Senator Manchin Tries To Sneak His Dangerous ‘See Something, Say Something’ Attack On The Internet Into The Must Pass NDAA

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas... in that politicians who couldn't pass their terrible and destructive bills through normal means are trying to light up various must pass funding and omnibus end-of-year bills with those failed bills as amendments. It happens every year like clockwork, and I'm sure we'll be noting some other attempts to sneak through bad bills, but last week, Senator Joe Manchin pushed to have his absolutely terrible See Something, Say Something" bill attached to the National Defense Authorization Act, better known as the NDAA, and long considered a must pass" so that we have, you know, a military doing stuff.

If you don't recall the See Something, Say Something bill, we wrote up a long deconstruction of it two years ago, when he first pushed this monstrosity. It's a direct attack on Section 230, in that it would force companies to file Suspicious Transmission Activity Reports" (STAR) for basically anything suspicious" they see online.

You know how under the law right now, if a website finds child sexual abuse material, it needs to report it to NCMEC? Well, this law basically expands that to... well... everything. See someone mention drugs? File a report! See someone slightly mean to someone else? File a STAR. See someone joke about a bomb? STAR. On and on and on.

The law applies to known suspicious transmission" which means it will actually encourage websites to take a less proactive approach to reviewing content, because they will claim that if they don't look, they couldn't have known. Still, the law says it covers content the website should have reasonably known" about as well, meaning that even if you take the eyes-covered approach, you still have to litigate whether you should have magically known about this bad thing found online.

Of course, we already know that the original see something, say something" program (which is trademarked by the NYC Metropolitan Transit Authority, who is crazy fucking litigious about it) has been a complete and total disaster. It has a long history of basically encouraging overly paranoid bigots to report everything they find suspicious about non-white people, and it has resulted in floods of useless reports that the police have to sort through, and almost no actual useful, actionable data.

And now, Senator Joe Manchin wants to recreate that mess... but for everything on the internet.

And he wants to do it by quietly hiding his bill in the must pass NDAA, even though this bill has fuck all to do with the military.

It's a terrible idea that makes no sense, but I guess you could say the same thing about Senator Manchin himself.

Anyway, you might want to let your Senators know not to support this terrible legislation that would not just force websites into a ton of useless busywork, but would also flood the government with totally useless STAR reports that keep them from doing actual useful work.