What Happened Today: March 30, 2023
The RESTRICT Act and your privacy; Biden speaks for American Jews; Ernest Hemingway hit his head, often
The Big Story
A congressional bill aiming to ban TikTok in the United States over concerns that the video platform is surveilling its American users has come under fire for its own potential civil-liberties violations. Introduced by Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA) and John Thune (R-SD) earlier this month, the RESTRICT Act would put an end to the “whack-a-mole” approach to tech security, Warner has said, no longer targeting just one company but rather empowering the Department of Commerce to “identify and mitigate foreign threats to a range of critical communication tech.”
But free-speech advocates say the bill is overly broad and grants the government the same kind of power the Patriot Act gave it to skirt existing privacy protections. In addition to enabling the potential criminalization of people who use a VPN, or virtual private network, to surf the internet anonymously while protecting their data and location, the new bill gives the Commerce Secretary the power to potentially punish any citizen engaged in any kind of cyber transaction on any platform connected to or directly with any foreign entity that the Commerce Secretary deems a “foreign adversary.”
Several lawmakers have come out against the new spate of legislation restricting social media platforms. Critical of both the RESTRICT Act and a bill proposed by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) that more narrowly focuses on just TikTok, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) says that banning any app outright would only emulate China’s own speech bans without offering any additional protection to Americans. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has similar concerns that Congress is rushing the legislative process: “Usually when the United States is proposing a very major move that has something to do with significant risk to national security, one of the first things that happens is that Congress receives a classified briefing. And I can tell you that Congress has not received a classified briefing around the allegations of national security risks regarding TikTok.”
Read More: https://reason.com/2023/03/29/could-the-restrict-act-criminalize-the-use-of-vpns/
In The Back Pages: The U.S. Government Is Funding Chinese Spy Technology in America’s Backyard
The Rest
→ The Russian Federal Security Bureau arrested a Wall Street Journal reporter, Evan Gershkovich, on charges of espionage on Thursday. The Russians accuse Gershkovich, 31, of being an American spy who’s “collected information constituting a state secret about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex.” The first American reporter detained on espionage charges since the Cold War, Gershkovich has worked in Russia as a journalist since 2017; he was one of the few members of the media with an official accreditation from Russia’s foreign ministry. But it appears he’s run afoul of Russian officials as part of their ongoing crackdown on the media since their country’s invasion of Ukraine.
→ Video of the Day:
President Joe Biden was asked about the situation in Israel on Tuesday, and he offered up this gem to reporters: “They [the Israeli government] know the American Jewish position.” With one sweeping statement, Biden placed all American Jews in one camp vis-à-vis the situation in Israel. Prime Minister Netanyahu, perhaps in response to these remarks, wrote on Twitter, “Israel is a sovereign country which makes its decisions by the will of its people and not based on pressures from abroad, including from the best of friends.” Looking for friends wherever he can get them these days, Netanyahu will surely welcome the upcoming visit of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has been a staunch supporter of Israel since his election. Biden, meanwhile, has announced that he won’t be inviting Netanyahu to Washington, D.C., anytime soon.
→ Speaking of Florida, it appears that The Walt Disney Company subverted DeSantis’ attempt to wrest control of its Monaco-like status within Florida in February by securing a development agreement in the Reedy Creek Improvement District one day before the Florida House approved a government takeover of the district board as ordered by DeSantis. DeSantis intended to punish Disney for attacking his reforms for sex education in schools by ending its monopoly on power in the economic zone where Walt Disney World is located, taking away the company’s power to appoint the all-powerful board members and giving it to the governor. At the time, DeSantis quipped, “There’s a new sheriff in town.” But Disney swiftly passed a new development agreement that would prevent the DeSantis-appointed board from doing much at all until “21 years after the death of the last survivor of the descendants of King Charles III, king of England living as of the date of this declaration.”
→ Adding to Lebanon’s political and economic woes, from Sunday until Wednesday, no one even knew what time it was. In typical sectarian fashion, the interim Prime Minister Najib Mikati announced on March 23 that he was going to delay daylight savings time until April 21, a move he later attributed to helping the Muslim majority break their Ramadan fast an hour earlier. Following a Cabinet vote on Monday, Mikati announced that actually, daylight savings time would move ahead on Wednesday, just a few days late.
