#bitcoin is not a partisan issue.
Liberty-oriented people have more in common with each other than with either political party.
It’s great to make allies, but one’s allies are not one’s identity.
In fact, identity politics is part of the problem we’re facing right now as a country; it’s not the solution.
A little history: the House Un-American Activities Committee was initially founded in 1938 to root out fascists and Nazis.
It quickly became a tool to eliminate alleged “communists” from America by exposing and shaming them.
Every power you delegate to the government will eventually be used against you.
Delegate wisely.
Congress Moves To Broaden President’s Emergency Powers, Re-Introduce Internet Export Controls
Natalie Smolenski
Contributor
Apr 5, 2023,02:51pm EDT
Sen. Mark Warner Discusses Legislation To Allow Banning Of TikTok
WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 07: Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Mark Warner (D-VA) talks to ... [+]Getty Images
Recent months have seen the introduction of several pieces of legislation, including the RESTRICT Act, the DATA Act, and the ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act, that would greatly broaden the President’s emergency authorities under federal law. The Congressmen introducing these bills—including Senators Mark Warner, Marco Rubio, and Josh Hawley, as well as Representatives Mike Gallagher, Raja Krishnamoorthi, and Michael McCaul—argue that only augmenting the President’s emergency powers can protect Americans from Chinese-owned social media applications, particularly TikTok and WeChat.
But their legislation effectively treats speech by Americans as a sensitive export that must be controlled. In this way, they are re-introducing the export controls on speech which were roundly struck down by Congress and by the courts during the 1980’s and 1990’s. In contrast to their stated objectives of curtailing Chinese influence, these legislators’ bills will have a similar effect on Americans that the Chinese Communist Party’s ban of American internet platforms—Facebook, Twitter, and Google—did on the Chinese people: censor their access to information and their freedom of speech.
Background: Exporting Speech
The rise of the internet has been characterized by ongoing government attempts to control what kind of speech—whether in the form of computer code or other forms of expression—Americans can export abroad. During the 20th century, the position of the U.S. government was that encryption technologies constituted a munition of grave national security importance and could not be exported without a license from either the Commerce Department (for technologies that also had commercial applications) or the State Department (for those with mostly military applications).
With the widespread proliferation of encryption technologies beginning in the 1990s, however, the U.S. government was forced to significantly soften its position. Today, most retail implementations of cryptography don’t go through any government review prior to “export” (i.e. use by entities outside of the United States), while open source encryption is fully exempted from licensing requirements—largely due to the impossibility of controlling the dissemination of open source code. A landmark federal court case, Bernstein v. Department of Justice, defined software code as protected speech. Nevertheless, some encryption export controls have remained in place to this day, particularly around exporting militarized encryption equipment to so-called “terrorist-supporting states”.
Defining The President’s Emergency Powers
Among the various sources of law defining export controls is the U.S. Code, the backbone of U.S. federal law. Subsections 1701-1707 of Section 50 are known as the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in 1977, the IEEPA gives the President emergency powers to control Americans’ international economic transactions. The IEEPA became law shortly after the National Emergencies Act was signed into law by President Ford in 1976. The NEA, currently Subsections 1601-1651 of the U.S. Code, in combination with other Sections of the U.S. Code, define 123 statutory emergency powers that the President can exercise simply by declaring a “state of emergency”. Congress can give the President an additional 13 emergency powers by itself declaring a state of emergency.
There are currently 42 active states of emergency in the United States. They were declared unilaterally by Presidents Carter, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden either through Proclamation or Executive Order. While Congress can terminate states of emergency with a Joint Resolution, there appears to be no inclination by either political party to divest the President of these extraordinary powers. In fact, authors of the RESTRICT Act, the DATA Act, and the ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act argue that the President’s current emergency powers don’t go far enough and seek to enhance them further. They argue that such enhanced powers are necessary in order to prevent Chinese-owned social media apps—particularly TikTok and WeChat—from surveilling Americans.
