Jill Stein on Technology

Negotiate an international treaty banning cyberwarfare

JILL STEIN: The Internet and the access to information it provides is an extremely important resource for the entire world. Here is how we will protect and improve the Internet:

• Protect the free Internet. Oppose the Online Piracy Act and all other legislation that would undermine freedom and equality on the Internet.
• Vigorously defend net neutrality.
• Support public broadband Internet.
• Negotiate international treaty banning cyberwarfare; create a new UN agency tasked with identifying the sources of cyber attacks.

CLINTON: I will make it clear that the United States will treat cyberattacks just like any other attack. We will be ready with serious political, economic and military responses and we will invest in protecting our governmental networks and national infrastructure.

Make science policy more democratic & responsive to citizens

JILL STEIN: Presidents are able to affect long term R&D priorities by creating institutions focused on research like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health that are to some extent insulated from short-term political cycles. We will revisit these institutions--their charge, focus, and operations--to ensure that they're performing as expected. We will look for opportunities and mechanisms whereby science policy can be made more democratic, and more responsive to the preferences and needs of average citizens.

CLINTON: I share the concerns of the science and technology community that the US is underinvesting in research. Federal funding of basic research amounts to less than 1% of annual federal spending, yet it is an investment that pays big dividends.

Green New Deal for efficient public transportation

The Green New Deal will fund itself through massive health savings by ending pollution and improving food quality, with military savings from making wars for oil obsolete, and with savings from reductions in the cost of energy.

Renew our infrastructure and assure everyone has a job

STEIN: So, our top plank really is a Green New Deal to transform our economy to a green economy, 100 percent wind, water and sun by the year 2030--we can do it; this is an emergency, and we must do it--but to use that as an opportunity to put America back to work, to renew our infrastructure and to basically assure that everyone has a job. That's another key plank of our Power to the People Plan, that it ensures economic rights for everyone--the right to a job, the right to complete healthcare through a Medicare for All, improved Medicare-for-All plan; that we ensure the right to quality education, from preschool through college, and that includes free public higher education and abolishing student debt.

4 million people wrote to FCC to preserve net neutrality

STEIN: There are groups and key activists who really understand the necessity of having a political voice. The presidential debate is going to frame people's thinking, for better or worse. And we want to be in there fighting. And it may come in through the alternative media channels. It may come in through social media. But that's how we successfully fought back privatization of the internet.

Q: I don't think you accomplished that; there's a big division amongst monopolies on this question: the Googles and the Netflixes--there's very big sections of capital.

STEIN: But it wasn't going to happen without us. It was really important. And FCC got some 4 million letters, which were, like, 99% to preserve net neutrality. We have the numbers. What we don't have is the conviction and the infrastructure to use that power. And what we want to do in our campaign is to flick that switch in our brains from powerlessness to powerfulness.

No government policing of the internet

A: No, and enact legislation preventing any level of government policing the internet