I think this is the main content of the law. (Everything below is quoted.)
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Section 3. Right to compute
Government actions that restrict the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes, which infringes on citizens' fundamental rights to property and free expression, must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest in public health or safety.
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Section 4. Infrastructure controlled by artificial intelligence system -- shutdown.
(1) When critical infrastructure facilities are controlled in whole or in part by an artificial intelligence system, the deployer shall ensure the capability to disable the artificial intelligence system's control over the infrastructure and revert to human control within a reasonable amount of time.
(2) When enacting a full shutdown, the deployer shall consider, as appropriate, disruptions to critical infrastructure that may result from a shutdown.
(3) Deployers shall implement, annually review, and test a risk management policy that includes a fallback mechanism and a redundancy and mitigation plan to ensure the deployer can continue operations and maintain control of the critical infrastructure facility without the use of the artificial intelligence system.
> Government actions that restrict the ability to privately...
This seems weirdly backwards. The main problem is not generally what government can and wishes to restrict, it's all the proprietary/private restrictions such as not being able to run whatever code you want on hardware you own. The bill does nothing to address the actual rights of citizens, it just limits some ways government can't further restrict the citizens' right. The government should be protecting the citizens' digital rights from anyone trying to clamp them down.
Yeah, the whole concept of rights in the US are, in the main, about restricting what the federal government and states can do individuals.
Whereas in Europe our concept of rights include restrictions on the state, but also also might restrict non-state actors. We also have a broader concept of rights that create obligations on the state and private actors to do things for individuals to their benefit.
It’s kinda good the planet gets to run both experiments, and more.
The EU approach seems to want to insert government in to contracts between private individual and those they do business with, and the US approach seems to want to maybe allow too much power to accumulate in those who wield the mercantile powers.
The optimal approach probably lies in the tension between multiple loci.
It's one experiment because both systems are competing at the same time for global resources both in cooperation and competition with each other and other actors. Additional both systems exist in such widely different contexts that any comparison would be inaccurate because other factors such as geographic and historical have a large impact on any measured results.
The optimal approach appears domain specific and granular, too.
As for domain specificity:
I don't know any Europeans who'd prefer to have American healthcare.
I don't know any European technology companies that hold a candle to the sheer breadth and depth of capabilities brought into the world by Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, AMD, Intel, OpenAI, or Anthropic.
Yes, Mistral, Nokia, OVH, and SAP exist, but compared to the alternarives, they exist in the way the American healthcare system exists compared to its alternatives.
As for granularity:
Perhaps we want American style governance for building the tech, but then European style governance for running it?
I don't agree with that at all. If anyone else tries to infringe your rights it's either voluntary i.e. you've consented to this, or it's involuntary in which case you can sue them or the state will prosecute them on your behalf.
It is oddly funny that people in my town are ferociously protesting the police force's adoption of Flock surveillance cameras when everyone already carries total surveillance devices (smartphones) on their person at all times.
You can (generally) tell when a person around you is filming, and you generally don’t have to worry about tons of random individuals bringing together footage of you for tracking and surveillance.
Most of the cameras are attached to either Apple or Android devices. The companies that control these ecosystems could use them for mass surveillance. The government could 'politely' ask these companies to do that for them. Or they could just directly order the phones.
Sort of except for the fatal flaw that you are talking about battery powered devices that mostly live in peoples' pockets. The reason Flock cameras and Ring doorbells both serve well for mass video surveillance is consistent predictable location and power.
Maybe, yes. On the other hand, there's lots and lots of people running around with these things, so you get pretty good statistical coverage, especially in cities.
In Germany it's (very roughly speaking) illegal to film people in public. (Importantly, not the same as filming a thing or event and having people incidentally in the frame)
I'm pretty sure the point parent was trying to make is that you can't get other people to leave their phones at home and there is very little recourse if a private citizen decides to record you without your consent from their phone in a public space. There's of course a difference in the powers involved, but people have had their lives ruined because somebody captured a video of them out of context or in their worst moment.
That's the notion of "rights" we have in the US though. It's the same with the Bill of Rights. It's true some states do go further and bestow more affirmative rights. But it's deeply ingrained in US political thought that "right to do X" means "government won't stop you from doing X", not "government will stop anyone who tries to stop you from doing X".
> The main problem is not generally what government can and wishes to restrict, it's all the proprietary/private restrictions such as not being able to run whatever code you want on hardware you own.
But those come from laws, like DMCA 1201, that prohibit people from bypassing those restrictions. The problem being that the DMCA is a federal law and Montana can't fix that one, but at least they couldn't do state one?
Although this language seems particularly inelegant:
> computational resources for lawful purposes
So they can't make a law against it unless they make a law against it?
The proprietary restrictions are an extension of government, because the government grants private actors protection of their IP and enforces that IP. The only issue is that because we take IP protections for granted, we see it as an issue of the private actor rather than the state which has increasingly legislated against people's ability to execute code on computers they themselves own. But it should be simple. The government grants a monopoly in the form of IP to certain private actors - when that monopoly proves to be against the interests of the citizens, and I believe it is, then the government should no londer enforce that monopoly.
