But, as Murray Rothbard has pointed out, “human rights, when not put in terms of property rights, turn out to be vague and contradictory.” Your freedom to have an opinion does not grant you the right to express that opinion in venues or on media outlets you do not own. But if you pay to give a speech at a lecture hall and the government blocks it, this violation of free speech could be better understood as a violation of property rights. So how would property rights fare under the RESTRICT Act? Not well. The bill would not only block private companies from engaging in legitimate business practices but would further violate the property rights of American citizens and companies through an open-ended digital surveillance regime.

The RESTRICT Act seeks to give the Commerce Department broad new authorities to “identify, deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, and mitigate” information and communications technology products “in which any foreign adversary has an interest, and that pose an undue or unacceptable risk to U.S. national security or the safety of U.S. persons.” The bill defines foreign adversaries as China, Russia, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea, but it allows the Executive to add and drop foreign regimes from the list without oversight from Congress.

The information and communications technology products highlighted in the act are expansive and unspecific. They range from desktop applications, mobile apps, web-based applications, payment platforms, and gaming systems to webcams, Wi-Fi networks, drone cameras, home surveillance systems, and even biotechnology.

It’s worth mentioning that the only real threat the alleged adversarial regimes pose is to Washington’s ability to exert military control over the entire globe. The root of this issue lies in America’s overzealous foreign policy aspirations—not in some irrational wish by these regimes to see American people harmed. The proper way to address these threats is to bring American foreign policy back in line with reality as Washington’s unipolar moment slips away. The RESTRICT Act ignores the root of the problem and instead attacks the rights of the American people.

Our right to property stems first from our right to self-ownership. We alone own our bodies. Any property claim made on our bodies is unethical and impossible. From self-ownership, property can be attained justly through homesteading—mixing one’s labor with unowned land resources. After property has been homesteaded, it can be justly transferred through gifts or voluntary exchange. That is how most property is justly acquired in modern societies.

Unfortunately, we do not live in a perfectly libertarian world. But property rights are still important and, to the extent they exist, must be defended. As such, if a someone wishes to read, watch, or listen to a foreign government—maybe they want to hear both sides of a geopolitical dispute to be better informed—and a website owner is willing to deliver that piece of media to them, it is completely within the rights of both the consumer and website owner to engage in that transaction.

Further, it is the right of those who own the internet service provider, data center, and optical fiber cables to make part of their infrastructure available for the information transfer if they find the price to be worth it. Even if the information originated from or encountered a foreign regime, any third party stepping in to stop this transaction would be violating the right of the individuals involved to control their own property.

The conduct that the RESTRICT Act seeks to prohibit is not a real crime. And beyond that, the state surveillance of private activity necessary to identify the relevant transactions is where the majority of property rights violations will occur. The bill makes numerous references to the use of information gathered by the director of national intelligence. Although we’re told US intelligence agencies focus on gathering information and conducting operations outside of the United States, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that agencies such as the National Security Agency conduct mass surveillance of American’s communications. The RESTRICT Act could ratchet this up by extending the surveillance beyond communications to include digital information of any kind. By accessing devices without express permission, the federal government would further violate our property rights.

There is even more of concern. With its vague language, the bill gives the government much leeway in defining what qualifies as illegal information. We’ve already seen government officials and their friends in media conflate antiestablishment arguments with foreign disinformation. They’ve even falsely labelled accurate news stories as foreign disinformation. It’s not hard to see these same people using the powers granted to them by the RESTRICT Act to criminalize certain dissenting views under the guise of counterintelligence.

This awful bill seeks to prop up Washington’s disappearing global military dominance by making certain pieces of digital information illegal. The implementation of the RESTRICT Act would violate the American people’s basic right to control their property—all in the name of thwarting a fake crime. The bill isn’t protecting you from a threat. It is the threat. Don’t fall for it.

About the Author

Connor O’Keeffe is a writer and video producer at the Mises Institute. He has a masters in economics and a bachelors in geology.

