (Jackson, J., for the Court). But the record the government has amassed in these cases after years of study supplies compelling reason“
Then he says this.
“ Consider some of the alternatives. Start with our usual and preferred remedy under the First Amendment: more speech. Supra, at 2. However helpful that might be, the record shows that warning users of the risks associated with giving their data to a foreign-adversary-controlled application would do nothing to protect nonusers’ data. 2 App. 659–660; supra, at 3. Forbidding TikTok’s domestic operations from sending sensitive data abroad might seem another option. But even if Congress were to impose serious criminal penalties on domestic TikTok employees who violate a data-sharing ban, the record suggests that would do little to deter the PRC from exploiting TikTok to steal Americans’ data. See 1 App. 214 (noting threats from “malicious code, backdoor vulnerabilities, surreptitious surveillance, and other problematic activities tied to source code development” in the PRC); 2 App. 702 (“[A]gents of the PRC would not fear monetary or criminal penalties in the United States”). The record also indicates that the “size” and “complexity” of TikTok’s “underlying software” may make it impossible for law enforcement to detect violations. Id., at 688–689; see also id., at 662. Even setting all these challenges aside, any new compliance regime could raise separate constitutional concerns—for instance, by requiring the government to surveil Americans’ data to ensure that it isn’t illicitly flowing overseas. Id., at 687 (suggesting that effective enforcement of a data-export ban might involve).”
And the nail in the coffin is this
“All I can say is that, at this time and under these constraints, the problem appears real and the response to it not unconstitutional. As persuaded as I am of the wisdom of Justice Brandeis in Whitney and Justice Holmes in Abrams, their cases are not ours. See supra, at 2. Speaking with and in favor of a foreign adversary is one thing. Allowing a foreign adversary to spy on Americans is another.”
Of course if the app have done anything seriously illegal it would not have been necessary to bring this law to ban it, because existing laws would have sufficed to do it.
Perhaps because US government wanted to do it despite TikTok not breaking any serious provisions of law this law has been made.
It feels like a sleight of hand from government to ban something that has broke no (serious) law (yet).
Did the SCOTUS go into the necessity of having this law to achieve what government wanted, if existing laws would have sufficed, provided that government met the standards of evidence/proof that those laws demanded.
If not, it is as if government wanted a 'short-cut' to a TikTok ban and SCOTUS approved it, rather than asking government to go the long way to it.