When the pioneers first moved across the Great Plains, they found them to be covered with foot-tall rodents they eventually called prairie dogs.

Utah is estimated to have had as many as 95,000 of these Utah prairie dogs as late as the 1920s. But due to disease, drought, and poison, that number had dropped to almost 3,000 in 1972.

In 1973 the Utah prairie dog was listed as an “endangered” pursuant to the Endangered Species Act, and a management plan was developed bring the species back.

The Utah prairie dog population quickly recovered and by 1984 the United States Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to reclassify the animal from “endangered” to “threatened.” Unfortunately the federal government also chose to leave most of the regulations protecting the Utah prairie dog in place.

Since that time, the Utah prairie dogs have fruitfully multiplied and now there are now an estimated 40,000 in the state.

If you live far away in Washington, DC, this may sound like fantastic news, but if you live in southwest Utah, the only place in the world this species of prairie dog exists, it is not so great.

These critters may be cute, but not only have they ruined crops and backyards, but they have also been known to invade cemeteries, open coffins, and topple gravestones.

The people of southwest Utah have had enough.

In 2013 some residents of Cedar City, Utah sued the federal government and challenged the authority of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to manage the Utah prairie dog.

See unlike many species, the Utah prairie dog exists only in Utah. So the residents of Cedar City argued that since the Utah prairie dog habitat didn’t cross state lines, it did not affect interstate commerce, and therefore Congress had no power to regulate it under the Constitution.

In 2014 a federal district court sided with the residents of Cedar City and turned management of the Utah prairie dog over to the state of Utah. For the past two years under state management, the species reached its highest population levels since the 1970s. But an appeals court overruled the district court’s decision and returned management authority to the Fish and Wildlife Service earlier this year.

The people of Cedar City shouldn’t have to seek permission from Washington, DC to control their rodent population.

That is why I recently introduced, the Native Species Protection Act, which would clarify that the federal government has no regulatory jurisdiction over a single-state species.

This is a commonsense reform that would limit the damage caused by federal mismanagement of protected species, while empowering state and local officials to pursue sensible conservation plans with their communities.

Thirteen years ago a 24-year-old Brigham Young University student named David Sneddon vanished in China’s Yunnan province.

After a cursory investigation, Chinese officials concluded that David must have died while hiking alone through Tiger Leaping Gorge.

But David’s kin retraced his steps, and they found that the official story didn’t add up.

For one, David was an experienced hiker and a responsible kid—an Eagle Scout, in fact. Could he have fallen into such peril on a well-traveled trail? Unlikely.

Supposing he had, where was the body? Over a decade later, no remains have been produced.

Eyewitness testimony, meanwhile, placed David in a Chinese city at the end of his planned hiking route. This suggests he passed safely through the gorge before disappearing.

He would have had to circle back through the gorge in order for the official explanation to be correct. Again, unlikely. After thirteen years, no evidence exists to support the official explanation of an untimely death in the gorge.

And then there were other curious details.

David Sneddon was traveling near the so-called “Asian Underground Railroad,” a network of mostly Christian missionaries who help North Korean defectors flee to safety.

North Korean agents are known to operate along the route, ruthlessly hunting down and intercepting defectors and returning them to execution or permanent captivity on the gulag peninsula of North Korea.

And Sneddon was last seen leaving a Korean restaurant. Korean restaurants reportedly are used as outposts for North Korean espionage and illicit enterprise.

Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, one month before David’s disappearance, North Korea took the rare step of releasing an American captive, 64-year-old Charles Jenkins. North Korea had forced Jenkins to teach English to its spies at a military university during his almost 40-year captivity.

After his release, the regime needed a substitute teacher. David Sneddon was an Asian Languages major. Highly educated, David spoke perfect American English with a Midwestern accent.

Subsequent intelligence from inside North Korea has supported what these facts strongly suggest: It is likely David Sneddon was taken by the North Korean regime in 2004. He likely has been held captive in that country ever since.

David Sneddon’s possible abduction is one link in a chain of North Korean crimes that stretches back to the Korean War, when the regime ordered the capture of over 80,000 “prominent” South Koreans.

Since the Armistice, North Korea has used a combination of flattery and force to abduct many thousands more.

The regime tricked more than 90,000 ethnic Koreans in Japan into traveling to North Korea to build a “worker’s paradise” they could never leave.

