Quote: "Cantwell has repeatedly upended privacy negotiations. In 2019, she broke up a working group trying to hash out a compromise. In 2022, she rebuffed a landmark agreement from three key lawmakers, a first-of-its kind bipartisan deal. Again and again, aides said, she has thwarted promising talks by refusing to iron out key disputes, speaking out publicly against colleagues’ efforts and not empowering her staff to fully negotiate."
Ahhh, the good old two-facedness of American lawmakers.
Or the bills could just be a terrible step back that removes some of the few protections that already exist in multiple states.
Privacy bills are extreme targets for lobbying when the objective is to destroy some business ability to function and costs several industries significant money. No bill is simply going to say “personal information may not be sold” and call it a day they are all going to be filled with exceptions allowing groups X, Y, Z to keep making money.
There are a non-negative number of compromise bills that are worth less than nothing. There's no way I was able to tell from the article's text whether Cantwell was blocking things that were legitimately valuable or complete garbage (ie, use the word "privacy" offer only block stronger privacy guarantee, etc).
Statement like, "Again and again, aides said, she has thwarted promising talks by refusing to iron out key disputes, speaking out publicly against colleagues’ efforts and not empowering her staff to fully negotiate." say nothing at all.
I would hope that her own aides would choose a more positive phrasing if they believed she was doing good work by holding out against worse than nothing bills.
The one clear thing is that the unnamed aids are complaining about Cantwell. The article gives no real details which one could use to determine what the criticism is about exactly, never mind who is right.
Vaguely I guess that if they had criticism that would resonate with people, they say it and so I'm vaguely skeptical of these aids. But my main reaction is "wow, here's an article about nothing that people actually read as stiff criticism"
As an addendum, it occurs to me that the article's authors could have looked up the public statements that these aids these were referring to and so have given the reader an idea what bills she was opposing as contrasted with what bills she favored. But I could find no mention of this in the article.
The allegation is Cantwell is bombing these bills so she can keep claiming to her constituents that she's fighting to pass them. If she straight up came out and changed her mind on privacy, sure, that would resolve the conundrum, but that sidesteps the dilemma instead of solving it.
With very few exceptions, legislators don’t get a bill that they single-handedly draft and pass that has national implications. On occasion, for totally local issues, they’ll have the power to ram something through. But if it has national implications, it will be the work of many. Cantwell tanking bills just because it has co-sponsors doesn’t make sense.
Uh, I just want to point that the sentence you quote gives the reader zero information concerning the substance of the questions being debated. It could be summarized as "she didn't accept undescribed things that key unnamed people wanted".
Not to put too fine a point on it but the main thing it illustrates is the opaqueness of journalist political commentary, something Debord liken to a "tedious series of lifeless, inconclusive crime novels [having] all the dramatic interest of a realistically staged fight between blacks, at night, in a tunnel." [1]
We should demand good journalism. The remainder of this article quotes more than a dozen sources. It seems to rise above pure political commentary by a fair chunk.
There is no surprise to me that the chair of a tech privacy panel is opposed to privacy. That seems to be the kind of person that would get such an appointment.
Yeah. It's her pet issue. Much like term limits and many other things for other elected representatives, if they actually addressed the issue there would be no reason to vote for her any more.
> if they actually addressed the issue there would be no reason to vote for her any more
This isn't how politics works. Issues can bring someone into office. They rarely remove them from them.
Cantwell is kept in office by the machine she built. If she delivered to that machine, she'd gain from it, not lose. The only thing she would be doing by "saving" an issue is telegraphing to a primary competitor that there are chips on the table.
> Staffers from Microsoft and Amazon — both headquartered in her state — have been among Cantwell’s biggest political contributors over the past five years, according to OpenSecrets, an organization that tracks campaign donations.
The elephant in the room.
Without imputing evil motives (not that they might not be present): lawyers and politicians don't want to solve problems. They want to make a career of them.
So if there WAS a bipartisan bill passed and she didn't get the credit, then she'd lose all those campaign contributions.
Some politician said, "It's amazing how much you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit." The converse is also true.