This seems to have the positive effect that patching applications on your own device (a la Revanced patching Spotify) appears blessed, since government prosecution would need to demonstrate a public interest case, if I'm reading this correctly.
Well if you want to really get pedantic about it, it comes from the government enforcing those restrictions, like the DMCA, patent, or copyright, otherwise people would just do it willy-nilly for the most part.
Citizens don't need to be aligned with eachother, but they should ensure that the government is aligned with the citizenry as a whole. Everyone should have the freedom to polarize in different directions and hold different opinions as each individual sees fit. The government is only supposed to implement the laws that most people want in common, not enforce alignment of opinion in the populace (that's an authoritarian regime). If people are allowed to freely misalign, then they'll be misaligned in different directions, and their conflicting wishes will cancel eachother out like random noise when they vote, leaving only what most people want in common to be written into law.
As a simple example, Finland's national government just passed a smartphone ban in schools. That's fine by the criteria you brought up, but I think it's utterly moronic.
Not because I disagree with the Finnish people, or their elected representatives on the issue itself: that's for them to decide. I disagree that this should be handled at the national level at all!
> Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution. The Oxford English Dictionary defines subsidiarity as "the principle that a central authority should have a subsidiary function, performing only those tasks which cannot be performed at a more local level".[1] The concept is applicable in the fields of government, political science, neuropsychology, cybernetics, management and in military command (mission command). The OED adds that the term "subsidiarity" in English follows the early German usage of "Subsidiarität".[2] More distantly, it is derived from the Latin verb subsidio (to aid or help), and the related noun subsidium (aid or assistance).
In this case, I lack the imagination to see the reason why this issue couldn't have been handled at eg the city level, so that the good people of Oulo get the policy they want, and the good people of Helsinki get the policy they want.
Or even lower: there's no reason to even go as high as the city level, each school individually can decide what they want.
But just to give you the limits of subsidiarity here: I can see why you'd want to have a unified policy per school instead of per teacher or per class: the logistics are easier, and the individual teacher doesn't have to use their own judgement and authority on this. (Of course, individual schools should be free to let the teachers decide, if that's the policy they want.)
You can surely create your own example that cover more familiar territory, eg legal drinking ages in the US (which are ostensibly a matter for the states, but have been hijacked by the central government.)
No, the problem is the extent to which private parties can use the power of law to legally restrict your usage of property you own. And that's the reason it's a right.
If you don't like the restrictions a product has you can simply not purchase the product, no "right" has been infringed.
The issue is societal lockin - aka network effects. People can't afford to "not buy one" because then they are "the one without".
Banking apps, delivery apps, public transport apps, utilities apps, insurance - so many services have been captured by the big two phone oligopoly that modern life revolves around your phone. The assumption is that you will have one.
Sure, you could decide not to, but you are instantly a societal pariah as every business finds it s so much harder to deal with you - and you don't have enough time in the day to deal with the secondary processes these businesses employ, for every aspect of your life.
Maybe it's country specific - here in Canada I don't feel like I need a smart phone for anything crucial. There is a trend where people including zoomers such as myself switch to dumb phones for a "digital detox". So it seems perfectly feasible to do so.
Some people can do it. I'd also ditch my smartphone if I was living in the woods, or had a personal assistant handling my daily needs, or lived in an Amish community etc.
But I don't see the vast majority of people to be able to ditch their smartphone, that's just not a reasonable proposition.
A few people can live with just phone calls, but a sizeable majority use some additional apps for texting. Dumb phones won't work here.
1. Many people use a virtual text number, like google voice
2. Maybe even more folks use one or more app based texting services. I bet many users here have several on their phone:
Signal
What's app
telegram
There are probably 50 texting type apps in this category
These are dangerous attack vectors for people trying to remotely control your phone, but also important to talk to your friends.
I think we need a solution for these types of apps for a popular usable solution. I don't know how to solve the safety issue when running these apps, and I can't just "forward" text messages to my dumb phone.
But 30 years ago there were also no government services or major companies who require you to interact with them using an app on a major smartphone platform.
Nothing has changed, there are no government services or major companies who require you to interact with them using an app on a major smartphone platform.
There are many that do require SMS or a phone number of some sort at this point.
We are mostly saved by the part of the 70+ crowd who is completely computer illiterate and own significant investment resources. But that will only last 10-20 more years.
"lawful" seems like an enormous loophole that makes this seem vacuous. If the government makes what you are doing unlawful, then it can be restricted. How would the government restrict you from doing something lawful in the first place? A bill of attainder? That's already illegal.
It gives a legal foothold to those who would challenge later laws, akin to the bill of rights. Believe it or not, courts will honor that kind of thing, and many legislators act in good faith (at least at the state level).
I feel like this was a mistake: “must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest in public health or safety”
So, public health or safety, in the hands of a tyrant how broad can that get? I imagine that by enshrining this in law, Montana has accidentally given a future leader the ability to confiscate all computing technology.
In the hands of a tyrant all laws can be arbitrary/ignored because that is a key part of what makes them a tyrant.
