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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.

2/?

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.

4/?

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.

5/?

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.

Without wiretaps. Without subpoenas.

6/?

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.

And you will be treated accordingly.

7/?

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.

I suggest you react accordingly.

8/8

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 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.

@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.

@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*.

@siderea Oh, I agree that having big tech outfits be the ID Managers is awful. It's an option though.

Personally, I think it's a role the government should hold... but I also hate laws that would force anyone to use it.

Yes, SOMEONE needs to hold the data (technically, it could be individuals/distributed, but that's too complicated), but there are very elegant tech mechanisms already in existence that can let you control which attributes are released to third parties, what security you want to wrap around access to your profile, and revoke their access. Setting that up to work -for- people seems like a job for the Post Office or something.

@siderea I'd argue that we're already in almost the worst timeline on this stuff, where big tech has our personal data and robust mechanisms to manage it, the government has awful disjointed data, and we are still subject to fraud and a near total lack of agency over how our data is used.

@DarcMoughty No disagreement, but that's not an argument for giving up trying, and it's also not an argument for how introducing government issued IDs into the situation will improve those things.

@ciggysmokebringer Strength to your arm, comrade!

@Dennis1212 Sure, this is totally a thread in which is appropriate to make it about you.

@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.

@IronCurtain

> such as living in places like Singapore.

Psst, you misspelled "San Antonio".

@resuna @mmasnick

@siderea @resuna @mmasnick

You'll have to ask the anonymous commenter who keeps saying they're from Singapore if they mean to say they're from Texas.

@emurphy42 ...No.

@JanuaryJoe1960 So very true. Those who compromise your knowledge, compromise your ability to reason.

@greyduck Who's that?

@siderea Wyden.

@greyduck @siderea It makes perfect sense for Wyden to be against this hot bullshit of a bill because he's the most pro-internet legislator there is:
-He co-authored §230
-He opposed SOPA and PIPA
-He opposed SESTA and FOSTA
-He's opposing KOSA

And that's just scratching the surface of the tip of the iceberg. He's my fave senator for those stances. While he's far from ideal, I appreciate what he's done to keep the intertubes runnin'.