> On Sunday, Cantwell heralded a breakthrough privacy measure with House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), marking the first time the leaders of the two critical committees had agreed on a plan to establish a federal baseline for what data companies can collect online and to give consumers new privacy rights
> In recent years, Senate Commerce has twice advanced a bill to expand federal privacy laws for children and another sweeping measure led by Blumenthal and Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) to force tech companies to take greater steps to protect children from harm. Both lawmakers expressed gratitude for Cantwell’s support in written statements.
Beyond this, overall I believe the article is actually implying that Cantwell is working against Democratic party interests. Kinda seems like the WaPo wants to say something, but is not really willing to just say it.
It's not the WaPo, it’s the anonymous sources trying to send a message. Or maybe Amazon, which is really good at killing strong privacy bills.
There was very little about what she was holding out for, so it’s hard to say if it is unreasonable. Cantwell could very well be listening to her constituents - there has been a privacy and tech equity coalition watching her over the years.
Privacy bills come down to:
1. What data is covered?
2. Opt-in vs opt-out: is the default assumption my data will not be collected and shared, or that it will be unless I opt-out?
3. Enforcement - only the attorney general or can someone file a lawsuit? The article states that she wanted protection against forced arbitration which as her constituent I would agree with her on that.
4. Whether states can pass stronger laws at their level. California has a large delegation and a strong state law which is a consideration in the House.
Your comment is too terse for me, I can't parse it. Both Cantwell and Rodgers are moderate politicians from opposing parties in the state of Washington. What certification are you referring to?
I recall Cantwell being on the right side in the crypto wars in the nineties, when she was a congresswoman, so I'd be inclined to give her the benefit of doubt. So many alleged Federal privacy regulations are a transparent ploy to preempt state laws with actual teeth like California's CCPA/CPRA, that they are in fact worse than nothing.
> The two sides remained apart on key sticking points — whether a federal law should override state privacy measures, as Republicans wanted, and whether consumers should be able to sue companies directly, as Democrats desired. The disputes have long befuddled negotiators.
Looks like the proposal she favored left state privacy measures in place. And didn't preempt consumer actions.
A lot of states already have stronger to much stronger protections, including the two largest states, CA and (very recently) TX. A very large percentage of the population of the country would lose privacy protections if this bill is passed without removing preemption.
Hopefully either they remove preemption from the bill, or the bill dies.
In fact, that’s how US laws were intended to work. Federal gives guidelines that apply to all states. The states narrow the scope for any issues that arise.
That's not necessarily true in the US. Federal law can either preempt state law, meaning that states are not permitted to pass stricter or less strict laws in an area (e.g., copyright and patent law), or not, meaning that states are free to pass stricter laws.
I either have rights or I don't. These are not things "given" to us. You just updated the legislation to enforce those who would encroach on them. Also it means you were incredibly late to good jurisprudence so it's odd to take a victory lap on it.
Perhaps committee chairs should be selected by the population.
> I either have rights or I don't. These are not things "given" to us.
Rights are a social construct. It's fair to describe their delineation as creation. (Natural rights don't really work without a deity bestowing and defending them, despite our collective furious attempts to pretend otherwise [1].)
I strongly doubt this. You might make a case that our conception of them is tied to our biology and evolution, but that also means these ideas and concepts have obviously existed well outside and over society for much of history.
> It's fair to describe their delineation as creation.
I strictly disagree. What gets created is a collective enforcement mechanism. The right, recognized or not, exists separately from this.
> Natural rights don't really work without a deity bestowing and defending them
Your reference, in the very first paragraph, contradicts you with `all people have inherent rights, conferred not by act of legislation but by "God, nature, or reason.'
> these ideas and concepts have obviously existed well outside and over society for much of history
So have most social constructs. From marriage to slavery.
> What gets created is a collective enforcement mechanism. The right, recognized or not, exists separately from this
Sure. Fine. Kant said the same about mathematics. Like undiscovered math, unrecognised rights do jack shit until they're codified. At this standard of evidence we might as well start debating ghosts. (Which is fun and fine. But not the business of a lawmaker.)
