The Department of Justice has
announced they will be changing the Foreign Agents Registration Act(FARA) soon.
The Department is considering changes to key regulations, including those relating to the scope of agency; the commercial exemption; and exemptions for persons qualified to practice law as well as for those engaged only in religious, scholastic or scientific pursuits. The Department is also considering changes that would modernize its regulations relating to labeling informational materials in light of the significant technological changes that have occurred since the regulations were last amended more than a decade ago. Modernization of FARA’s implementing regulations will further facilitate the Department’s focus on FARA enforcement to ensure transparency in U.S. democratic processes.
To explain what FARA is, it is essentially a law from Word War 2 that was used to combat propaganda from the Nazis and Soviets by requiring them to publicly disclose everything about themselves to the U.S government by hence registering as a foreign agent. The more modern use of the law today is in the area of foreign lobbying. There's been amendments and court cases that narrowed the definition of what it means to be acting in the interest of a foreign power as well as removing the mention of "propaganda" from the law entirely but I will attempt to give my best example of a scenario that would violate the law today.
Say you are sitting on your couch and think to yourself that the Chinese are getting a bad rap and the United States should have a day dedicated to celebrating Chinese culture, so you begin attempting to lobby congress to establish a national Chinese recognition day. This scenario while some would call retarded, is perfectly legal and protected speech.
However, if Xi Jinping calls you up and tells you to do this, you are now acting in the interest of a foreign power and you must register with the government under FARA. If you are interested in the specifics,
here is a law firm that practices in FARA specifically.
This announcement is some what notable as the law was dead in the water, other than being tacked on to
charges against spies and
prosecuting the mentally ill, from 1966 until 2016 when the Russians decided to
start poking around in voting machines. The proceeding investigations saw an unprecedented use of the law, but this post isn't concerning politicians. The interesting event that occurred was the
indictment against the
Internet Research Agency on February 16th 2018. The Internet Research Agency, despite having no presence in the United States, was charged with violating FARA for their disinformation campaigns on social media. The
following article goes into depths on the subject I'm certainly unable to provide and I recommend reading it, however the conclusion is that the government, under the current law, has no way to enforce it against entities not in the United States and the governments theory is based on the courts interpretation of where and when a law is violated in the context of the internet that is normally applied to hacking laws.
So where does this lead us to? My theory on the upcoming changes is that the Department of Justice is going to craft a social media disinformation law out of FARA. We have seen news media organizations such as RT America and Xinhua News compelled into registration and their Youtube videos prominently display a notice on their source of funds. Although this change was
Google's choice rather than a requirement by the law,
After pressure by the government occurring the same month as the Internet Research Agency Indictment. This war on disinformation from foreign governments by the United States was likely furthered more than ever after the National Intelligence Council report on
Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections which declared most if not all activity was disinformation campaigns in comparison to intrusion attempts from the 2016 election.
Regardless of the opinion on the basics of the law itself and foreign influence, It's highly disturbing to see a law from 1938 be potentially used for what information the government finds to be disinformation on the internet. It's also odd as the point of registration was for the purposes of transparency and to not censor information, yet it seems the government will compel and the companies will in turn, censor. Is it doomsday? no but it may be the beginning of something horrible.
Then again maybe I'm just insane.
This is the first time I've done a kind of write up, I'd appreciate feed back on how schizo I am for future posts.