Senator Dick Durbin is introducing legislation to sanction companies that don’t take “reasonable steps” to protect the human rights of people abroad. This is obviously targeted at companies doing business in places like China, where famously, government officials have used US technologies as well as worked with US-based companies to censor the internet and spy on citizens.
While I can understand the reasoning behind such a bill, my question is why is this limited to abroad? Here in the US, AT&T eagerly helped the administration in spying on users with no warrant and no official process (even allowing private info to be passed on with just a post-it note request). And what about efforts by US lawmakers to put in place third party liability — similar to that which is used in China to censor the internet — on copyright issues? Shouldn’t there be sanctions for that as well?
Sanctioning companies that help regimes violate human and civil rights is perfectly reasonable — but Durbin is kidding himself if he thinks this sort of thing only happens outside of the US. Let’s clean things up at home first.
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