> Your reference, in the very first paragraph, contradicts you with `all people have inherent rights, conferred not by act of legislation but by "God, nature, or reason
Yes, that is what someone who believes in natural rights believes. I am disagreeing with it. (I believe it's quoting Aquinas, a famous philosopher and priest.)
How does “nature” confer upon you rights? Can I observe rights via scientific techniques? I don’t think so—to nature you’re just meat.
The concept of individual “rights” that can’t be infringed by the government arose from religion—specifically Christianity. That concept makes no sense absent some supernatural order. Because otherwise, “rights” are just what society agrees not to do to individuals. Those choices can be completely arbitrary.
A deity cannot confer any rights if it doesn't exist.
That nature doesn't in and of itself confer any rights to anyone is rather self-evident from observations of said nature. Even wholesale genocide of species is something that happens routinely in nature over sufficiently long timescales.
Reason cannot confer rights because you can't reason from nothing. You have to pick a set of ethical axioms first to reason from, but the choice of those axioms is largely arbitrarily. There's some amount of biologically-induced restrictions on the practical choices of those axioms (e.g. basic survival of species in a state capable of implementing them, but also various hardwired biological responses such as altruism), but even with those in place there are still infinitely many drastically different options.
The very notion of "natural rights" is fundamentally religious in nature. They don't require deities or worship etc - you can just omit that step as unnecessary, with the rights themselves being the object of faith - but if you're honest about it, it's still a (non-theistic) religion. And there's nothing wrong with that, and I personally embrace such an interpretation as someone who cares deeply about natural rights. But we should be aware that it is a belief, not something objectively following from the very nature of reality.
> That nature doesn't in and of itself confer any rights to anyone is rather self-evident from observations of said nature.
Historically, there were a lot of people for whom this was not "self-evident". From Aristotle through to scholastics such as Aquinas, it was "self-evident" that nature entailed moral rights and duties. Even early modern figures such as Grotius still thought that way (although he was a Christian theologian, he insisted that morality would still exist even if God didn't, since he held that the moral law was inherent in nature)
Now, maybe you are right and they were wrong – but you need a stronger argument than simply "self-evidence" to demonstrate that
> Even wholesale genocide of species is something that happens routinely in nature over sufficiently long timescales.
Aristotle, Aquinas, Grotius et al were certainly aware that the moral law they believed was inherent in nature was nonetheless routinely violated, sometimes on an enormous and abhorrent scale. However, they didn't agree that this was some kind of slam-dunk counterargument to their views
> Reason cannot confer rights because you can't reason from nothing. You have to pick a set of ethical axioms first to reason from, but the choice of those axioms is largely arbitrarily
What is "reason"? It has meant very different things to different thinkers. For a Humean conception of "reason", what you say is true. Given many ancient, mediaeval and early modern conceptions of "reason", what you say is false. How can we determine which understanding of "reason" is the correct one?
> The very notion of "natural rights" is fundamentally religious in nature
"Religious" is another one of those words which can be defined in numerous different ways. Your claim may be true given some of those definitions, but is clearly false given others.
If nature is the source of natural rights, then you would expect their violation in nature to be an exception rather than a rule. If it is instead the rule, then what even is the meaning of calling it a "natural right"?
The problem with all the philosophers you've listed is that they were, essentially, arguing towards a predetermined conclusion, which is that the way they wanted their society to be is also the "natural" way for it to be. It should come as no surprise that this mode of thinking is prevalent in humans regardless of which specific religion or philosophy they espouse. You could also mention Confucius etc.
But then when we look at those people, we find that, aside from the very few things that can be easily backtracked to the aforementioned biological constraints, they rarely agree on anything. The very fact that human morality has varied so extremely over different cultures, and even in the same culture over time (which people often underestimate based on pop and folk history, I should add), is yet another piece of evidence that there's nothing "natural" about all this.
For the purposes of this conversation, "reason" as a term means what people today, in the society that we live in, understand as such. I'm not interested in sophistry.
> If nature is the source of natural rights, then you would expect their violation in nature to be an exception rather than a rule. If it is instead the rule, then what even is the meaning of calling it a "natural right"?
Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, etc, were working in a very different framework from most people today. They believed that universals were really existent entities – either in some transcendent eternal realm (Plato and Platonists), or somehow immanent in their instances. From those realist assumptions, it makes sense to view a universal (nature/essence/subject/species/etc) as an ideal against which something could be measured. The fact that real life very often fell short of the ideal didn't make it any less ideal. And it is "natural" because it is part of the nature of things. Whereas, most people today are nominalists, and given nominalist assumptions, that whole approach doesn't make much sense. But now we've shifted the philosophical problem from natural rights, to who has the correct metaphysics of universals.
They also viewed teleology as real in a way in which mainstream contemporary thought does not. Purpose was not an exclusive property of conscious beings (humans and animals), it was inherent in everything. Teleological explanations (final causes) were viewed as causal explanations equal in ontological status to efficient causation, whereas Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought has (on the whole) redefined causation to mean efficient causation only. Purpose was inherent in the very nature of things, so it makes sense to judge actions based on whether they further those purposes or fight them.
> The problem with all the philosophers you've listed is that they were, essentially, arguing towards a predetermined conclusion, which is that the way they wanted their society to be is also the "natural" way for it to be.
Okay, but if you are going to accuse them of that, why not levy the same accusation against philosophers whose positions are closer to your own? If realism about universals is an example of "motivated reasoning", why isn't irrealism about them equally so? If a broader understanding of causation, in which teleology and efficient causation are ontologically equal, is an example of "motivated reasoning", why isn't Bacon/Hume/etc's position that efficient causation has ontological priority over teleology equally so?
> The very fact that human morality has varied so extremely over different cultures, and even in the same culture over time (which people often underestimate based on pop and folk history, I should add), is yet another piece of evidence that there's nothing "natural" about all this.
That's an old argument: morality can't be objective because people don't agree on what is moral. It also has an old response: if that's true, then fact can't be objective either, because people don't agree on what is factual.
> For the purposes of this conversation, "reason" as a term means what people today, in the society that we live in, understand as such.
It is a vague squishy term without a clear definition. And when we try to be precise about what it means, we find that even today, people disagree about which precise definition is the correct one. And that's important, because different definitions of "reason" can produce different answers to questions such as "can reason confer rights?"
> I'm not interested in sophistry.
Implying that the person you are talking with is engaging in "sophistry" is not particularly civil, nor conducive to thoughtful discussion.
Indeed, so they redefined "nature" to mean what they wanted it to mean, rather than what it observably is. Again, it is always very telling that all those "universals" and "innate purpose" of things somehow conspired to lead to the conclusions that the person in question wanted to achieve.
I am really utterly disinterested in pursuing this line of thinking or debating it. And yes, I do see it as sophistry; specifically, as dressing up trivial and/or circular arguments with intent to confuse others about their plain meaning. Much of classical philosophy is exactly that.
> Okay, but if you are going to accuse them of that, why not levy the same accusation against philosophers whose positions are closer to your own. If realism about universals is an example of "motivated reasoning", why isn't irrealism about them equally so?
Because it's the only sensible null hypothesis. We can postulate existence of all kinds of things at random, why universals specifically?
> That's an old argument: morality can't be objective because people don't agree on what is moral. It also has an old response: if that's true, then fact can't be objective either, because people don't agree on what is factual.
It doesn't matter if people agree, only if the universe agrees. A 1-ton block falling on you doesn't care if you "agree" whether its movement is factual or not; you'll find out soon enough through direct experience, without having to debate with anyone about it. But can you show me a thing that disagrees with people about its purpose in a way that can be observed and measured?
> Indeed, so they redefined "nature" to mean what they wanted it to mean, rather than what it observably is.
They never "redefined" the term "nature". They actually originated it. The definition you are used to is actually a descendant, a modification, of theirs.
And the problem with claiming "what it observably is" is that (as Popper, Kuhn, Feyerabend, inter alia, argue) observation is theory-laden: a lot of what you think nature "observably" is, is how you interpret your experiences through the lens of your own theoretical committments; hence, people who have different theoretical commitments, don't observe the same things you do. The raw sense data may be the same, but the conversion of that raw sense data into words and concepts proceeds differently.
