Senator Introduces Bill That Would Block US Companies From Storing Data In China (thehill.com) 49
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) on Monday introduced a bill that would curtail the flow of sensitive information about people in the U.S. to China through large tech companies like Apple and TikTok. Hawley's legislation would place new and wide-reaching limitations on companies with ties to China such as TikTok, the mega-popular social media platform owned by a Chinese firm, and Apple, an American company that builds many of its components in mainland China.
The bill, called the National Security and Personal Data Protection Act, would subject a litany of companies with ties to countries of "national security concern," including Russia and China, to a new privacy regime. Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) also signed onto the bill on Monday. Hawley's bill would apply to tech companies that are subject to Chinese or Russian law, or are under the jurisdiction of those countries in a way that would allow those governments to access user data without "respect for civil liberties and privacy," according to the bill. Those companies would not be allowed to collect private data beyond what is required to run their services or transfer data on U.S. users to countries of concern. They would also be required to store information on U.S. users in the United States itself, and would have to submit a yearly report proving their compliance with the law once a year to the Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. attorney general, and all state attorneys general.
The bill, called the National Security and Personal Data Protection Act, would subject a litany of companies with ties to countries of "national security concern," including Russia and China, to a new privacy regime. Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) also signed onto the bill on Monday. Hawley's bill would apply to tech companies that are subject to Chinese or Russian law, or are under the jurisdiction of those countries in a way that would allow those governments to access user data without "respect for civil liberties and privacy," according to the bill. Those companies would not be allowed to collect private data beyond what is required to run their services or transfer data on U.S. users to countries of concern. They would also be required to store information on U.S. users in the United States itself, and would have to submit a yearly report proving their compliance with the law once a year to the Federal Trade Commission, the U.S. attorney general, and all state attorneys general.
Nor for our benefit (Score:5, Interesting)
This is not for the protection of citizens. Hawley promoted the do not track flag [duo.com] which made it easier to fingerprint users. This is about enabling spying on citizens, by forcing sites to store data about us where he (and his ilk) can reach it.
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by forcing sites to store data about us where he (and his ilk) can reach it.
Isn't data on US users ALREADY stored on US soil? You write as though Apple and other tech companies are currently storing US user data in Chinese datacenters to secure them against access by the US government, and that this proposal would "finally" bring that data onshore again to facilitate domestic spying. Wouldn't that be totally unnecessary, the premise being false?
In the case of Apple, I can imagine this legislation affecting those US citizens traveling or residing in China (whose data supposedly go t
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Isn't data on US users ALREADY stored on US soil?
Some of it. Not all.
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Isn't data on US users ALREADY stored on US soil?
Some is. Some isn't.
I regularly use WeChat to communicate with my Chinese friends and my Chinese in-laws. I don't think any of that data is stored in America, even when the communication is entirely domestic.
That is fine with me. I fear the American government far more than I fear the Chinese government.
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Isn't data on US users ALREADY stored on US soil?
Not at all. Data on American owners of Mercedes vehicles is probably stored in either Germany or (if they're using one of the big cloud providers) Ireland. Drive a Hyundai? Data about you is being stored in South Korea and analyzed by companies in Singapore and Shanghai. Bank of America contracts data processing to companies in India and Brasil. Your data is **EVERYWHERE**, and there's squat you can do about it.
This bill, put forward by people who think A
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How DARE you not buy into the "America Bad" narrative! /s
Never (Score:5, Funny)
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Starlink data centers (Score:3)
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Good luck with that. What are they going to do, carpet the country with RF jammers?
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Good luck with that. What are they going to do, carpet the country with RF jammers?
No. It's China. They can run a drone over your house, register receipt of a signal from your uplink, drag you out of your house and put a bullet in the back of your head.
Or any less drastic reaction they please.
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Tesla loves spying on users. Their cars log everything constantly, so much so that it eventually wears out the flash memory and bricks the main screen (and half the car). They log location, speed, if you used the indicators, which driver profile you selected, how hard you accelerate and brake, what music you listen to, everything. Even a live feed of video which gets saved in the event of an "interesting event".
I wouldn't trust them with my data.
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There is no cloud, just other people's satellites.
