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Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40444795
"Folks over at Bluesky dug into the specific language of the reauthorization bill and found it was inserted by Republican Rep. Bruce Westerman of Arkansas."
It's always funny (both haha and sad) to me which sacrificial lamb the parties convince to push something like this forward. It signals so much about their intent. If they wanted lots of coverage, they would pick a much more recognized person within the party as a champion to push something forward. For stuff they want to sneak in, they pick someone much more obscure. This protects the more recognized from catching any blow back. This poor guy is probably barely known in his home state, so he's probably using it as a "happy just to be mentioned" type of coverage.
Rep. Westerman is fairly senior.
He's the Chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources - the Committee that gives authorization for mining, drilling, and land use.
He is also holding Tom Cotton's former House Seat, a former Majority leader of the Arkansas State House (the first Republican one in Arkansas since the 19th century), and will most likely replace Senator Boozman when he retires.
Aka, he's upper level in the hierarchy of the House GOP.
Most likely, Walmart leadership (Bentonville is in Westerman's constituency) lobbied for this as private flight data is often used in competitive intel.
> Most likely, Walmart leadership (Bentonville is in Westerman's constituency) lobbied for this as private flight data is often used in competitive intel.
Bentonville is in the 3rd, which is Steve Womack's district.
Mike Johnson is the Speaker of the House, but before the chaos that put him in that spot, who here would have known his name and/or been able to pick him out of a line up. I bet there are people in his home state that wouldn't be able to do that too. Even if they are a "senior" member, which I'm only familiar with being used to reference senators, I know that I don't know every single representative from my state. There's too many of them, and the ones I do know that aren't my rep are probably because of some asshattery they were in the news from doing. It's not like senators where there's only two of them.
As I understand it House Members just like the UK's MPs win single member elections, so Bruce is literally the guy some people in Arkansas picked, he's not just somebody on a list picked by the Republican Party in DC.
Thus it's a failure of collective democratic responsibility if you're not picking the people you actually want. My friends lived in Vauxhall when Kate Hoey was its MP, which again makes no sense. Kate is pro-gun, anti-gay, anti-Europe even on a good day her interests don't align well with those of Vauxhall voters. So the way Kate was winning those elections is that she's the Labour candidate (was, she left of course because she's a terrible fit) and those voters are voting for the party symbol not the candidate. This is how your representative democracy rots from the inside.
I actually had this dilemma when I last voted.
I was deciding on who to vote for. I liked through all the political parties and picked one.
I liked the overall party platform. I liked the first and second candidate in my district, but the third candidate's description on the party website read like a caricature of an online radical feminist. (She seemed so out of place for the party because she had recently switched parties.)
I debated whether I should even vote for the party, because I did not want her to get elected. After looking at some previous results and electoral math I realized that it's very unlikely that she could get elected.
I think maybe you're misinterpreting what I've stated. I'm only saying that the national party is picking from the list of current congress critters to propose trial balloons. However, the national party will help someone get elected if they feel it is a race that needs the extra attention.
Sounds like a stalking horse?
>It's always funny (both haha and sad) to me which sacrificial lamb the parties convince to push something like this forward.
Driving up to their home with a dump truck full of money tends to get the desired results.
I'm not sure I buy the comparison to Internet privacy. The comparison to cell phone tracking elsewhere in the comments is better.
It's bad enough that the government has relatively trivial access to cellphone tracking data, but if it was publicly available, that would be pretty disastrous on a lot of fronts.
Yes, this is a law that only protects rich people, but it's also a problem that only affects rich people, and I'm pretty comfortable saying that it is a problem.
As long as not too much money or effort is being diverted to this (and therefore away from the hundreds of more important problems), I just really can't get that worked up over it.
It's fairly common in the US that people of public interest have fewer privacy protections than your average citizen (the public figure doctrine).
I - and many others - believe that these public figures should be held accountable for their actions due to their outsized influence on society. Holding someone accountable for their actions requires transparency, something this law removes.
> I'm pretty comfortable saying that it is a problem.
On what evidence?
Fly commercial. Problem solved.
I’d like to learn more about what the problem is exactly
I'm surprised to see agreement, even just in principle, with this amendment.
If you think this is OK, are you just against ADS-B altogether?
I have serious qualms about someone flying a 23,500lb hunk of metal, laden with volatile and explosive fuel, over my community without needing to publicly report telemetry and flight plan details in plaintext.
First it was the cops, and now rich people.
Allowing certain privileged groups to keep this information between them and the state seems likely to lead to outcomes where they can behave poorly and then be able to lie or "get their story straight" before being honest with the public. Which makes incidents more likely altogether.
I think that accountability in aviation is very healthy for a technologically advanced society, and these moves seem like a step backward.
What are your thoughts on the 80,000lb semi trucks, laden with (admittedly less) volatile and explosive fuel, driving through your community without needing to publicly report telemetry and routing details?
>I have serious qualms about someone flying a 23,500lb hunk of metal, laden with volatile and explosive fuel, over my community without needing to publicly report telemetry and flight plan details in plaintext.
But none of that requires a fixed identifier linked to the publicly-accessible airframe registry, right?
Lol, once upon a time Dick Cheney used to disappear from travel logs by doing the opposite: traveling first class commercial like a "normal" person. He didn't even claim the costs as expenses so as to avoid any publicly-accessible records of his travel. A relative of mine ran into him, and his security detail, on a small aircraft flying out of Hartford.
So we're saying that the reason jets should be able to be tracked by anyone, in real time, is so we can enable targeted moral shaming? Everyone, regardless of wealth or mode of transportation should have the right to not be publicly real-time tracked. Let's find more constructive ways to solve our larger scale societal problems than to fall back on mob rule.