Almost every part of government is in isolation a single point of failure to someone with a tyrannical streak, it's why most democracies end up with multiple houses/bodies and courts - supposed to act as checks and balances.
So this law wouldn't alter the outcome in the slightest.
> In the hands of a tyrant all laws can be arbitrary/ignored because that is a key part of what makes them a tyrant.
But that is not how tyrants actually operate, at least most of the time.
The most tyrannical country possible would be a "free democratic union of independent people's republics". Democracy has been so successful that most tyrannies operate under its veneer. This is in stark contrast to how monarchies have operated historically.
The trick isn't to ignore laws, but to make them so broad, meaningless and impossible to follow that you have to commit crimes to survive. You can then be selective in which of these crimes you choose to prosecute.
You don't charge the human rights activist for the human rights activism. You charge them with engaging in illegal speculation for the food they bought on the black market, even though that was the only way to avoid starvation, and everybody else did it too. In the worst case scenario, you charge them with "endangering national peace", "spreading misinformation" or "delivering correspondence without possessing a government license to do so" (for giving out pamflets).
"must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest" is exactly the shenanigans tyrants love. You can get away with absolutely anything with a law like that.
How has that been working in the US where both the legislation branch and judicial branch have willingly given their authority to the executive branch?
> So this law wouldn't alter the outcome in the slightest.
If an unchecked tyrant exists, do they really need the paper-thin facade provided by manhandling the English language to pretend that some law supports their actions?
This is just making a slippery slope fallacy by circuitous means.
The point of all laws and thus the courts is that each new action provides an opportunity to debate and decide on whether an action is lawful, and thus determine whether it should proceed.
You are arguing that all such decisions would always be decided in favor of the tyrant because they're a tyrant ala a slippery slope: the law exists, all things will be declared lawful, ergo all things are allowed with no further challenge.
This can certainly be true, but it doesn't naturally follow.
Show me a tyrant that doesn’t have rules and laws. Turkey, Saudia Arabia, Iran, China, North Korea, Sadam Hussein’s Iraq, and Russia still have law creating and law enforcing bodies. A good chunk of those countries even hold elections.
Hell, even in medieval England the king didn’t have absolute authority and had to worry about political alliances abcs political support of the other nobles.
You should go read the dictator’s handbook. Think about it from the perspective is the tyrant - there’s one of you. How do you establish control over groups of other people? Just ordering people around doesn’t work. You need to create a power base. You can go broad and give riches back to the people or narrow and give riches to people who have power and influence already. Dictator’s generally go the latter route because you’re not at the whim of changes in political mood and individual problems can be managed easily. But you still need to tap into symbolism and other institutions to lend yourself legitimacy to avoid uprisings.
in that case they can just vote in whatever law they want or they can hold starving kids hostage and forbid anybody from helping - I don't think this law in particular will make any of it worse.
Yea a Supreme Court ruling 110 years after a law passed only for them to reverse course 2 years later. Surely that’s based on the constitution and nothing else.
It seems strange (or maybe you are just young) that you think this. But both Democratic and Republican controlled Congresses have fought against excesses of their own President. The same is true for the Supreme Court in the past ruling against an administration of its own party.
There was an entire coalition of “Blue Dog Democrats” that came from red states as recently as 30 years ago.
Or did you really forget that even in Trumps first term that Republicans like McCain voted against Trump snd 10 voted to impeach him?
The party is MAGA and that party is pro-dictatorship. The behavior of republicans decades ago is irrelevant, and it's obvious that MAGA has learned lessons from Tumps first term.
Perhaps it's you who haven't been paying attention? I find older people have a lot of unfounded faith in these failing institutions, but if you try to keep up you'll see this isn't the same America you grew up in.
How many Republicans were purged from party leadership after they didn’t vote to shelter Trump from the consequences of attempted election theft? His first term you had Romney, McCain, Cheney, etc. in Congress and a lot of people in his administration like John Kelly who had various lines they wouldn’t cross.
Those people have all been purged. Any instinct you have for what Republicans will do which is older than 2021 is now actively misleading your judgement.
And 2021 was when the republicans decided to protect Trump after his half-assed failed coup attempt. He should have been locked up but the republicans decided to protect him.
I get (and partly agree with) the point you’re trying to make, but do consider that the fact that Trump was ever elected at all, let alone twice, is really not helping your argument.
> The party is MAGA and that party is pro-dictatorship.
remember the "sanctuary city" thing? That kind of blind obeisance to the tribe and defiance to the federal government smells awfully like what MAGA does today.But let me guess: it's okay when your tribe does it?
So this is a fascinating example of left vs right thinking.
To those on the left, why you do things matter. Breaking a law that is widely regarded as unjust is considered to be a moral action as long as it helps people.
The difference is being able to understand that "defying the federal government" is neither an absolute moral good nor is it an evil. Why you're doing it is the more important reason.
No city is “defying federal laws” by not cooperating with federal law enforcement to enforce federal laws. In fact, the Supremr Court has specifically said that enforcing immigration is the responsibility of the federal government.