NSA are govt servants (Score:3)
They dont want to work hard to break into data stored in China. They want all data stored in the US where they can force American companies to build in backdoors for "national security"
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Re:NSA are govt servants (Score:5, Interesting)
The law is stupidly written because the corrupt USA government wants an entirely one way law. They want Russian and Chinese data stored in the US in fact that want every country in the world data stored in the US, so that could mine and manipulate it but what they absolutely do not want to do is right laws other countries would copy.
Reality is in the digital age, every country on the planet should demand all citizens data be stored locally and not of it replicated or mined from off shore sources but that would of course conflict with USA demands that the globes data be stored in the USA so they can attack every countries data at will.
Guess what will happen, every country will start demanding all corporations store of citizens data locally.
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Reality is in the digital age, every country on the planet should demand all citizens data be stored locally and not of it replicated
So how would that work? Would you be prohibited from playing a game based in South Korea, or register your Japanese-made television with your name and address? You could no longer get a Visa card from Bank of Scotland, or fly on Lufthansa? Getting a facelift in Brasil would be a lot more risky if they couldn't see your medical data, and forget ever getting on an internationa
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It just prevents you from storing it in China or Russia. Try Iceland or Canada if you want it safe.
Counting 1, 2, 3... Oh, I see a new Yandex datacenter in Iceland. Oh... there is an Ali-Baba next to it.
So what was that bullshit about not shipping data to China or Russia?
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They dont want to work hard to break into data stored in China. They want all data stored in the US where they can force American companies to build in backdoors for "national security"
That would be closing the barn door after the horse has left. There are no back doors now in encryption and so any new systems built on such flawed encryption would be obsolete the day they were released. Any attempts to make such encryption illegal would face a First Amendment challenge. Calling such encryption a "weapon" opens a case on a Second Amendment challenge. Requiring such back doors can reach into a challenge under the Fifth Amendment, Fourth Amendment, and possibly even Third Amendment.
Those
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"Privacy is dead - Get over it." - Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems, cerca 1998.
Data localization (Score:3)
Re:Data localization (Score:4, Informative)
American companies have been lobying hard to block data localization laws around the world. Now the government they own wants data localization?
Tech companies don't own the government. That's energy companies and defense contractors. Microsoft got owned by the USDOJ [wikipedia.org]. The telecoms got owned by the NSA, the only one that refused to install their warrantless wiretap equipment was QWest [wikipedia.org], remember how that turned out?
No deals with China (Score:3, Interesting)
China is a nation that is currently accused of killing political prisoners for their organs. China also has a long history of cracking down on people's ability to worship as they wish. This is a nation that is suspected of harboring people that are shipping illegal and dangerous drugs into the USA. China deserves no business from the USA in any form, and preventing companies from storing private data in China should simply be one of many laws intended to cut China off from trade with the USA.
We need to wage an economic war on China like we did with the USSR. I keep hearing people say the Cold War ended, but it didn't "end" any more than World War II "ended". Both wars were won and they were won by our team.
This little lie is also told with the "fall" of the Berlin Wall. It didn't "fall", it was felled. It was torn apart by people with hammers, crowbars, and bare fucking hands. The people that did this were seeking the freedom of movement, freedom of speech, freedom of trade, and other freedoms, that existed on the other side of this wall. What made this possible was the economic war that weakened the ability of the government to keep this wall standing.
This is not a war on the people of China, they are the unfortunate victims of their own government. If it is possible to starve the government of funds without also starving the people of medicine, food, and other necessities then we should make all attempts to do that. Starving them of valuable data on the people in the USA sounds like an excellent start.
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For someone who talks a lot about "economic war" you sure don't seem to understand economics very well. What you're proposing would have had to be enacted in the 70s. When Nixon opened our doors to China it didn't take long for our economies to develop serious interdependencies. Clinton would later seal the deal by inviting China into the WTO.
Now it's like a symbiotic relationship. We both see ourselves as the host and the other the parasite, but the truth is that we're so intertwined that declaring "econom
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and now we need to incentivize them to expand citizen rights.
Tell me, just what kind of leverage do we have to incentivize them to do anything? Other than with trade?