A fantastic new piece in The Spectator details all the myriad ways that Nobel Prize-winning writer Ernest Hemingway hit his “thick skull” over the years and surmises that perhaps Hemingway’s final period of mental illness and his suicide was due to a case of CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, an increasingly common occurance among former NFL players. Hemingway, by the count of forensic psychiatrist Dr. Andrew Farah, might have had as many as 10 major concussions in his life, from car accidents to plane crashes to his battlefield injuries. Hemingway was also regularly challenging people to boxing matches, famously saying, “My writing is nothing; my boxing is everything.”
Read the whole wild tale of Hemingway’s head, here.
→ “Jesus sells” is the new headline in Hollywood. The latest Christian-themed film to hit theaters, Jesus Revolution, has already grossed $49 million in ticket sales since late February, far outstripping many of this years’ Oscar nominees. And that’s just part of a larger trend of low-budget, faith-themed fare making huge profits, without a lot of fanfare, at the box office. God’s Not Dead, a 2014 film essentially about theology, was made for $1.1 million and grossed more than $60 million. Still struggling to find its post-pandemic footing, Hollywood major studios are rushing in to fill the niche space. Roma Downey, who runs LightWorkers Media, a faith-based division of MGM, told The Free Press, “People are hungry for goodness, people are hungry for change. … For a minute it looked like the world as we knew it was coming to an end, then what were the things that were important? I think it [the pandemic] helped people refocus on family, faith—those sort of values.”
Read More: https://www.thefp.com/p/hollywoods-great-awakening
→ Joanne Marian Segovia, executive director of the San Jose Police Officers’ Association, has been charged with attempting to illegally import a controlled substance after authorities suspected she purchased thousands of illegal pills from 2015 to 2023—including fentanyl—from Hong Kong, Hungary, and India to sell in the United States. In spite of the packages being labeled with innocuous titles like “Chocolate and Sweets,” Segovia wasn’t particularly careful, especially for someone in law enforcement. She even used the return address of the officers’ association on a package she sent that authorities suspect contained drugs. She faces up to 20 years in prison.
TODAY IN TABLET:
In Bloom by Unorthodox
Ep. 355: Chanie Apfelbaum on her new kosher cookbook; celebrating baseball’s opening day with Zack Hample; and a new project from one of our hosts
By a Hair by Dovid Bashevkin
In Tractate Nazir, the Talmud teaches us about beauty, transcendence, and other human frailties
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
This piece was originally published in Tablet, January 2023
The U.S. Government Is Funding Chinese Spy Technology in America’s Backyard
An exclusive report on how law enforcement agencies used FEMA funds to buy drones from a company tied to the Chinese government
By Lars Erik Schönander
Federal funds are being used to buy drones and drone detection equipment from DJI, a Chinese drone company that maintains control over data created and compiled by their products. Some of the details of these drone acquisitions were buried on government websites, while other aspects of these programs only came to light after I submitted a series of Freedom of Information Act requests to emergency management departments across the country. These programs indicate an ongoing tolerance among state and federal officials for having Chinese-made technology all but spying on American citizens and public safety officials.
America’s cold war with China has been heating up. New export controls, calls to ban social media applications like TikTok, and rising concerns over Chinese companies buying American farmland, are signs that some lawmakers are now making it a priority to counter Chinese influence in critical sectors of the U.S. economy. Given the intensifying strategic rivalry between Washington and Beijing, the use of Chinese drone fleets by American law enforcement arguably poses an immediate security risk to American citizens. At the very least, it represents a significant vulnerability.
DJI is not as well known as other Chinese companies with ties to the Chinese Communist Party, such as the telecom giant Huawei, but it deserves to be. For one thing, DJI is on the “Chinese military companies” list maintained by the Department of Defense as a result of the company’s work with China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army. Furthermore, there is no such thing as a fully private company in China. Following the country’s 2017 National Intelligence Law, “any organization or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work according to law,” mandating Chinese companies to work with the country’s authorities. While drones have many commercial applications, from herding animals to taking wedding photos, they are still essentially military weapons that were pioneered and developed to perform reconnaissance and surveillance on the battlefield.
This makes it even more concerning that DJI retains access and control over the location data of every single drone it sells, giving the company the power to fully restrict where drones fly with no restraints—a capability illustrated during the Russian-Ukrainian war, when the company refused requests by the Ukrainian government to apply geofences that would have prevented the drones from flying inside Ukraine.