That is not left or right issue. Why you do things matters to everyone.
What you're talking about, which the left can certainly be said to have been guilty of, is selective enforcement, where people who purport the right motivations (read: politics) are fine to do things that others are not.
Well, no. It's the right, for example, that constantly saw the "spectre of pedophiles" everywhere, including a random pizzerias basement, but when it comes to Epstein Files and his friends, many of who are in office, they suddenly don't care. Leftists, are, at least as far as i can tell, very consistent in not liking child molesters.
There's a huge amount of rightists against ALL abortion, until they suddenly need one. I don't know of any leftists that are ever like "I think abortions should be legal except for that one person who I don't like".
To follow your format, apparently the entire left is okay with releasing convicted sexual predators back into society, when legally they should have been deported.
Now, I don't think the left is actually in favor of that, but their policies cause this to happen.
There's plenty of folks on the right who want to see the "Epstein Files" released. There's also plenty of folks on the right who are against abortions and still end up having the kid even though it will cause difficulties for them. If you're unaware of this, you may want to broaden how you're exposed to opposing views a little more.
And there are plenty on the right who call themselves “evangelical Christians” but constantly defend a theee time married adulterer who pays off prostitutes and brags about grabbing women against their wills…
The President of the uS literally admitted to being a sexual predator on tape.
This doesn't fully capture it, because the right is clearly fine with lawlessness.
The distinction is the left cares about why, as you said, while the right cares about who. If the Right People are breaking the law (Trump, ICE, the youth pastor), it's okay.
If every accusation is an admission, GP admits it plainly: "it's okay when your tribe does it?"
I think another way to say this is that some people see laws as one layer in a stack of principles of varying degrees of generality, and believe that it makes sense to oppose a policy at more specific layer if it conflicts with a more basic principle at a deeper layer. Others see laws as just arbitrary dictates: you follow the law or you don't, and that's it, the law doesn't represent or instantiate any principles or ideals, it just is what it is.
I'm not sure the distinction here maps cleanly onto a left/right political axis though. People on the right also think that stuff like refusing to serve gay people or (at least in the past) standing in a schoolhouse door to block racial integration constitutes a form of legitimate resistance or protest against unjust laws. And there are certainly those on the right who believe that certain acts are okay (or more okay) when done by certain people (e.g., the homeless, oppressed racial/ethnic groups).
It does seem to just come down to different views of what principles are in that stack and what the priority ranking is. An obvious case is that many on the right would give certain tenets a central, foundational status on religious grounds, whereas it's increasingly the case on the left that religion isn't considered a legitimate basis for public policy. And in fact, the divide is even deeper, since many on the left consider that secular perspective itself central and foundational --- one side thinks certain things should be illegal because religion says so, while the other side considers it wrong for the law to even take account of what religion says.
In light of this what I find frustrating is that so many of those on the left (especially those holding political office) are unwilling to turn against those institutions themselves on the same grounds, namely that the institutions are subverting and impeding more basic ideals of freedom and justice. Democratic politicians shouldn't be arguing about this or that Supreme Court decision or what this or that Senator did or didn't do; they should be arguing that the Supreme Court and the US Senate are undemocratic institutions and should be swept away entirely, along with a good bit of other governmental cruft, in the furtherance of the root goals of democracy and equality.
The government partnering with businesses to restrict speech is actually a really bad thing. Thankfully we've pulled back from that now. Trump being corrupt and a garbage human doesn't negate that fact.
We have pulled back from that with Trump suing companies who have said things against him and then paying him off - see Paramount, Disney, Facebook, X, and Google.
Not to mention the new press corp policy that everything that press says about the Pentagon has to be approved by the government. It was a policy so abhorrent that Fox News even refused to sign.
He even threatened to take away ABCs broadcast license because someone criticized a dead racist podcaster.
Conservatives all over the US - especially in “the free state of Florida” - are firing public officials who criticize him.
(and every time I dare say that Kirk was a racist who said a good “patriot” should bail out the person who best Pelosi’s husband almost to death, I get flagged)
They just said they won’t be deputized to do something that’s the federal government’s responsibility any more than a city government is responsible for going after federal tax evaders.
From what I can tell, all Sanctuary City means is that locals will not cooperate with federal law enforcement unless it is legally required. Which seems right to me? States are independent entities with their own laws.
Exactly, sanctuary city/state laws are an application of 10th Amendment reserved powers of the states, and particularly the principle known as the “anti-commandeering doctrine”, hinted at in in dicta concerning hypotheticals regarding the Fugitive Slave Laws in cases shortly before the Civil War and first applied as a basis for judgement by the Supreme Court in New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144 (1992).
Even where the Constitution grants the federal government authority to make laws and to provide for their enforcement, it generally does not have the power to direct states to use their resources to enforce those laws. Sanctuary laws simply restrict the conditions in which state or local resources will be used to enforce certain federal laws.
sanctuary cities are there partly due to government trying to be (just a little bit :) ) lawless… if ruling party was obeying the laws there wouldn’t be any need for “sanctuary cities” so pick another example
your “tribe” in particular is *all about State rights” unless of course States do what the Tzar doesn’t like, right?!
