February, 09 2023, 08:57am EDT
Confirm Gigi Sohn. 40 groups say a fully staffed FCC is essential for reproductive rights
Today, 40 reproductive rights, racial justice, and privacy advocacy groups released a letter calling on the Senate to immediately confirm Gigi Sohn to the fifth seat on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In the letter the groups say, “the FCC has a role to play protecting reproductive rights, but they can’t until Gigi Sohn is confirmed.”
The letter comes on the heels of right-wing outlets, like Breitbart, maliciously attacking Sohn’s sexuality and spreading baseless accusations like Sohn ‘opposing’ efforts to combat sexual trafficking. These attacks draw on dangerous homophobic falsehoods that portray LGBTQ+ people as predators and a threat to society.
Fed up with Senate Democrats’ inaction and silence, the organizations have released this letter to declare their support for Sohn. The letter highlights concerns that a deadlocked FCC is unable to “protect the safety and rights of people seeking, providing, and facilitating abortion care.”
“Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, unregulated data collection has reached a point of crisis. Our country’s lack of constitutional privacy protections now enables the mass-scale tracking and criminalization of those seeking abortion healthcare. Location data from cell phones can be used as evidence to prosecute those who travel out of state to get an abortion,” the letter reads. “This mass surveillance dragnet is not only harmful to the public at large and our democracy—it puts the lives of abortion patients and providers in danger. The FCC has clear authority over restricting these abusive data collection practices. But with Sohn still waiting to break the current deadlock, it cannot act.”
The letter goes on to exemplify the surveillance of people seeking abortions, “in 2016 an advertising company working with anti-abortion groups used “mobile geo-fencing” to pinpoint the location of women sitting in a Planned Parenthood waiting room, and sent them anti-choice ads in an attempt to dissuade them from getting an abortion.” Such tactics will become more commonplace now that states like Texas and Oklahoma have deputized people to surveil their loved ones and neighbors through so-called “vigilante” laws.
Abortion surveillance isn’t the only concern highlighted. The letter also mentions that “civil rights groups in particular have been warning the government for years that the blanket surveillance hidden in our everyday devices poses a substantial threat to privacy rights, personal safety, and the lives of Black and brown people.”
The groups end the letter by saying, “the Senate must take action to confirm Sohn and in doing so, it will be signaling that clear parameters are needed to protect consumers from being involuntarily recorded or tracked. Continued failure to appoint Sohn will result in unjust arrests and the proliferation of a surveillance state that jeopardizes the lives of many thousands of people.”
The letter is signed by Fight for the Future, Accountable Tech, Advocacy for Principled Action in Government, Aspiration, California LGBT Arts Alliance, Defending Rights & Dissent, Digital Defense Fund, Digital Equity Research Center, Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), FREE! Families Rally for Emancipation and Empowerment, GLAAD, Institute for Local Self-Reliance, JusticeLA Coalition, Kairos Action, Lucy Parsons Lab, Media Alliance, MediaJustice, MPower Change Action Fund, Muslim Advocates, Muslim Counterpublics Lab, National Center for Transgender Equality, Open Markets Institute, OpenMedia, Privacy Right Clearinghouse, Pro-Choice North Carolina, Pro-Choice Washington, Progressive Technology Project, Public Citizen, Reframe Health and Justice, Restore The Fourth, RootsAction.org, Secure Justice, Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, Tech for Good Asia, The Sex Workers Project of the Urban Justice Center, The Tech Oversight Project, UCLA Center on Race & Digital Justice, UltraViolet Action, WA People’s Privacy, and Women’s March. Click here to read the full letter.
Fight for the Future is a group of artists, engineers, activists, and technologists who have been behind the largest online protests in human history, channeling Internet outrage into political power to win public interest victories previously thought to be impossible. We fight for a future where technology liberates -- not oppresses -- us.
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Lonsdale then added that "our society needs balance," and said that "it's time to bring back masculine leadership to protect our most vulnerable."
Lonsdale's views on public hangings being necessary to restore "masculine leadership" drew swift criticism.
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"For months, Peter Thiel guru Curtis Yarvin has been squawking about the need for more severe measures to cement Trump's authoritarian rule," Durán explained. "Peter Thiel is ranting about the Antichrist in a global tour. And now Lonsdale—a Thiel protégé—is fantasizing about a future in which he will have the power to unleash state violence at mass scale."
Taulby Edmondson, an adjunct professor of history, religion, and culture at Virginia Tech, wrote in a post on Bluesky that the rhetoric Lonsdale uses to justify the return of public hangings has even darker intonations than calls for state-backed violence.
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Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll argued that Lonsdale's remarks were symbolic of a kind of performative masculinity that has infected US culture.
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Tech entrepreneur Anil Dash warned Lonsdale that his call for public hangings could have unintended consequences for members of the Silicon Valley elite.
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And Columbia Journalism School professor Bill Grueskin noted that Lonsdale has been a major backer of the University of Austin, an unaccredited liberal arts college that has been pitched as an alternative to left-wing university education with the goal of preparing "thoughtful and ethical innovators, builders, leaders, public servants and citizens through open inquiry and civil discourse."
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