DJI’s drone detection product, AeroScope, which “rapidly identifies [drone] communication links, gathering information such as flight status, paths, and other information in real-time,” also raises security concerns. While DJI had initially claimed that AeroScope’s signals were encrypted, last year the company was forced to admit that they were not actually secure, and that anyone with a little technical know-how could access detailed information on where and when the company’s drones had been flying. This capability, too, has played a role in the Russian-Ukrainian war: One group within the Armed Forces of Ukraine has even speculated that DJI is using these technologies to provide Russia with a military advantage.
In short, DJI is not a company the United States should do business with, which raises the question why law enforcement agencies across the country have purchased equipment from DJI using FEMA funds. Police departments in California have purchased nearly $100,000 in drone equipment from DJI using these grants. In Florida, police departments applied for $270,000 in funding to purchase DJI’s AeroScope drone detection software.
These transactions are mostly kept from public view, with the exception of a 2019 purchase made by the government of Massachusetts, which announced that it spent $235,000 on AeroScope equipment with Homeland Security grant money. They ultimately received eight AeroScope antennas to track drones flying across Massachusetts.
To know about DJI purchases from other states, however, required FOIA record requests from every local government agency across the country. Surveys of drone purchases by law enforcement agencies show that a substantial majority were DJI drones. If we assume that most police departments that bought drones since 2017 purchased them from DJI, we can estimate how many hundreds of thousands of dollars U.S. taxpayers have put toward bringing a Chinese government aligned surveillance platform into America: Washington, D.C., and its surrounding counties spent $420,000 on drones in 2010-21; in Texas, around $142,000 was spent on drones; in Washington state, police departments spent roughly $322,000 on drones. Including California and Florida, the total comes to roughly $1.4 million. This is a relatively small sum for state governments, but even over a million dollars is not an amount we should be giving to a CCP-affiliated company.
And this is only the spending that we know of. Several states still have yet to respond to my FOIA requests. Even worse, several states have told me that they do not have detailed data on how their states spent these grants over the past 10 years. Some states, for example, only had data on total spending per year. Even worse are states like Texas, where the Texas Homeland Security Act allows the state to hide spending due to vague security concerns.
The purchase of DJI drones with these FEMA grants is alarming but not surprising. The history of these grant programs is filled with dubious purchases and an overall lack of transparency. These drones were purchased through FEMA’s Homeland Security Grant Program, which includes two programs created after 9/11 focusing on funding terrorism preparedness. While the cause is commendable, these post-9/11 programs are notorious for misspending, from the merely wasteful (police departments using grants to buy snow-cone machines) to the harmful, as when police departments purchased militarized equipment such as armored vehicles—often causing alarm and fear among the citizenry—despite the fact that those police departments were in areas of declining crime.
In 2021, FEMA released guidance on using agency funds to buy DJI drones, stating that there was no prohibition on the usage of FEMA funds to buy Chinese drones while acknowledging data privacy concerns and advising buyers to figure out secure ways to store their data. More prudent, however, would be to ban the usage of these funds to buy DJI drones altogether. Indeed it’s already the rule within other parts of the government. For many years, police departments used a grant program within the Department of Justice to buy Chinese drones until the DOJ banned the practice in 2020. The ban was enacted due to concerns that Chinese drones could be vulnerable to control from an outside actor.
Other parts of the federal government have also enforced bans. In 2021, the General Services Administration (an independent agency of the U.S. government specializing in procurement) prohibited the agency from buying drones from Chinese companies. The GSA requires contracts for drones to be verified as secure through an internal drone security program run by a part of the Department of Defense.
Apart from the obvious dangers and inherent absurdity of American security agencies outsourcing sensitive defense and surveillance functions to China, there is also something drearily predictable about the practice. Critics have pointed out that FEMA grants are used to fund questionable purchases.
And a central issue is that America, with all its spending on military technology, has failed to produce a superior product. While buying the Chinese equipment poses concerns, DJI drones have more features and are cheaper than competitors. The Department of Interior even conceded that there are no good alternatives to DJI.
This raises the question of what American police departments and other public safety groups should replace their DJI drones with. A strategy of promoting the manufacturing of commercial drones in the United States would be optimal, but this may be an issue where things have to get worse before they get better, as groups wean off of using Chinese drones. But if lawmakers want to get serious about protecting U.S. industries from Chinese surveillance, banning DJI drones offers a strong place to start.