Sanctuary city laws were largely driven by local law enforcement and community services agencies and the way fear of being targeted (personally, or family, or community members) by immigration authorities in the event of law enforcement or other government contact complicated enforcement of local enforcement of non-immigration laws and delivery of local services in communities with significant immigrant populations; mitigating that fear related to contact with local government and leaving enforcement of federal law to federal authorities improved the ability of local governments to serve their own priorities.
In my city, the origin of those laws was partially trying to push the national discourse for immigration reform but mostly due to wanting law enforcement, public health, and education to work better. Without legal paths, you inevitably get people who are joining relatives who are here legally, trying to appeal refugee decisions, etc. where those people are not causing problems but could be victims of crimes everyone wants to be reported and you don’t want perverse incentives like a minor who is a citizen being deprived of education or other support because they have a caretaker who is not a legal resident and doesn’t want to listen to themselves on official forms.
Sanctuary cities are there to shelter people who enter the country illegally. That's not the government being lawless.
They were not a reaction to recent ICE moves; you've no history, and have reversed cause and effect.
In the 1980s they were a great moral move originally by the southwestern churches, they've just expanded into electorate jerrymandering and virtue signalling.
So-called "sanctuary cities" have made the judgement that their law enforcement apparatus will be more effective if people who fear immigration authorities are willing to interface with it. They can't and don't stop enforcement actions by federal authorities (see Chicago, right now) - but they view active cooperation with those efforts as detrimental to other law enforcement activities. You might disagree with that assessment, but it is a straightforward exercise of the municipal power to allocate its own resources.
Claiming that they are "there to shelter people who enter the country illegally" is disingenuous at best. In reality, that is neither the goal nor the effect.
Municipal government does not have any power, obligation nor responsibility to enforce federal law.
Lowering themselves to be federal snitches, they reduce compliance with state and local laws which actually impact the public, and create a variety of other problems that hurt the community. Where does it end? Should states investigate purchases that may enable the violation of federal law? You realize that there’s almost no limit to what can be technically constructed to be a federal felony. Why is immigration so special?
To conservative thinkers, sitting behind their keyboards in the cushy suburbs, the concept of states’ rights ends with the oppression of minority voting and pillaging of the environment. Anyone, regardless of politics, who is comparing that legal concept to support of the lawlessness the regime is carrying out should really look within.
This is essentially the "strict scrutiny" standard, which governments have to achieve in order to violate your strongest constitutional rights (e.g. 1A). If you don't spell it out, then it might be delegated to a lower standard like "rational basis".
Seems like a lazy way to write a law. Basically just gives any governor whose party controls the supreme court a blank check. The law should qualify what public safety means
What drives me nuts is the way lawyers (of all stripes) keep praising "legal reasoning". None of it strikes me as even vaguely rigorous.
I'm not a lawyer so I could well be completely off base here. But if my perception is correct, I would much rather they admit that it's fundamentally up to someone's gut feeling. That's more honest than telling me that a bit of reasoning is airtight when it's not.
The true honesty is that judges may rule however they please, regardless of the reasoning. In many cases they require their intuition to guide them. In that sense, it is already up to their gut feeling.
At some point someone needs to weigh the facts, and they are given great discretion to do so. It is generally a good thing, because we have multiple layers of appeal to prevent obviously horrible outcomes.
So this legislation, like all legislation, provides guidance for the good faith judge to help weigh the facts. There is no guidance that will prevent a bad faith judge from ruling badly: You do not need a clause about public safety to get the ruling you want, but there is an argument that your ruling may perhaps be less scrutinized.
There’s a reason an attorney’s answer is always “it depends” :) No legislation is truly airtight from abuse.
A judge can rule however they please, but if it goes against legislated law or precedent, it can (and should) be appealed. Sure, if the highest appellate determines the law says something different than it really does, that’s that, but it’s not like most judges have carte blanche to determine the outcome of any legal entanglement on a whole.
You want discretion for judges so that they can respond to the problems of their era wisely rather than rigidly applying the ideas of another time without nuance
Unless those judges themselves have a fondness for an imaginary "great" time, and will apply their reasoning in a way that just happens to fit their ideology.
Law is either rigorous or it's not. When I'm told that the law is against me but gosh darn it the law is the law, I grow resentful of the "discretion" reserved for some but not others.
I know what you mean, but this is actually as strong as a protection in Montana (and probably elsewhere) gets. The burden is high. Montana's RTC bill had strong and competent libertarian input.
It appears to be a law that is simply adding restrictions to what the state can do (like the first amendment, the best sorts of laws IMO). It’s not granting people limited rights. Any existing rights people had under the fourth or first example, for example, are still in place, this just sounds like further restrictions on the state.
Yeah, so much that my feel is this law basically gives the state of Montana the right to confiscate computing equipment rather than the right to of the owner to have and use it. I understand that the intent of those involved in passing this was to protect civilians from the state, but such a broad and unspecific carve out just makes me think that a radical from either side could paint with quite a broad brush. “Who’s the terrorist today?” Kind of thing.