Article cross-posted from Mises.

The so-called “RESTRICT Act,” introduced by Sens. Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Tom Thune (R-S.D.), is supposedly aimed at blocking or disrupting transactions and financial holdings linked to foreign adversaries that the powers that be claim are a threat to national security. In truth, though, the RESTRICT Act appears to have been intentionally designed to target the free speech rights of everyday Americans.

Warner, who is described as “a longtime opponent of free speech,” crafted the RESTRICT Act in such a way as to weaponize Big Tech, according to Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger, who warned about all this in 2018.

It would seem that nobody took Krieger seriously until the Twitter Files revelations dropped, revealing that he was right: there is an effort afoot to scrap the First Amendment by tying it to foreign malice that must be stopped in order to protect America.

Krieger says that Warner intentionally designed the RESTRICT Act in such a way as to allow the government to “take swift action against technology companies suspected of cavorting with foreign governments and spies, to effectively vanish their products from shelves and app stores when the threat they pose gets too big to ignore,” to quote Wired.

(Related: Check out our earlier coverage about how the PATRIOT Act has been used by the feds to target patriots.)

ACTION ITEM: Contact your representatives and demand they reject the RESTRICT ACT. It is important to call, not just send an email. You can reach your Senators and House members via the United States Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121.

Tell your representatives to vote NO on SB686 – the RESTRICT Act cannot be allowed to pass

The bill lists the following countries as bad actors that have to be stopped via its passage: China, Iran, Cuba, Russia, North Korea, and Venezuela. The corporate-controlled media is reporting on the legislation as if it specifically pertains to the social media app TikTok, but this is also a deflection from the truth.

“In reality, the RESTRICT Act has very little to do with TikTok and everything to do with controlling online content,” one report warns.

“In very specific terms, a lot of U.S. websites would be impacted. Why? Because a lot of websites use third-party ‘plug-ins’ or ‘widgets’ or software created in foreign countries to support the content on their site.”

The passage of the RESTRICT Act would grant the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) new overarching powers to take down any and all websites deemed to be using any “foreign content” or software, or that might be engaged in platform communication that the U.S. government deems as going against its interests.

“In very direct terms,” reports state, “the passage of SB686 would give the Department of Commerce, DNI, and DHS (Department of Homeland Security) the ability to shut down what you are reading right now. This is a big deal.”

In defense of his bill, Warner claims that its provisions only apply to people or entities that are “engaged in sabotage or subversion of communications technology in the U.S., causing catastrophic effects on U.S. critical infrastructure, or interfering in, or altering the result of a federal election” – but who defines what constitutes a violation of all this?

Warner further claims that his legislation only targets “companies like Kaspersky, Huawei and TikTok … not individual users.” The only problem is that the bill specifically states otherwise:

“… no person may cause or aid, abet, counsel, command, induce, procure, permit, or approve the doing of any act prohibited by, or the omission of any act required by any regulation, order, direction, mitigation measure, prohibition, or other authorization or directive issued under, this Act,” it reads.

The following RINO (Republican in Name Only) Republicans support the RESTRICT Act – vote them all out:

• Sen. Thune, John (R-S.D.)
• Sen. Fischer, Deb (R-Neb.)
• Sen. Moran, Jerry (R-Kan.)
• Sen. Sullivan, Dan (R-Ak.)
• Sen. Collins, Susan M. (R-Maine)
• Sen. Romney, Mitt (R-Utah)
• Sen. Capito, Shelley Moore [R-W.V.]
• Sen. Cramer, Kevin (R-N.D.)
• Sen. Grassley, Chuck (R-Iowa)
• Sen. Tillis, Thomas (R-N.C.)
• Sen. Graham, Lindsey (R-S.C.)

The free America you once knew is dead and gone. To keep up with the latest, visit Collapse.news.

Sources for this article include:

• Technocracy.news
• NaturalNews.com
• NATURAL NEWS