 The Restrict Act is supposed to ban TikTok, but it actually does much more than that. And TikTok, in the great tradition of laws that are obviously tailored to one thing, but have much broader application, it doesn't actually mention TikTok. What does the Restrict Act do and what should we be worried about? Yeah, so it's an extremely broad law. And there could be a good reason to not mention TikTok, to be just transparently clear, a law that specifically calls out a corporation and finds them guilty of a crime, or a person for that matter, would be a Bill of Attainer, unconstitutional under our American system for other reasons. Which that was Senator Holley's bill, by the way, and Rand Paul specifically called him out for that because Holley's bill was targeting TikTok and it's illegal. Exactly. So we don't have that infirmity with the Restrict Act, but we have a different one, and in many ways a more dangerous one, because rather than zeroing in on a specific corporation or company, TikTok, this bill is giving basically unrestricted powers to the Secretary of Commerce to identify information technologies and transactions or holdings, financial holdings related to those information technologies, and simply say that Americans are not allowed to make those transactions or have those holdings. And there's very little process for how they make those determinations, other than the fact that the information technology is advantageous to a foreign adversary. I guess in this case, we're assuming it's China, but it could be anyone. And there's no limitations, or there's very few limitations with regard to who can challenge or rather there are limitations as to who can challenge designations once they're made by the Secretary of Commerce. And we can get more into that. It's particularly relevant to us at Coin Center where we're focused on cryptocurrency technologies because we're actually fighting some of these sorts of battles with respect to an existing statute for sanctioning or blocking transactions, the International Economic Emergency Powers Act and the OFAC regime that comes from that act of Congress. So one thing we've done as we look at the restrict act is compare and contrast. Does this create new powers? Are we going to be fighting Treasury's OFAC designations as well as the Secretary of Commerce's restrict act designations? And would it be more or less difficult to challenge Secretary of Commerce's designations under restrict than it has been thus far for us to challenge OFAC designations when they go beyond the actual statutory authority? Yeah, and let's get to that because the restrict act is really kind of applying an existing law against various kinds of, that effect crypto and other things to media. But I just wanna say, to me, part of what strikes me as insane about this, it's a two-fold process. First, you have Congress actually seeding so much power to the executive branch. This is a long running problem, I think within a reason-style libertarian analysis of government, sometime over the past 50 years and maybe since Andrew Jackson, Congress has just stopped actually doing what it's supposed to be doing and it's just offloading, it's outsourcing what it's supposed to be doing to fucking Congress, which is nuts to begin with. And then, so there's that problem and then it's like the Secretary of Commerce, there are probably 80% of the people in Congress could not name who the Commerce Secretary is and you give them massive broad powers. I mean, the Commerce Secretary is to cabinet offices what Cornell is to the Ivy League. It's a secondary tertiary seller-dweller kind of cabinet level. So it just seems nuts that this is what's in front of us. I mean, to be fair, there's some members of Congress who aren't even aware that their own name is a cosponsor to the bill. Yeah, no, I mean, but this gets to this, right? Where it's like, Congress no longer, I mean, they don't declare wars, they don't do anything. And like, how do you battle that when you're talking about the Restrict Act and earlier existing laws that end up giving massive amounts of power to the administrative state, essentially? How do you start clawing back agency? It's really hard because as you said, this has been going on for a long time, maybe since Andrew Jackson, certainly since the New Deal and Roosevelt's expansion of the executive powers therein. And there's this public-facing rationale for that that a lot of people have bought or sort of bought into for a long time now. It goes all the way back to Max Weber, the sociologist, who said that as the subject of law, the things that law needs to regulate become more complex and technological. And he was probably thinking about, I don't know, steam engines and things like that, but God knows it's gotten more complex, that it will be inevitable that sort of citizen-run legislatures will have to give up their authority to a more technocratic bureaucratic class. And so a lot of people, I think that argument, if they're not just sort of casually observers of the political process makes sense, but there's something extremely insidious in that argument. It's that we need to give up on elected representatives being capable of educating themselves sufficiently to actually control the things that matter most in society, like our information technologies and our engineering technologies. And what you end up with then is where we are today, where that atrophy has gotten so profound that Congress really just sort of writes blank checks all the time. They say, oh, TikTok's a problem. Here's a blank check to the Secretary of Commerce to make sure that they can ban anything that they need to in their wisdom and their technical expertise about the internet that might be a threat to American interests. And that is just an abdignation of Congress's duty under the Constitution, which vests the sole legislative power in Congress, not in the executive. The bright spot here, and I don't need to tell you, Nick, or you, Zach, what this is, is that our courts have actually wised up to this and some of our justices, like Neil Gorsuch especially, are very keen to return that separation of powers with important cases, dealing with the major powers doctrine and the non-delegation doctrine of the Constitution. So that's how you challenge this. You challenge it in court. Now, hopefully we don't have to bring a non-delegation challenge to the Restrict Act because hopefully it never passes into law. But that's all a lot of hopefullys, right? Yeah. I wanna look at some of the text here just to underline or highlight exactly how big of a blank check this is to the executive branch, the Commerce Secretary in particular. The law says the Secretary is authorized to and shall take action to identify, deter, disrupt, prevent, prohibit, investigate, or otherwise mitigate all of these threats that the Secretary determines poses an undue or unacceptable risk of sabotage or subversion that can include catastrophic effects on the security or resilience of the critical infrastructure or digital economy of the United States, which we should talk about in a second here and otherwise poses an undue or unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States. And then this one is the one that blew my mind. If the Secretary in his sole an unreviewable discretion determines that such a referral would be in the interest of national security. So they're not missing any words as to, you know, the kind of sole unreviewable authority of this one executive appointed official to affect a broad swath, undefinable swath of the economy. Yeah. My favorite in that is otherwise mitigate. So Congress is supposed to tell the agencies in the executive branch, you know, what the problem is and ideally with some specificity like regulation of the airwaves, i.e. we can't have interference between different parts of the broadband spectrum. And then ideally supposed to direct them to how they're supposed to, you know, carefully wield their powers to enforce Congress's will. Otherwise mitigate is a completely unbridled phrase. I mean, if you bomb a data center, you might otherwise mitigate certain nasty effects coming out of that data center. Surely that is not within the intended powers that Congress seems to be giving here. But if you just look at the plain language of the word, otherwise mitigate includes all kinds of things that would be patently a violation of human rights or liberty or the rule of law. Hey, thanks for watching that excerpt from our live conversation with Peter van Valkenburg of Coin Center about the restrict act and its threats not only to social media but to digital privacy. You can watch another clip from that conversation here or the full conversation here.