An Inconvenient Amendment
Subsection 1702(a) of Section 50 of the U.S. Code defines the President’s authority to impose economic sanctions. However, Subsection 1702(b) of the Code, known as the “Berman Amendment”, explicitly denies the President “the authority to regulate or prohibit, directly or indirectly— (1) any postal, telegraphic, telephonic, or other personal communication, which does not involve a transfer of anything of value.” It is the protection offered by the Berman Amendment that lawmakers see as the biggest obstacle to banning TikTok and other Chinese social media apps.
The DATA Act (H.R. 1153), introduced by House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul, reads as follows: “An exemption to IEEPA (i.e., the Berman Amendment) blocks the President from regulating information and informational materials. This bill specifies that sensitive personal data is not information or informational materials exempt from regulation under IEEPA.” The bill was passed by the Committee on a party-line vote, with all Republicans voting in favor and all Democrats voting against.
The ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act (S. 5245), introduced by Senator Marco Rubio, specifically waives the Berman Amendment, stating, “The requirements under section 202 and the limitations under section 203(b) of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1701 and 1702(b)) shall not apply for purposes of this section.”
The RESTRICT Act (S. 686), sponsored by Senator Mark Warner, states that “the Department of Commerce must identify, deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, and mitigate transactions involving ICT products and services (1) in which any foreign adversary (such as China) has any interest, and (2) that pose an undue or unacceptable risk to U.S. national security or the safety of U.S. persons.” In addition, the bill states that the Secretary of Commerce’s determination of what constitutes a “foreign adversary” is “subject to Congressional disapproval”. In other words, the bill removes the discretion about who is an adversary of the United States from the legislative branch and gives it to the executive branch. As the Commerce Department is a Cabinet agency, this further consolidates warmaking power in the expanded Presidency, which has also had the unilateral power to deploy the U.S. military into kinetic conflict since Congress approved the Authorization of Military Force Resolution in 2002.
Reviving Export Controls
The RESTRICT Act and the DATA Act are reviving the tradition of commercial internet export controls, which have lain relatively dormant since the year 2000. The bills also build on the recent American tradition of consolidating power in the Executive Branch, particularly the Presidency, at the expense of other branches of government. This consolidation of power has been facilitated by both political parties and by the legislative branch itself, which either encourages or offers no meaningful resistance to the accumulation of “states of emergency” that justify increasing infringements on Americans’ constitutional rights.
While the sponsors of the RESTRICT Act, the DATA Act, and the ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act invoke the threat of an ascendant China to justify enhanced Presidential emergency powers, none have been able to describe a specific situation in which their proposed legislation protects a vulnerable American citizen or business from a specific threat by a Chinese state actor. Instead, they propose to curtail the expression of Americans on Chinese-owned internet platforms. This is most analogous to China’s own bans of Facebook, Twitter, and Google—American-owned internet platforms—which have certainly not protected Chinese residents from adverse actions by the American government, but have succeeded in curtailing their freedom of information and expression.
It is now up to American voters to decide whether they will continue to elect representatives who curtail their liberties in the name of increasingly creative “states of emergency”, or if we will begin to dismantle the legal edifice that affords an ongoing suspension of constitutional protections. https://www.forbes.com/sites/digital-assets/2023/04/05/congress-moves-to-broaden-presidents-emergency-powers-re-introduce-internet-export-controls/?sh=54463d6b225b
Did you know there are currently *42* active “states of emergency” in the United States?
Declared by 6 different Presidents from both parties.
Rather conveniently, a state of emergency gives the President additional special powers.
The RESTRICT Act, the DATA Act, and the ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act dramatically expand the President's emergency powers by removing a key speech protection in federal law.
Prosecutors are chaos agents.
They usually wield their unaccountable power against “easy targets”—the game is scoring wins, and wins are easiest to score against poor people, people without power, and people who are widely disliked, if not hated.
The role of the prosecutor is political top to bottom, which doesn’t mean they don’t occasionally deliver something like justice.
But Justice should be the main product of a Justice System, not merely a happy accident.