So this is probably just to attract datacenters with the promise there will be no recourse for the local environmental consequences and the horrible noise for neighbors.
That's .. unexpectedly broad? A strict interpretation of that would mean no gaming consoles and certainly no iPhones.
Their fundamental promise is a gatekeeper that restricts a lot of things that are not only legal but many customers want to do, including trivial things like writing their own software.
> Government actions that restrict the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources
If the government tried to block you from installing certain apps on your phone, that would fall under this law. Apple as a private company can still block whatever they want.
It does get a little interesting to imagine the interface here though: if I circumvent those restrictions, a strict reading would be that I'm allowed to because the mechanism by which Apple would stop me would be through the State.
Which in turn would put it in conflict with the DMCA.
That seems like a correct interpretation and I don't like seeing it spelled out like this in a law. It seems more like a CAN-SPAM act than a step in the right direction.
Good job, Montana. There was a trend in proposed and passed policies that were eating at rights to own machines. Examples: DMCA anti-circumvention (right to repair and jailbreak), export controls for high-end chips and cybersecurity tools, proposals to weaken/negate e2e encryption or delay security updates, AI rules that you can't train past X amount (shortsighted for future of personal compute capacity), restricting individuals from crypto mining, etc. So basically a trend of restricting software use or modification on general-purpose hardware. Once the tiniest relevant policy lands, it tends to expand from there. Hence what Montana did.
I think this is just to make it so that data centers and crypto mining facilities can be built and operated where owners want. Makes it so zoning and environmental regulations can’t stop you as easily.
People need to be more skeptical. This is not going to be used to uphold individual rights, and that's not the intention. This will be used not only to fast track data centers, but to support companies like Flock and push back against any attempts to regulate widespread surveillance.
Not sure, but to me the beauty of individual States who agree to Unite, is they get to keep all powers not specifically enumerated to the Federal Government, which creates 51 different A/B tests, to see which ones others would want to adopt or champion.
^^^ Ok, I just learned that concept from a recent tweet from Linus Torvalds.
SB212 is an AI bill. It also includes some guidelines around AI-controlled infrastructure. But, as the source explicitly discusses, the focus clearly seems to be around preventing AI regulation of private individuals (individuals also means corporations in the US).
> Nationally, the Right to Compute movement is gaining traction. Spearheaded by the grassroots group RightToCompute.ai, the campaign argues that computation — like speech and property — is a fundamental human right. “A computer is an extension of the human capacity to think,” the organization states.
> The MRTCA stands in stark contrast to recent regulatory efforts in other states, such as California, Virginia, and New York, where proposals to rein in AI technologies have either failed or been heavily revised. Montana’s approach leans toward empowering individual users rather than restricting access.
Sure, I completely believe this model legislation drafted by ALEC is being pushed by a "grassroots group" and not an industry lobbying organization. I wish reporters would be more careful with their language.
Maybe someone could have just came up with in a vacuum, but it looks like a response to other attempts to restrict AI by saying that models trained with more than X amount of compute resources have to follow tons of extra rules.
And, per the article, the group pushing this is AI and blockchain companies.
I guess this is like the second amendment, except for computers and GPUs? I'm with it -- but is this actually addressing a real threat?
Maybe I'm naive, and I am definitely uncertain about how all this AI craziness is going to break -- whether empowering everyone or advancing ultra corporate dystopia. But do we think our government is gearing up to take our laptops away?
The federalist wing of the drafters of the US Constitution didn't think a Bill of Rights was necessary because they believed that a government of only enumerated powers was enough.
So they didn't even think things like the First and Second Amendment were even necessary.
Fastfoward 250 years and now maybe the idea of a "right of the people to own and self host their own software, shall not be infringed" doesn't sound like such a bad idea.
"The law is antiquated and should be repealed. The framers could never have envisioned Our Supreme Lord AI and how irrelevant individual compute is today when writing that law."
There's an oft-repeated factoid that recognizable organized civilizations last about 10 generations or 250 years on average. And then there's Strauss–Howe generational theory. There's no magic formula or universal fate except it's risky to have lots of corrupt, stupid leaders, injustice, inequality, and/or bad circumstances that do everything to avoid rare, effective leadership with integrity and labor wealth growing faster than capital wealth. Late stage capitalism is omnicidal and suicidal because the greedy fools involved tend not to care about or plan for the future, including a cognitive dissonance to deny anticipation of domination by externalities like changes in youth public sentiment, demographic shifts, geopolitical balances, and climate change. The current richest people in the world are drug addicts, warlords, pedophiles, and those who erroneously believe public beaches belong to them personally.
Ha. You reach for the 2nd but fail to realize that of all the Amendments, there is more legal precedent torture to sidestep that prohibition than any other amendment save maybe the 4th, 5th, and 10th.
> they believed that a government of only enumerated powers was enough.
That's a perspective, but it seems to me that the Federalists didn't believe that government should be limited at all. The Constitution is a genie granting three wishes, and explaining beforehand that one of your wishes can be to wish for three more wishes.
