Hey, Americans, check this list and if any of these legislators are yours, well you need to come get them.
This is the bipartisan list of co-sponsors of the nightmarish anti -1A Big Brother KOSA bill, that the GOP has already announced they intend to use to suppress information about LGBTQ+ topics.
Sen. Blackburn, Marsha [R-TN]
Sen. Lujan, Ben Ray [D-NM]
Sen. Capito, Shelley Moore [R-WV]
Sen. Baldwin, Tammy [D-WI]
Sen. Cassidy, Bill [R-LA]
Sen. Klobuchar, Amy [D-MN]
Sen. Ernst, Joni [R-IA]
Sen. Peters, Gary C. [D-MI]
Sen. Daines, Steve [R-MT]
Sen. Hickenlooper, John W. [D-CO]
Sen. Rubio, Marco [R-FL]
Sen. Warner, Mark R. [D-VA]
Sen. Sullivan, Dan [R-AK]
Sen. Coons, Christopher A. [D-DE]
Sen. Young, Todd [R-IN]
Sen. Schatz, Brian [D-HI]
Sen. Grassley, Chuck [R-IA]
Sen. Murphy, Christopher [D-CT]
Sen. Graham, Lindsey [R-SC]
Sen. Welch, Peter [D-VT]
Sen. Marshall, Roger [R-KS]
Sen. Hassan, Margaret Wood [D-NH]
Sen. Hyde-Smith, Cindy [R-MS]
Sen. Durbin, Richard J. [D-IL]
Sen. Mullin, Markwayne [R-OK]
Sen. Casey, Robert P., Jr. [D-PA]
Sen. Risch, James E. [R-ID]
Sen. Whitehouse, Sheldon [D-RI]
Sen. Britt, Katie Boyd [R-AL]
Sen. Scott, Rick [R-FL]
Sen. Lummis, Cynthia M. [R-WY]
Sen. Cornyn, John [R-TX]
Sen. Murkowski, Lisa [R-AK]
Sen. Wicker, Roger F. [R-MS]
Sen. Kelly, Mark [D-AZ]
Sen. Manchin, Joe, III [D-WV]
Sen. Lankford, James [R-OK]
Sen. Crapo, Mike [R-ID]
Sen. Carper, Thomas R. [D-DE]
If you see any names you recognize as someone maybe you voted for or otherwise represents you, I recommend you ring them up and give them hell. Very, very diplomatically and politely, of course, but firmly and unambiguously. Be sure to let them know that you are constituent of theirs - that's an important word, "constituent" - and you cannot fathom why they would fall for such an obviously treacherous attempt to trick them into government overreach and tyranny.
Of course you don't need to see your own legiscritters on that list to be concerned. After all any damn fool in Congress might vote for this putrescent thing. So maybe now would be an excellent time - it's scheduled to be discussed in committee, 10:00 a.m. (EDT) the day after tomorrow (Thursday, July 27th) - to make the depths of your feelings about this known to your Congressmembers.
If you're unclear on how to reach them or would like a little assistance, I understand this website - https://www.stopkosa.com/ - would be happy to hook you up.
@siderea I clicked on the link, called all the senators, and made sure I left a message for Senate Majority Leader Schumer, the Senior Senator of my state.
@siderea Censorship keeps you Mis-informed. If something is censored you most likely have fragments and pieces left out. Just like when you were in school...you had, fill in the blanks & true & false. If you have pieces missing...you won't know what's true or what's false.
@siderea I'm very glad to have seen, via (er) that (um) cerulean atmosphere site of all places, that my Senator is firmly against this thing. Hot diggity.
Now if this is the first you're hearing of this, KOSA is a "think of the children" bill. It stands for "Kids Online Safety Act", but it's really more of a "Klansmen Online Supremacy Act". It does two terrible things.
The first is it makes platforms responsible for censoring basically anything the government orders them to. That's pretty bad. Like that's People's Republic of China bad.
The second is worse.
It requires platforms to verify the age of users. Long story short, while the proposed law doesn't specify how they are to do that, there literally is no way of doing that that does not require all internet users to show ID, and give up their legal names and residences. This is the death of anonymous and pseudonymous use of the internet.
The Nazis of course are very down with this. They are SUPER in favor of the state compiling lists of their critics' names and addresses - and even better, outsourcing the job to industry as an unfunded mandate, even.
I really can't overstate exactly how bad it would be for the American internet to start requiring all users of all social media platforms to present ID. Lots of people have come up with lots of special, specific cases of why this would be bad, but few of them have seen exactly how broadly this will be catastrophic. I've yet to see anyone mention how this will exclude from the internet people who do not have ID to present - the same problem as in voter suppression - and that in some ways is one of the least of the problems.