One of the reasons that it’s so hard to elect competent leaders is that most issues are too complex to campaign on in a thoughtful way.
So politicians default to culture wars, which are the dumbest issues, but easiest to get people riled up about and produce the false sense that they’re “doing something.”
People will soon realize that #bitcoin was built for not just a digital world, but for an AI-driven world.
As AI proliferates, we will be flooded with exponentially-rising tides of convincing-looking data, including data that buries and revises other data generated in the past. Content will be unceasingly generated to rewrite consensus reality in every field, domain, and social group.
The timechain will become the digital backbone for a shared historical record.
It is predictable that the collapse of the US into authoritarianism would happen due to “national security concerns.”
This is what happened with the PATRIOT Act and the AUMF, which now serve as precedent for the RESTRICT Act, and the DATA Act, to name just a few examples.
This is why those accessing banned websites in the US will be treated as terrorists and sanctions violators, not as ordinary people just going about their day-to-day lives.
The only way that tyranny is prevented is a strong civil society that the state actually becomes concerned about.
The enemies of #bitcoin in Texas are also introducing legislation.
TX Senate Bill 1751 seeks to:
1) Prohibit ERCOT from compensating #bitcoin miners for shutting down during demand spikes
2) Ban tax abatements for miners in Texas b/c “mining is already projected to grow in the state” (Sen. Kolkhorst, the bill’s sponsor).
This bills demonstrates how little some lawmakers understand about what makes a business viable.
OF COURSE miners should be compensated for shutting down during demand spikes. They are literally shutting down their entire business. If they weren’t compensated for it, most would have to close operations entirely because they would be forced to lose money every year.
#bitcoin miners shutting down during demand spikes is also a *public service*.
Most businesses don’t or can’t provide this service—demand response. They are being paid for adding value for the Texas grid.
Finally this assumption that “X business is just going to grow automatically, so let’s tax them!” is patently untrue.
#bitcoin mining operates on thin margins. Tax abatements make a real difference about whether they choose to locate in #Texas or elsewhere.
Some legislators would destroy the state’s economic engine & grid resiliency due to magical thinking that economic growth “just happens” & that grid resiliency can be simply demanded instead of architected using the right incentives for energy producers, generators, & consumers.
Every few months, politicians across the ideological spectrum & across the world try to make end-to-end encryption illegal using what cypherpunk Tim May called "the four horsemen of the Infocalypse":
1) terrorists
2) child pornographers
3) drug dealers
4) money launderers
Make no mistake: the right to bear your own cryptographic keys is just a version of the right to bear arms.
Today's battle for civil liberties is between those who insist that people should control their own keys and those who would take this right from them.
State sovereignty is not a partisan issue.
It is literally the backbone of our Federal Republic.
The Bitcoin Conference this year will happen as the crisis of sovereign credit accelerates.
The Bitcoin thesis is being proven out in real time.
The conversations should be electric. ⚡️
Code BIGGIESMOLS will get you 10% off your ticket.
The thing about decline is that it can last for a very long time. The world is filled with post-imperial countries whose ruins remind us of the greatness they once were. But these countries still function, dysfunctionally, generation after generation. It is easy to celebrate both ascendancy and demise. More difficult, and less satisfying, to consider the trajectories enabled by various trade-off decisions.
Some of these trade-offs seem new to us; for example, that economic growth and global military supremacy may actually be at odds—at least, after a certain resource utilization threshold has been crossed.
“Texas citizens shall always feel free and safe in their ownership and use of Bitcoin in the state of Texas.”
Full text of the resolution: ⬇️
https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/88R/billtext/html/HC00089I.htm
More and more, I am seeing the ways that people are trained to not only accept but *want* mediocrity thorough the footbinding of imagination enforced by mediocre leaders.
It’s so easy to just assume current state will continue, if not indefinitely, then just long enough for “me to get my payout”.
Unless we make a habit of seeing the world without reference to ourselves, self-interest will constrain our imaginations and lead to downfall.