Personally, it's always seemed obvious that the Federalists and their children have been the worst intellectual current in US government. They never had popular support at any time, and relied on the manipulation of power and position to accomplish personal goals (which is really their only ideology.) It began with a betrayal of the French Revolution, setting the US on a dirty path (and leaving the Revolution to be taken over by the insane.) The Bill of Rights is the only worthwhile part of the US Constitution; the rest of it is a bunch of slop meant to placate and protect local warlords and slaveholders. The Bill of Rights is the only part that acknowledges that individual people exist other than the preamble.
The Anti-Federalists were always right.
I agree with you that what we should be working on is specifying, codifying and expanding the Bill of Rights, rather than the courts continually trying to come up with new ways to subvert it. New ways that are never codified firmly, that always exist as vibes and penumbras. Rights shouldn't have anything to do with what a judge knows when he sees. If we want to abridge or expand the Bill of Rights, a new amendment should be written and passed; the Supreme Court is overloaded because 1) Congress has ceased to function and 2) the Senate is still an assembly of local warlords.
There is a big push to limit what kind of models can be OSS'd, which in turn means yes, a limit to what AI you are allowed to run.
The California laws the article references make OSS AI model makers liable for whatever developers & users do. That chills the enthusiasm for someone like Facebook or a university to release a better llama. So I'm curious if this law removes that liability..
You're not alone wondering about that. I would much rather have seen something along the lines of:
- right to internet connectivity (along with restrictions against some particularly offensive practices impinging access, including ads and popups when they are intrusive enough to substantially interfere*)
- right to utilize methods that protect personal privacy, like off-cloud computing (which I guess is partly covered here) and encrypted communications
- limit the extent to which online Terms of Service can bind you (i.e. deem unenforceable some of the worst clauses making their way around Silicon Valley, e.g. vague catchall indemnities that don't arise directly out of a user's breach of contract or illegal activity, incorporating third party terms of service by reference without explicitly stating what those terms are)
- identify activities that must be explicitly opt-in instead of opt-out (e.g. newly-introduced settings or features when they reduce a user's privacy, consents to sell user information / behavioral advertising / advertising remarketing / etc.)
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* Think about it like driving down a road. Imagine if you couldn't even get get down the street or across an intersection without bumper-car-ing into some giant "acknowledge", "agree", "go away" buttons, and having to swerve around billboards that randomly jump into your lane.
It's not about private citizens, for all they go on about “protecting rights”; this is transparently about preventing corporations from having their datacenters regulated.
US Executive Orders 14110 and 14141 did create fairly onerous regulatory regimes that could have constrained the dynamism of the marketplace. However, my understanding is that both have been rescinded, so they do not currently post a real threat.
> But do we think our government is gearing up to take our laptops away?
This law is not about them coming for your laptop. It's about some massive corporation is not allowed to cover all the land in data centers. Which one of you has more legal lobby power?
The gov doesn't need to come for your laptop if you are out of the job and can't even afford that laptop because everybody pays an LLM company instead
Think about this like you're openai not an average Joe:
> Government actions that restrict the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes
> I'm with it -- but is this actually addressing a real threat?
Yes, the threat of mandated computational devices performing mandated computations to do things in regular life. Currently, these come almost exclusively from private companies (at least in the free world), but I think it's a good precedent for a government to recognize the dangers here. To be really helpful, it needs to ban those private companies from doing what they're doing. But this is a good start.
You're thinking about your own situation - that's normal, but not enough: there are still loads of folks who don't have a computer but are expected to interface with their governments (municipal, county, state) using a computer, and have had to pay disproportionately more being in the least affluent and/or most vulnerable demographic.
It's not about losing access to laptops, it's about guaranteeing the right to even have access to the same tools that folks like us think everyone already has access to.
That seems like something different though. My understanding is that this is not about the government handing out free laptops, the same way the second amendment is not about the government handing out free guns. Rather, this is saying people have the right to own general purpose computers.
As far as government expecting you to interface with them using a computer, I loathe this trend. And of course it's infinitely worse if they require a specific proprietary platform like iOS or Android. But I don't think this is about that.
I'm totally with you as far as requiring a proprietary platform, but at some point we do just have to cut off obsolete methods of communication. We can't just keep supporting them forever.
Methods of communication like "face to face" or "mail" are not obsolete. Yes you can support them forever if that's literally your job as the government. And it should be.
I feel super happy for the 5 people and 20 cows who will benefit. (This is intended less a jab at Montana specifically and more at state and national politicians who only seem to have political gumption when it concerns the needs of less-populated states with particular demographics.)
I used to do presentations at educational technology conferences and many (30+)years ago I speculated that "in the future" computers that could create would be licensed. This was based on the observation that every significant past technology under user control was eventually licensed for permission to operate - radio, television, cars, the list is long.
radio/tv share the bands which are very narrow resource so licensing pretty much have to exist else there would be interference abound (imagine competing TV station just driving around with a jammer on competition
cars have that + the fact infrastructure is built by public money. Allowing anyone on anything with no training there literally costs lives
Or, copyright wise, to earn money in before digital world you kinda had to not have too much of copyright infringement - while artist today might get popular enough to subside on patreon/other form of digital tips, before it wouldn't be possible
This doesn't really disagree with the parent's thesis. You're just giving the long explanation for each event.
