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After facing several regulatory obstacles, Elon Musk's Starlink is on the brink of entering the Indian market, a move that could reshape the country's digital landscape.

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Senate Urges Domain Registrars to Combat Russian Election Interference

By circleid.com
Published On :: 2024-10-24T12:12:00-07:00

The United States Senate Intelligence Committee Chair, Mark Warner, has called on several domain name registrars, including Namecheap, GoDaddy, and Cloudflare, to address the misuse of their services by Russian actors attempting to influence the 2024 U.S. presidential election.

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Congress moves toward stepped-up registration for a military draft

By hasbrouck.org
Published On :: 2024-06-14T18:46:38-08:00

[Excerpt from the summary released by the Senate Armed Services Committee of the version of the NDAA for FY 2025 approved by the SASC and to be voted on by the full Senate.]

A proposal to expand registration for a possible military draft to young women as well as young men is moving forward again this year in Congress, along with a seductively simple-seeming but in practice unfeasible proposal to switch from the current system in which young men are required to register with the Selective Service System (SSS) to a system in which the SSS tries to identify and locate everyone eligible for a future draft and automatically register them based on other existing Federal databases from the Social Security Administration, IRS, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, etc.

Today both the U.S. Senate Armed Service Committee and the full U.S. House of Representatives approved different proposals to expand and/or make it harder to avoid the requirement for men ages 18-26 to register with the Selective Service System for a possible military draft.

The proposals for changes to Selective Service registration were approved during consideration of the Senate and House versions of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2025, a "must-pass" annual bill that typically runs to more than a thousand pages.

The Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) approved a version of the NDAA that would expand Selective Service registration to include young women as well as young men. This version of the NDAA will now go to the floor as the starting point for consideration and approval by the full Senate.

Also today the full House of Representatives approved a different version of the NDAA that would make Selective Service registration automatic while keeping it for men only.

A House amendment proposed by Rep. Warren Davidson (R-OH), a West Point graduate and Army veteran, which would have replaced the provision to make draft registration automatic with a provision to repeal the Military Selective Service Act, was not "made in order" by the Rules Committee to be considered or voted on by the full House. There was no separate House floor vote on the proposed change to Selective Service registration, only a single vote on the entirety of the NDAA as a package.

The SASC markup was conducted in closed session, and only a summary of highlights of the version adopted by the SASC was released. It's not clear whether the SASC version also includes the provision in the House version of the NDAA to try to make Selective Service registration 'automatic' or only the provision to expand the registration requirement (with which compliance is currently low) to young women as well as young men. A spokesperson for the SASC told The Hill today that the full text of the Senate version of the NDAA won't be released until sometime in July.

Floor amendments are still possible in the Senate before it approves its version of the NDAA. But as of now, it seems likely that competing bad proposals with respect to expansion and/or attempted enforcement through automation of Selective Service -- one from the Republican-majority House to try to make it automatic, and one from the Democratic-majority Senate to expand it to women -- will be included in the House and Senate versions of the NDAA and go to the eventual House-Senate conference committee to sort out in closed-door negotiations late this year, after the elections.

It's possible that either or both of these proposals were included as "bargaining chips" intended to be withdrawn in exchange for concessions on other issues during the conference negotiations. The conference committee could include either, neither, both, or some other compromise on Selective Service in its final package of compromises, which typically are voted on and approved "en bloc" without further amendments.

Either of these misguided proposals would be the most significant change to the Military Selective Service Act since 1980. There have been no hearings, debate, or recorded vote on either of these proposals, and there appear unlikely to be any. The decision will probably be made in secret by the House-Senate conference committee for the NDAA.

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Senate joins House in proposal for "automatic" draft registration

By hasbrouck.org
Published On :: 2024-07-09T07:20:31-08:00

Contrary to earlier reports, the U.S. Senate has joined the House of Representatives in moving toward a foolhardy attempt to 'automatically' register all draft-eligible U.S. citizens and residents for a possible military draft, by extracting and aggregating information obtained from other Federal agencies.

The proposal for "automatic" draft registration is among several previously-undisclosed provisions related to Selective Service in the newly-release version of the National Defense [sic] Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2025 approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) and to be considered by the full Senate.

The 1,197-page SASC proposal for this year's NDAA was approved by the committee in closed session last month, and only a summary was released. At the time, a spokesperson for the SASC told me that if "automatic" Selective Service registration had been included in the bill, it would have been included in the summary. That proves to have been incorrect: The proposal for "automatic" draft registration was included in the SASC version of the bill, but not in the summary.

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