Has it ever occurred to you to wonder HOW the United States government managed to find all of the Japanese people in California to round them up and put them in concentration camps? They used the census records. Having access to that database, it was pretty easy to figure out; after all, Japanese Americans tend to have Japanese last names, obvious on casual inspection of a list of citizens.
The neat thing, from a Big Brother's perspective, of indexing internet commenters to their real world identities and residences, is that you could select not for people of just an ethnicity, but of an espoused opinion. You could round up everyone who, say, spoke positively of unions or of helping people access abortion.
I cannot begin to tell you how dramatically this will intersect with a little bit of what's known as social network analysis (SNA). SNA is a bunch of things, but one of them is a computational method for figuring out which person is actually a secret ringleader or organizer of collective action, without reading what they actually write or listening into their actual conversations, just by analyzing who talks to whom.
SNA is a method for figuring out which employee is organizing the other employees. SNA is a method for figuring out which activist is coordinating the efforts of multiple activist groups.
You may not realize it yet - many of you have no idea - but you're going to want anonymity and pseudonymity where we're going, very, VERY badly. You may still think that anonymity on the internet is the problem, not the solution. If so, you are very, very wrong. If you've forgotten how little the fascists need anonymity, it's been too long since you visited Facebook, and you might want to drop by to refresh your memory.
The idea that anonymity is the threat is predicated on the fond fancy that only bad guys need it and you are a good guy.
But from the GOP's perspective you are NOT one of the good guys. You are criminal. Everything you value and treasure is being criminalized: your access to health care, your authenticity, your autonomy, your marriages, your freedom to bring up your children the way you believe, your right to protest and dissent, even your vote. You are being criminalized; you are being made a criminal.
You, personally, should be afraid of this law. This law should terrify you. This law is a gun to YOUR head - not someone else's head, someone less fortunate than you, someone less privileged than you: YOU. You, personally, are threatened by this law.
@siderea Unfortunately I can't read the text of the bill thanks to a disability. Would this bill require everyone use an ID to access the internet, or would it merely establish a standard? In my opinion there are good ways to implement government-backed internet identification, but there's also very terrible ways.
@NanoBookReview I'm looking into exactly what it would require, and the upshot seems to be requiring some proof of age for using social media. ISPs, broadband, educational institutions are all explicitly excluded from this law (if I'm reading it correctly!) I'll try to get more information back to you.
@siderea Mmm, required proof of age sounds like the wrong way to me. A much better implementation would simply give websites the option the use ID verification if they wanted to. The government could provide a container for ID verification and just report back to the website if the credentials match the person they're claiming to be.
PS, the other gnarly wrinkle of asking everyone to submit ID to use the internet, is that it both makes it way easier to steal people's IDs - after all, the parties that will be legally responsible for proving that they checked your ID will want to keep a copy to prove that they got it, right? So now platforms will have databases full of copies of people's legal IDs - and it creates a whole new motivation for wanting to have access to someone else's stolen ID!
@siderea a somewhat ancillary point because what you’re saying is far more serious but wouldn’t this kind of regulation be in direct contradiction to the EU’s GDPR regulations? I can’t imagine it be possible to have the ability to opt out of tracking and have a “right to be forgotten” (GDPR) as well as identify people visiting or using your site (KOSA)
@bryanjswift Yeah I've been wondering that myself. I suspect there are many powers that be that would be delighted if the internet fractured, and Europeans could not access the American internet and the Americans cannot access the European internet.
@siderea There are some complex knock-on effects from this.
Firstly: US websites with international users.
Secondly: International websites with US users.
Imagine you were running an internationally-used social media/everything app, partially funded by wealthy people in another country who really would like to know which of their citizens are fomenting rebellion.
I'm sure that person's demonstrated* commitment** to free speech*** wouldn't lead to them insisting ALL users require ID... perhaps in the form of a credit card.
@siderea I'm on your side with the idea that this law sucks, but I want to point out that it's not necessarily true that a 'scan of your ID' or any personal data has to be retained for vendors to do age verification.
For instance, a browser plugin/web service that can decode and verify the barcode on the back of your ID could just pass a 'valid/of age' value back to a website. Another way to do it would be to have big identity players (Microsoft, Google, etc.) do the actual age & ID verification, then make users 'log in with Google & release an Age Verification Status attribute to the vendor)
This is common in 2FA systems 2FA... the primary authentication system only gets a pass/fail back from the 2FA service, not the details.