Any significant technological advancement necessarily uses some shared public resource which will drive people to regulate it. For AI folks are trying to get a lot of random things to stick: the power grid, water usage, public safety, disinformation.
Montana, which has the 4th largest population of millionaires despite being the 7th lowest populated US state, passes a law to prevent AI regulation. I don't think that it's a coincidence that many of the wealthy individuals that have flocked to Montana made their wealth in the tech industry
>Government actions that restrict the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes, which infringes on citizens' fundamental rights to property and free expression, must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest in public health or safety.
Exactly. I was hoping that this law would be the pushback to the overzealous prosecution of DeCSS, people who defeat DRM locks in order to lawfully back up the multimedia data that they already paid for, etc.
I also wonder what the impact of the law is on TPM chips on computers (restricting your ability to boot whatever OS you want), the locked-down iOS mobile app store, etc.
I admit I'm not knowledgeable about this law but as it's written it seems fairly meaningless to me, as it could be interpreted in many different ways, and the exclusion is a hole you could drive a metaphorical truck through.
Question nobody wants to talk about: will this prevent courts from issuing "no computer" restrictions on persons convicted or being investigated for crimes involving computers?
I have seen clients go for many years without cellphones because a judge cassually attached a "no computer" protective order. It is hard enough finding work as a convict or person under investigation, but 10x harder for those without cellphones and email.
It does look to be a nudge in that direction, but it's not a slam-dunk. From my non-lawyer reading of the text, it seems like it would depend on how well you can argue that a total ban is not "narrowly tailored."
These restrictions must be scrapped completely. Along with this barbaric "criminal record" they delegate big chunk of the population to an underclass, well, unless they are rich.
I disagree for most crimes at least. Most crimes are either going to be some form of illegal dishonesty (theft, fraud, etc.) or violence. I would hope the company I work for is able to screen individuals for such behaviors before hiring them. “Willing to lie/cheat/steal for gain” in particular is such a huge red flag that any company who hired someone and ignored such red flags could reasonably be sued for negligence whenever that employee inevitably commits another similar crime. There are examples of this in the news literally today.
"Most" crimes are posession and/or status crimes. Either you are caught with something illegal (drugs, guns etc) or you violate some sort of protective restriction (parole violations for guns/drugs/alcohol). That, and just generally being drunk or high, represent the bulk of crimes that land people in jail. No dishonoesty or violence is required.
And who says violence should haunt the person for the rest of their lives? It could be a single act in unfortunate circumstances. Person pays for it once and should be free to live the rest of their lives as normal unless they reoffend. Except some special circumstances companies should have no fucking business about private lives of their employees.
As long as laws are restricted to business services it shouldn't conflict. This is the right for citizens to use computation, business regulation is always a layer on top of that.
Interesting, has the EFF done a writeup/opinion on this legislation yet? I tend to trust them on breaking things down from the legalese and implications.
I’m all for this movement provided it’s actually focusing on the rights of individuals rather than empowering corporations to own and operate massive amounts of computing power unchecked. When I first read the article, I frankly assumed this was meant to limit regulation on AI. From what I’ve read in the law that doesn’t seem to explicitly be the case, but given the organizations involved, I fully expect to see more in that vein.
Yes. In written laws "citizen" generally means any person and/or organization subject to the laws of the state. It doesnt mean just living people who can vote.
Many a young law student has pontificated that as non-citizens, visiting tourists have no rights. There is no more loaded a word in US politics, and none more malleable under the law, as "citizen". It means something different in every context.
I mean, without this law, are the people not allowed to use computing? What exactly is the difference it brings? Does it force government to provide computing to all citizens?
Um. Montana resident here. The state also had quite strong anti-corruption (aka campaign finance) laws, since the copper baron days. But the US Supreme Court ruled that doesn't matter (because their corruption trumps any state anti-corruption law presumably). So don't expect this to amount to anything.
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Section 3. Right to compute
Government actions that restrict the ability to privately own or make use of computational resources for lawful purposes, which infringes on citizens' fundamental rights to property and free expression, must be limited to those demonstrably necessary and narrowly tailored to fulfill a compelling government interest in public health or safety.
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Section 4. Infrastructure controlled by artificial intelligence system -- shutdown.
(1) When critical infrastructure facilities are controlled in whole or in part by an artificial intelligence system, the deployer shall ensure the capability to disable the artificial intelligence system's control over the infrastructure and revert to human control within a reasonable amount of time.
(2) When enacting a full shutdown, the deployer shall consider, as appropriate, disruptions to critical infrastructure that may result from a shutdown.
(3) Deployers shall implement, annually review, and test a risk management policy that includes a fallback mechanism and a redundancy and mitigation plan to ensure the deployer can continue operations and maintain control of the critical infrastructure facility without the use of the artificial intelligence system.
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