> Again, it is always very telling that all those "universals" and "innate purpose" of things somehow conspired to lead to the conclusions that the person in question wanted to achieve.
Again, why can't we levy the same argument against the positions you prefer? If realism about universalism conspires to produce conclusions that the person in question wanted to achieve, why doesn't nominalist irrealism about them likewise conspire to produce conclusions that nominalists want to achieve?
> And yes, I do see it as sophistry; specifically, as dressing up trivial and/or circular arguments with intent to confuse others about their plain meaning. Much of classical philosophy is exactly that.
I disagree. I think it is a case of being so wedded to a certain interpretive framework that one loses the ability to take any of its competitors seriously, to even realise that there are other options to consider.
> Because it's the only sensible null hypothesis.
Why should irrealism about universals be the null hypothesis? And, if irrealism about universals is the null hypothesis, why not equally so irrealism about other things, for example physical matter? Why wouldn't the same logic lead to subjective idealism as the null hypothesis?
> We can postulate existence of all kinds of things at random, why universals specifically?
Because they are part of our everyday experience. We know both individual trees, and whatever it is that all individual trees have in common which makes them trees as opposed to mountains or rivers or dogs or asteroids or whatnot–the first are particulars, the second is a universal. Obviously both exist in some sense, the question is how similar those respective senses of existence are. If you view both as "existing" in fundamentally the same sense, you end up with a strongly realist position about universals, such as Plato's; if you view universals as "existing" in a much weaker sense than particulars do, you end up in the ballpark of nominalist positions such as those of William of Ockham and Thomas Hobbes. If you aim for somewhere in-between these two extremes, you end up with the "moderate realism" of Aristotle and Aquinas.
> It doesn't matter if people agree, only if the universe agrees.
But we can't know whether the universe agrees. There are many "factual" questions to which (barring some kind of afterlife) none of us now living will ever know the answer. Is there intelligent life in the Ophiuchus Supercluster? What was Julius Caesar's last meal? Somebody once knew, but the last person to ever know that died a very long time ago, and barring some unlikely archaeological discoveries (which probably don't exist to discover), we never again will know. Or, consider modestly (as opposed to outlandishly) improbable conspiracy theories – the vast majority of them are going to be false, but there are enough of them that likely a handful are actually true–but will we ever be able to know which ones?
If there are questions to which we'll never be able to know the answer, why should we assume an unknowable answer to them must actually exist?
> Facts transcend cultures. "Universals" do not.
The concept of a tree, as opposed to any particular individual tree, is an example of a universal, and I'm not aware of any human culture lacking that concept.
> he very notion of "natural rights" is fundamentally religious in nature. They don't require deities or worship etc - you can just omit that step as unnecessary, with the rights themselves being the object of faith - but if you're honest about it, it's still a (non-theistic) religion.
That’s an apt way to put it. We started with “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.” And then we silently dropped the “Creator” but maintained the framework of “rights” as if they’re God-granted.
Ironically, “rights” are an area where liberals sound more theistic than conservatives. For conservatives, rights are rooted in social tradition and practice. Aliens could deduce them from observation. For liberals, rights are something that exist in the aether until humans discover them.
Rights that are rooted in social tradition and practice are mostly about protecting that social tradition and practice. An example of such traditional customary right that was pervasive in human societies, and is still pervasive in some of them, would be the right of husbands to rape their wives.
But, of course, that is still a fundamentally religious position; in this case, the implicit axiom is that the current social tradition and custom is something valuable - for theistic conservatives, because it is divinely ordained, or at least has its origins in something that was, and for non-theistic ones, because it has value in and of itself. In that sense, they are not different from theistic or non-theistic liberals. There's still nothing particularly objective about it, as evidenced by the fact that different societies have wildly different traditions and customs.
As a non-theistic liberal, I prefer to start with the axiom that human suffering is bad in general, and that every person has absolute and inviolable ownership of their own mind and body, then derive the natural rights (bodily autonomy, right to self-defense etc) from there. That is, of course, also a religious position, since nature itself doesn't care one bit about suffering, so my assertion that it is bad is a matter of faith, not of reason.
Ahhh, the good old two-facedness of American lawmakers.