The White House rightly said it was “concerning” when Israel’s parliament laid the groundwork to shut down Al Jazeera within its borders in April. On Sunday, Israel made its move. The Foreign Press Association called it a “dark day for democracy”.
If the White House remains concerned, it has a strange way of showing it. Joe Biden and his administration have supported and encouraged recent censorial laws and court cases that virtually ensure that “dark days” are ahead at home as well.
The best-known example is the bill Biden signed into law last month to ban or force a sale of TikTok. Like Israel’s Al Jazeera ban, that law relies on unsubstantiated assertions of national security concerns, ignoring Justice Hugo Black’s prescient warning in the Pentagon papers case that “the word ‘security’ is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the first amendment”.
Another thing the two laws have in common is that it’s an open secret that those concerns are pretexts for silencing the growing backlash against the Israel-Gaza war. Senator Mitt Romney essentially acknowledged as much in a recent conversation with Antony Blinken, the secretary of state. He wasn’t the first to say the quiet part out loud.
The TikTok law, like the Al Jazeera one, isn’t limited to its initial target. It opens the door for future bans of other platforms – including foreign-controlled online news outlets – that the president deems a national security threat. But unlike the Israeli law, which requires the prime minister to obtain approval from the security cabinet or the government, the US law permits essentially unilateral executive action. It would be naive to think TikTok will be the end of it.
It doesn’t stop there. Biden also signed into law the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act (Risaa). That legislation allows the government to conscript any “service provider who has access to equipment that is being or may be used to transmit or store wire or electronic communications” to help it surveil foreign targets.
The administration ignored the consensus of civil liberties advocates as well as warnings from lawmakers like Senator Ron Wyden, who cautioned that Risaa could allow the government to order “an employee to insert a USB thumb drive into a server at an office they clean or guard at night”.
And that office could be a newsroom. Risaa is, after all, an amendment of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which had been abused to spy on journalists before Congress expanded it. It’s a safe bet foreign sources will hesitate to speak to US journalists if they think the newsroom may be bugged.
Another bill recently passed by the House of Representatives would give the secretary of the treasury unchecked power to revoke the tax exempt status of any non-profit – including non-profit news outlets – that the secretary deems a “terrorist-supporting organization”. Funding terror is already illegal, but the bill would dispense with the process needed to officially designate groups as terrorist organizations or prosecute them for material support of terrorism.
The legislation comes at a time when federal lawmakers and state attorneys general have insinuated that major news outlets like CNN, the Associated Press, the New York Times and Reuters support terrorism, for example by buying pictures from Palestinian freelancers or by merely being critical of Israel. That’s not to mention the pandering politicians claiming – based on similarly flimsy evidence – that student groups are terrorist supporters.
Some commentators have even called for the bill to be expanded to delist non-profits that meet the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. The definition, also recently adopted by the House, is widely criticized for conflating disparagement of Israel with antisemitism – a tactic also employed by proponents of the Al Jazeera ban.
That would give the US government far greater power to silence news outlets – at least increasingly common non-profit ones – than Benjamin Netanyahu could dream of. The administration has not yet said whether it will support the non-profit bill, but its embrace of other censorial power-grabs is not a good sign.
Nor are its anti-press prosecutions. The Florida journalist Tim Burke faces federal charges under the vague and frequently abused Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for “scouring” the internet to find important news that corporations wanted kept secret. Press freedom advocates worry that the charges, and the lack of transparency around them, could chill online newsgathering.
And then there’s the prosecution of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The administration frames it as a hacking case, despite that 17 of the 18 charges have nothing to do with hacking, and everything to do with routine newsgathering methods that investigative journalists employ every day. The Biden administration hasn’t denied that a precedent allowing imprisonment of publishers of government secrets could be abused – it’s only offered assurances that it won’t do so (and, once again, cites nebulous claims of “national security” harms).
Biden and many other Democrats constantly warn that Donald Trump would behave like an authoritarian in a potential second term. Yet they insist on continuing to hand him new powers to abuse, particularly against his favorite scapegoat: the press.
Anyone who doubts that Trump or future presidents will abuse those powers should view the weekend’s events in Israel as a cautionary tale.
Seth Stern is the director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation and a first amendment lawyer