Biden Acts on Surveillance, Florida Broadband Maps, Free State Wants Constitutional Spectrum
The administration’s efforts are mostly directed at curtailing the Chinese government.
T.J. York
November 3, 2021 – The Biden administration announced on Thursday an initiative to prevent the use of technology for surveillance by authoritarian governments, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The Chinese government is among many authoritarian governments that rely on imported technology to conduct state surveillance.
U.S. technology has been used in China to surveil citizens, modernize its military and target Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
Biden’s plans include creating a code of conduct for export licensing, which authorizes specific transactions and controls which technologies the U.S. ships out, as well as sharing with international allies vital information on technologies that are weaponized against political dissidents, human rights activists, journalists and government officials, per WSJ.
The action comes after Biden in June banned Americans from investing in companies linked to Chinese military and surveillance activities, per Axios.
The administration’s new initiative will be announced at the inaugural Summit for Democracy gathering over 100 democratic governments to counter authoritarianism next Thursday and Friday. China and Russia have criticized the gathering following their exclusion from the event.
Florida added to Citizen’s National Broadband Map
Citizen’s National Broadband Map has added Florida to its expanding list of 15 state participants, GEO Partners said in a press release Thursday.
Florida will join the project which already includes states such as Washington, Minnesota, Maine, Nebraska, Kentucky, Indiana and Nevada.
GEO is the integration of software and software derived services, specifically designed to perform broadband modeling, costing and financial analysis for localities.
GEO Partners says its platform “permits grant administrators to interactively verify the impact of their programs and intended targets in real-time, without relying on out-dated historical maps.”
“Crowdsourced mapping has the ability to determine if broadband deployments and related grant programs are meeting expectations,” says GEO Partners.
Free State Foundation says Constitution requires more market-based approaches to spectrum policy
The Free State Foundation, a free market think tank, wrote in an op-ed Friday that “foundational constitutional principles” require government approaches to spectrum policy to be more market-based than they are at the present.
The op-ed says that the government should move from its current practice of controlling large swaths of private spectrum to reallocation of government spectrum to both licensed and unlicensed private commercial use, consistent with what FSF says is a constitutional requirement for the government “to promote private property and private sector commerce.”
FSF urges licensing on an exclusive basis for spectrum bands suited to commercial licensing.
Additionally to fulfill government responsibilities, FSF suggests excluding “application of ‘hard caps’ on wireless providers’ acquisition of spectrum licenses” as well as rejecting “net neutrality” or “open access” restrictions.
The think tank believes federal agencies should relinquish, or at least share, government spectrum that they are underutilizing and “prioritize the 3.1-3.5 GHz band for examination and timely repurposing.”