I think the outrage stems from wealthy people having their issue fixed by congress in a timely fashion, when regular people feel like they cannot catch a break.
Housing, Inflation, Healthcare, are all a mess but this problem gets fixed right away.
> Everyone, regardless of wealth or mode of transportation should have the right to not be publicly real-time tracked.
I think that's the point. There are data brokers selling information right now on everyone's whereabouts, travel patterns, shopping behavior, and many other data points. This happens essentially any time you interact with electronics that can send and receive data.
Going about data privacy legislation in this way is ridiculous. It's like if you had a clogged toilet in your house, you just continued to let it flood because you can build a ramp over the water to get to your private jet and take a dump in that toilet instead.
> The U.S. yet yet to pass even a basic internet-era privacy law
Nitpick, but even the first sentence in the article is nonsense. Doesn’t anyone proofread anymore? Let alone read even the first sentence before publishing?
> Doesn’t anyone proofread anymore?
If the headline got you to click than the article has completed it's job. The other 500 words are just to make you not feel scammed.
At least that way you know it's not written by an LLM...
Agreed, but then again, you see a stupid sentence like this later in the article:
> Jack Sweeney, the jet tracking student who made Elon Musk cry like a baby
– and realize, wait, I'm not really sure this is any kind of legitimate news source.
I'll wait for a more accurate article without all the editorializing.
Can you name one federal law passed in the last 20 years regarding online privacy? I work in this space and genuinely cannot think of one, but would glad to be corrected.
Edit: misunderstood the comment I was replying to, haven't had coffee yet
You're saying you've never ever made a typo in anything you've published?
It's almost universally agreed that you can proof read all you want, but has soon as you hit publish you'll spot at least one mistake.
which federal privacy law were you thinking of?
The Original Posting here linked to a TechDirt analysis piece; that piece is meaningfully different from the current PopSci link.
The entirety of the PoPSci article begins and ends with the Protect-Jet-Owners'-Privacy law. The TechDirt article uses that law to refresh public attention about US Gov's disinterest in protecting the privacy of all Americans - which is a massively larger and much more important issue.
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/05/29/the-u-s-finally-passes-a...
When you're rich, you can skirt laws by paying cops, courts and lawyers as cost of business.
When you're super rich, you have lunch with politicians and they change the laws for you.
I think if all your data broker data was logged and tracked on twitter it would be a congressional priority.
Wealthy people use youtube and tiktok too.
Privacy guys win another battle. Good for them, I suppose. Bit by bit, public information is protected.
Poor jet owners too.
I mean a) this is the right thing to do. b) it’s pathetic that this can be accomplished yet cell location tracking and and ALPRS data has not been addressed
The objection should really be not that this was passed--and, yes, the people involved could probably layer on some LLCs if they wanted to obfuscate as I assume corporations tend to. But that there is really a ton of personal data available to the obsessive, especially if they're willing to spend a few dollars.
> it’s pathetic
I think the word you're looking for is "corrupt". The interests of people who can afford private jets are obviously taking precedence over the interests of the rest of us.
This is a toxic post by someone peeved about not being to stalk people of affluence. There are other ways to address emissions attributed to private jets, such as taxes, while respecting people's privacy.
Some of those people of affluence hold opinions like this:
> “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
Moreover the companies many of them operate are more than happy to stalk people for ad dollars. So... I'm not sure why we're going out of our way to protect them specifically.
I've always considered the trade-off to be more straightforward: If you're going to fly a multi-ton vehicle over my head without me having the right to tell you to get the hell out of the property I own ("from hell to sky" is the traditional parcel of land owned in the English common law system), then at the very least I should have the right to know who you are.
The government took our property rights to build airspace as a common highway, and we ought to get something out of further taking.
the carbon shaming of celebrities seems to tap into a sort of “sneer at the rich” morality that is very attractive to the masses and thus is probably effective at motivating people to pass things like carbon taxes
"People of affluence" what does this mean?
Considering tech billionaires got rich by destroying our privacy, why do only they deserve a law protecting their privacy?
Great! Maybe this will cause a decrease in the total number of people getting harassed by jerks on the internet.
Interesting that people seem to not like your comment. Isn't harassment and doxxing against the rules around here? What's the principle that disagrees with this statement that doesn't also apply to everything else on site?
> The U.S. yet yet to pass even a basic internet-era privacy law — or regulate data brokers. And while there’s a lot of misdirection and pretense to the contrary, the primary reason is (1) because the U.S. government is too corrupt; and (2) because the U.S. government really enjoys being able to purchase massive amounts of sensitive citizen data from data brokers without having to get a pesky warrant.
No, this is false. There exists, today, a bipartisan proposal for a basic Internet-era privacy law called the American Privacy Rights Act. As Techdirt has covered in the past, advocacy groups like the EFF don't think it should be passed as is, but it's advancing along in the process and may well end up being passed after some amendments.
(Of course, while this information is critical to anyone who cares about internet privacy in the US, it would have made the article less effective as ragebait. Which is why the author didn't include it.)
https://energycommerce.house.gov/posts/committee-chairs-rodg...
https://www.techdirt.com/2024/04/23/any-privacy-law-is-going...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/04/americans-deserve-more...
A "law" has been finalized, passed by both halves of Congress, and ratified. A "bill" is an incomplete proposal at any stage of this process. There is a catchy song [1] to help everyone remember this.
A bill is the same as a pull request that has not yet been merged.
So the statement, "The U.S. [has] yet to pass even a basic internet-era privacy law..." is correct.
In other words: The American Privacy Rights Act is just a bill, yes it's only a bill, and it's sitting there on Capitol Hill...