Anti-TikTok RESTRICT Act could be turned against crypto and much else, think tank warns

The RESTRICT Act, a bipartisan measure introduced earlier this period into the United States Senate, could beryllium applied successful wide and unexpected ways, including to endanger crypto, should it go law, deliberation vessel Coin Center warned successful its blog. 

The bill, formally known arsenic the ‘‘Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology Act,’’ and informally arsenic the TikTok ban, has been introduced amid suspicions that the Chinese-owned TikTok app gathers idiosyncratic information connected behalf of the Chinese government.

The Act gives the Commerce Department caller powers that would “comprehensively code the ongoing menace posed by exertion from overseas adversaries” by allowing it to “review, prevent, and mitigate accusation communications and exertion transactions that airs undue hazard to our nationalist security.”

Under Title 15 of the Code of Federal Regulations, the overseas adversaries of the United States are China (including Hong Kong), Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Russia and the Maduro authorities successful Venezuela.

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According to Coin Center, the measure is conceptually akin to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act that authorizes the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) to artifact Americans from transacting with sanctioned parties. Coin Center pointed to OFAC’s sanctioning of Tornado Cash immutable astute contracts arsenic a misuse of that instrumentality to prohibition a people of exertion and expressed its interest that:

“The RESTRICT Act creates broad authority, with fewer checks, to prohibition conscionable astir thing linked to a ‘foreign adversary.’”

Not lone that, the RESTRICT Act would beryllium easier to use and harder to challenge. “Its imaginable implications for the cryptocurrency abstraction cannot beryllium ignored, Coin Center said.

If you deliberation the TikTok prohibition isn’t important, you’ve been missing the large representation - the Restrict Act (Bill S.686) volition alteration the net astatine the US presently knows it. It’s not conscionable astir TikTok - pic.twitter.com/hBjEHB0tRr

— Freckles (@FrecklesNFrce) March 27, 2023

The measure foresees penalties of imprisonment for 20 years and fines of $250,000. Legal experts say the enactment is vaguely worded and could beryllium used to restrict a scope of technologies, specified arsenic virtual backstage networks, oregon VPNs. Lead writer of the bill, Democrat Mark Warner, said:

“We request a comprehensive, risk-based attack that proactively tackles sources of perchance unsafe exertion earlier they summation a foothold successful America.”

Kirsten Gillibrand, coauthor with Cynthia Lummis of the Responsible Financial Innovation Act, is among the sponsors of the bill.

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