The GRANITE Act, H.R. 10174, is a foreign censorship shield bill. It has a companion in the Senate, s. 5478.
The GRANITE Act is designed to fix, among other things, problems like Russia having its unconstitutional censorship orders enforced against American citizens on American soil:
Incidentally, in a House Judiciary Committee hearing on foreign censorship that took place last year, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the Committee, asked his Republican colleagues why the Committee was focused on EU and UK censorship instead of censorship in Russia. He said:
I imagine that in a hearing about threats to freedom of speech abroad, we might hear from a Russian dissident about Putin’s massive violations of political freedom…
There was not a substantive answer from his Republican colleagues to that question at the time.
With the case of the Human Rights Foundation, we now have that answer, and it reveals that the “foreign censorship threat” the Committee was examining is not merely a conversation about Russian censorship of Russians – it is about Russian censorship of Americans.
In hindsight, the delay between Rep. Raskin’s question and the receipt of an answer to it may have been due simply to the fact that not enough time had elapsed for America to learn about a concrete, public example of Russians attempting direct extraterritorial censorship against an American target. This should not come as a surprise: as we know from the example of the UK’s censorship program, where of 197 targets, only 4 U.S. companies refused, most American targets of foreign censorship orders quietly comply. Most censorship happens in secret, hidden away from public view, as intended.
The Human Rights Foundation, however, did not comply. It refused the order. Unfortunately, despite HRF’s refusal, it didn’t occur to HRF’s web host, WP Engine, that it could or should refuse the order.
The experience with the UK’s censorship orders shows that roughly 98% of American targets fold to a censorship order as soon as it is received. Foreign states routinely threaten to enforce their orders here; hundreds of separate orders now enter the country every year, including from the UK, Australia, Brazil, and, now, Russia too. Their targets are hundreds of American websites used by hundreds of millions of American citizens.
These orders brazenly assert in writing that foreign law overrides the First Amendment, and foreign censorship agencies regularly claim that they will punish any disobedience through formal action on American territory, including through debt collection agencies and even by deputizing American police.
Realistic or not, these threats work, and the effect of these orders is to severely restrict freedom of expression on America’s Internet. Russia’s threats certainly worked on WP Engine, which folded like a cheap suit, and implemented the Kremlin’s order in under 24 hours. The result is that, in what as far as I can tell is the first publicly known instance where Russia attempted to censor Americans in America for our protected political speech, Russia succeeded.
Here are the two tweets that sum this up, as promised:
From the article:
On Sept. 3, WP Engine, a web hosting company based in Austin, Texas, informed HRF that it had received a demand letter from Roskomnadzor, claiming that the Tyranny Tracker ‘violates the national laws of Russia.’ WP Engine informed HRF that it would geo-block the site from Russia within 24 hours ‘on [HRF’s] behalf’ unless HRF implemented the block. HRF refused and sent a letter to WP Engine, asking the company to reconsider its decision to follow Russia’s unlawful request. By late afternoon the same day, less than 24 hours after WP Engine’s notice was received, HRF’s internal investigation showed that the Tyranny Tracker website was already inaccessible from Russian IP addresses.
Roskomnadzor’s demand, as shared by WP Engine, is a brief notice that does not cite any law, article, statute, or regulation that the Tyranny Tracker allegedly violates, and does not identify any specific content on the site that it considers unlawful. It simply directs the ‘hosting provider’ to tell the site owner to ‘immediately delete the information disseminated in violation of the law’ and, failing that, to ‘restrict access to the specified information resource’ after 24 hours.
American Internet platforms don’t take orders from Vladimir Putin.
HRF and WP Engine have a First Amendment right, in and from the United States, to make available over the Internet whatever protected expression they want, to anyone they want, anywhere on the planet.
The UK, EU, Australia, the Russian Federation… everyone offshore wants a piece of the First Amendment. This is one of hundreds of unconstitutional orders, from all over the globe, that have been transmitted into the United States in the last 18 months.
The First Amendment belongs to Americans. No foreign country has the right to reach into the United States and alter the configurations of American web servers on American soil to give effect to a censorship order, as Russia has done here.
In sending these orders directly to American citizens without first going through diplomatic channels, Russia brazenly ignores both U.S. and international law, specifically the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty between the United States and the Russian Federation, which is meant to govern any legal request from Russia for assistance in enforcing Russian criminal law in the United States.
Congress shouldn’t allow Americans to be threatened in this way.
The GRANITE Act is designed to give American Internet platforms the rights and the remedies they need to effectively resist these foreign orders: (a) a categorical shield for First Amendment-protected conduct from any foreign censorship law; and (b) a right to sue a foreign sovereign and compel it to appear in an American court to obtain a declaration, from a U.S. court, that the order is invalid.
This is not a partisan bill. The GRANITE Act is necessary to protect the First Amendment online, and the need for it is urgent.
Congress should pass it, without delay.