Pencils and Pens will be Illegal

As a citizen of the United States of America and a technology worker I am of course interested in Dianne Feinstein and Richard Burr’s recent bill “Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016”, particularly since Dianne Feinstein is my Congresswoman. While I appreciate the efforts of our Government to protect citizens, I am concerned what affect this bill will have on the US. The first of my fears is on someone who might be overlooked in the debate: the makers of pencils and pens. Here is the definition of who is covered:

The term “covered entity” means any device manufacturer, a software manufacturer, and electronic communication service, a remote computing service, a provider of wire or electronic communications service, a provider of a remote computer service, or any person who provides a product or method to facilitate a communications or the processing or storage of data.

As I read it “any person who provides a product or method to facilitate a communications or the processing or storage of data” would apply to the manufacturer of the pencil and pen. A pencil facilitates the storage of data. It also applies to the manufacturer of paper as that facilitates storage of data. And, oh my goodness, this also applies to the manufacturer of the sticky note. Hmmmm. If I think about this a little more I am sure we can find much more in scope. How about chalk boards, chalk makers, white board … yes. And spray paint manufacturers? Graffiti is communications, so spray paint makers are a covered entity.

This means all these people have to upon court order find a way to provide back to the government any and all data that has been written via these pens, pencils, chalk, spray paint in an intelligent format if it “has been made unintelligible by a feature, product, or service owned, controlled, created, or provided, by the covered entity.” Since my handwriting is by many accounts unintelligible, and the pencil/pen/chalk/spray paint I use to write with now must be made intelligible by the pencil/pen/chalk/spray paint manufacturer. Ouch! How are they going to re-engineer the pencil to accommodate this? Guess we will all be using Digital Pens after this bill passes, and those digital pens will all have to be internet connected so they can return all written data to the device manufacturer.

And how much farther does this go? What else is covered besides these writing devices?

It does not take long to see that every individual in the United Stages is covered. How? DNA! “any person who provides a product or method to facilitate a communications or the processing or storage of data”. DNA contains data. My body provides a method to communication, process and store data in DNA. And that DNA data is encoded. But this document says that I must provide my DNA data in intelligible format if that data has “been made unintelligible by a feature, product, or service owned, controlled, create, or provided, by the covered entity” So if ordered by the court I have to unencode my DNA and provide it to the government?

While I appreciate the efforts of our Government to protect my safety, I don’t think this bill meets its own criteria for legality. This bill says that the “laws of the United States provide for the safety, security, and civil liberties of all United Statues persons” Requiring me to provide my DNA to the government is not consistent with my civil liberties. Also requiring the pencil manufacturer to provide the contents of my journal to the Government is not consistent with my civil liberties.

Sorry Feinstein and Burr I don’t think this bill will fly.