Maybe we can drive them into the ground with military spending, like we did with the USSR. We have POTUS talk about the building of a fleet of band new aircraft carriers, as one possible example, which will "incentivize" China to build aircraft carriers of their own. This only works if those aircraft carriers are actually being built. Maybe we could have a Reagan style bluff like was done with the St
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"building of a fleet of band new aircraft carriers,"
Powered by a rubber band ?
Or does this refer to the (live) music on board.
I have great regard for the Band of the US Marine Corps.
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China, unlike the USSR, can afford to match us in an arms race. They're also probably smart enough not to go overboard. The parallel between China and the USSR just doesn't work. There are too many differences.
What we have to do is be able to exert more influence on other countries than China can. That's why the state department is so important. That's why China is pushing this whole One Belt One Road thing. By having the most influence we can force China to play by our rules because other countries, if for
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US has shown themselves to be nothing more than an immoral hypocritical hegemonic power.
Unlike China which is hegemonic to a much larger extent but not hypocritical about it.
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Given the Chinese economy is larger than the US economy in PPP terms trying to outspend China on the military will just bankrupt USA. You will say PPP does not matter but military weapons are built by workers paid the prevailing wage so it costs far less to build an aircraft carrier in China than it does in the US so PPP is the correct measure. You will say its per capita that matters but China only has to build more aircraft carriers than the US , it doesnt have to build more carriers/per capita. So for m
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Re:No deals with China (Score:4, Interesting)
Remember that the trade links were not just about economics, they were about securing peace and securing an ally that could have ended up siding with the USSR instead.
It's similar to the EU. Countries became so interdependent that war became impossible, and eventually economic war became impossible too.
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China is a nation that is currently accused of killing political prisoners for their organs. China also has a long history of cracking down on people's ability to worship as they wish. This is a nation that is suspected of harboring people that are shipping illegal and dangerous drugs into the USA. China deserves no business from the USA in any form, and preventing companies from storing private data in China should simply be one of many laws intended to cut China off from trade with the USA.
The problem is if you want to go that route then other people will apply the same standards to you.
For example the US still executes people, which is already a problem for extradition from the EU. In fact your whole prison system is a problem for the EU, large parts of it being considered inhumane. The US even tortures prisoners (solitary confinement, and in some cases waterboarding).
If you want to use criminality as a reason not to do business with an entire country then people in the US are suspected of m
Freedom of movement (Score:2)
Funny how you talk of the Berlin wall being "felled" by people wanting "freedom of movement" in an argument against "freedom of movement" of data.
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Funny how you talk of the Berlin wall being "felled" by people wanting "freedom of movement" in an argument against "freedom of movement" of data.
Funny how? Data are not people.
I should be free from a government snooping into my data, that includes foreign governments. By barring US companies from shipping data into China, where no government is willing or able to protect my data, I have my rights from unlawful search protected.
You sound like one of the knuckleheads that claim since there are prisons in the USA that people do not in fact have their right of free movement protected. If people don't like it here in the USA then they are free to go,
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Knucklehead. Wow. Way to have a civilized discussion.
But I will bite. US does not provide free childcare, maternity leave, free college or free medical care. Basically it does not invest in its people. So if anyone leaves the US it is no big loss to the government.
Countries which do invest in their people do want them to stay and contribute back to society. Is that so bad?
But lets talk about Data. US companies have profited for a long time from the economies of scale that come when you can sell to the entir
Doing good for bad reasons (Score:2)
This is a very good development, even if I believe the reasons cited are bad.
It's a very good development, that the US wants to submit the data of US residents to the same laws as the residents themselves. This will plug many loopholes overly exploited today. Basically it's similar in effect - although not in motivation - as the European data protections laws over which there's an the ongoing fight between the European Union and the USA for the past decade or so.
As to the motivation being bad in my opinion,
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Do you really think that Narco Marco and Cotton have any clue what the legislation they were handed and told to propose actually means?
Good (Score:1)
So the Chinese will host it in america. (Score:2)
This isn't hard to work around. My chinese webcams (that can be loaded with alternative firmware) are very chatty to Amason AWS.
TikTok will host in America and then back it up to China.
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