Of course, I don't trust companies to NOT collect every tidbit they can, and a smart kid could just take a picture of their parent's ID barcode to pass an age check that lives out on the untrusted 'edge'.
Personally, I think the government itself should offer robust identity management services, but also that 'browsing the web' shouldn't ever require their use. I sure as heck want to be able to opt-in to government verification for things like opening a line of credit, though.
@DarcMoughty
Okay, on one hand, yes, you are correct that not every individual platform would need direct access to IDs, because they could use a third party credentialing service.
On the other hand,
> Another way to do it would be to have big identity players (Microsoft, Google, etc.) do the actual age & ID verification, then make users 'log in with Google & release an Age Verification Status attribute to the vendor)
Surely you see how that's WORSE, right?
Regardless of whether individual platforms retain IDs, somebody has to. Having a few giant privileged monopolies get to be those somebodies is not actually an improvement from a surveillance state point of view. Perhaps you would like to believe it's an improvement from a security standpoint, but... Gestures grandly at Experian.
Reacting by setting up fictional validating authorities that dont actually validate but passes the token regardless and using every legal hustle to make it a replicable ezpz spin up/spin down enterprise
@qotca Honestly, I think it's a mistake to assume there are ever times when we don't have to hold our legiscritters' hands. They require a lot of guidance. Really, toddlers and congressmembers need to never be left unsupervised very long.
@siderea I left ‘merikkka to live where guns aren’t, where insurance actually pays its bills, and where there are no tv preachers sucking the gullible dry.
@siderea The fact that there have been multiple sites dedicated to sharing people being total asshats on Facebook under their own names should be all you need.
@resuna@siderea Not to mention that on TechDirt owned by @mmasnick, there are anonymous users and while some of them are trolls, most of them are extremely insightful and some of them have good reason to stay anonymous, such as living in places like Singapore.
@siderea Sounds like a case for something like Paranoid Linux: system generates a bunch of extra activity in the background, anyone snooping on it must guess which bits are actually being seen by humans
@siderea If you are in the UK, btw, there is a UK bill that is seeking something similar in mandated censorship and surveillance, forced weakening of encryption and forced age verification where content deemed to be of a sufficiently adult nature (not just covering porn).
Wikipedia has said if this passes they will block the UK from Wikipedia if needed.
Signal has said they will cease to operate in the UK. Apple among others have raised concerns.
Y'all.. the #EFF (@eff) has automated writing to your particular representatives, please take a moment to visit them, fill out their form, and send your representatives your views on KOSA (and a few other bad internet bills floating around),
@siderea When writing to these people it's always good to emphasize your personal clout & "ripple effects."
For example: If we are forced to leave this state to keep a family member safe, I'm...
closing my business & ending X # of jobs.
closing my practice & my patients will have to travel long distances.
@siderea imagine my overwhelming surprise to see several Democrats name on this bill and how it has bipartisan support. One day we're going to have to wake up to the reality that the Democrat party isn't an option.
@Julian_Invictus Eh, the Democratic party is a tool; specifically it's like a grocery cart with a sticky wheel: it'll carry what you need it to but you can't stop leaning on it hard to get it to go in the correct direction. You certainly can't trust it not to veer to the right at every bump in the road.
@siderea we’ve known Marsha Blackburn is a horrible person for years, but have not gotten close to getting her out. She has an R next to her name in Tennessee and that’s a free pass.
She does no public events and does not care what the people of the state think. Just a big bag of hair.
@siderea The challenge here is - the same as with "terrorism" - that they will do everything to depict anyone rejecting this ball as "being against kid security", "being a groomer", "encouraging child porn" etc.
And then you cannot really answer anymore as the public attached you already with that label.
No due diligence, just stating "kid" or "terrorism".
And the distinction's actually kind of interesting. It really did take about a decade for people to figure out that whole root password to the Constitution thing. When I look back now on the "think of the children nonsense" of the 1980s, it's just amazing to me how utterly credulous even people generally on the right side were.
I mean, my skeptical, rational, militantly agnostic, women's libber, fundamentalist-loathing Boston Ashkenazi mother felt the need to check out this Dungeon and Dragons thing to make sure it wasn't actually something terrible, after all, the way the Christian religious nuts said.
I knew people in the 80s who ran up & down all the stairs in the 18-story building 54, aka "Green Building". (Granted, they were crew team nerds, and got significant side-eye from the rest of us. I wished them well, but I will never understand athletics.)
And, according to Wikipedia, there's now an annual Bad Ideas weekend. One canonical Bad Idea is to see how many times one can go up & down the stairs; the record is 300. (For no particularly obvious reason. I mean, it did say "BAD" idea right there in the name.)
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