Roughly 100 other disappearances in Japan have been attributed to Pyongyang. In many cases, individuals were snatched from Japanese shores and spirited away on speedboats, never to be seen again.

Similarly, nearly 4,000 South Korean fishermen have been abducted after run-ins with North Korean intelligence vessels.

Recent reports indicate that North Korea has been hunting in China to discourage involvement in the Asian Underground Railroad.

And Pyongyang’s reach extends beyond the Asia-Pacific region. Its operatives have attempted kidnappings in such familiar locales as London, Copenhagen, and Beirut.
All told, the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea estimates that as many as 180,000 people have been abducted by North Korea.

One-hundred and eighty thousand. That’s just a few thousand less than the population of Salt Lake City.

Of those 180,000 abductions, only 13 have been acknowledged by North Korea and of these 13, only 5 were allowed to return.

The regime likely acknowledged this in the hope it would lead to a multibillion-dollar reparations payment from Japan. In the process of making this limited admission, it fabricated evidence and stonewalled investigators in order to cover up the true extent of its crimes.

It is easy for us to lose sight of North Korean abductions in light of the regime’s other flagrant offenses.

It has swapped weapons and expertise with other pariah states, including Iran and Syria.

It has conducted a campaign of political murders, including the assassination of a member of the Kim family in the public terminal of a Malaysian airport.

It continues to subjugate the North Korean people in conditions relatable to us only through the writings of George Orwell. For the majority of the impoverished, oppressed citizens of North Korea, from birth to death, they are doomed to suffer out their lives in the gulag peninsula of North Korea.

And of course it has made rapid strides in its nuclear weapons and ICBM programs, raising the terrible spectre of nuclear Armageddon once again.

In stark contrast to its nuclear program or its missile tests, North Korea’s abductions are quiet crimes.

They are marked not by seismic activity but by the absence of loved ones. By late-night walks never completed. By fishing boats that never return. By hikers who vanish from the trail.

Because of the quiet nature of North Korea’s abductions, it is up to the Free World to be loud. We have to be like the Sneddon family in Utah and the Yokota family in Japan, who have advocated tirelessly for their loved ones and all other abductees.

In that spirit, I, along with several of my colleagues in Congress, have introduced a joint resolution expressing our concern about the disappearance of David Sneddon.

The resolution encourages the State Department and Intelligence Community to investigate all plausible explanations for David’s disappearance—including abduction by North Korea.

The resolution further encourages the United States government to work with the Sneddon family and our allies in the region to investigate the disappearance and hopefully secure his release.

This resolution is a start, and I pray that one day soon the Sneddon family will be reunited with David.

It is unlikely we will ever know the stories of all those held captive in North Korea, so great are its crimes. But we can do much more for the few we know.

We can shine a narrow searchlight into the darkness of tyranny, and wait for dawn to break on North Korea.

The Fourth Amendment to the Constitution states plainly that Americans cannot be subjected to “unreasonable searches and seizures” of our “persons, houses, papers, and effects.”

But what about emails, text messages, and digital documents? Do they qualify for protection under the Fourth Amendment?

Any reasonable observer would answer yes, given how much intimate and personal information we share through those mediums every day. Electronic communications and records are the “papers and effects” of an online age. They should clearly be protected from government snooping.

It is stunning, then, that current law does not give provide sufficient protection to electronic communications. This needs to change, and it will if I and several of my colleagues are successful.

America’s online privacy laws are based on a bill passed way back in 1986, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA).

This well-intended bill prohibited the federal government from intercepting electronic communications and accessing some stored data. That’s because its authors understood that electronic communications were no different than phone calls or letters transmitted by homing pigeon.

But when Congress wrote the ECPA in 1986, the “Internet” as we know it did not exist—its predecessor, ARPANET, was used only by academic researchers, the military, and a few hobbyists. Congress did not anticipate that within a few decades the Internet would be used by billions to communicate, read the news, and even shop for groceries.

So they carelessly included a provision in ECPA that permitted the government to access many forms of archived data without getting permission from a judge. Under the provision, electronic records stored with third-party service providers for longer than 180 days are deemed “abandoned,” in the same way that a physical storage unit can be abandoned. Government agents can then access “abandoned” records by subpoenaing the third party.

As a result, we know that government agencies such as the IRS Criminal Tax Division have advised agents that they can rummage through Americans’ old emails without a search warrant—all because, in the words of the FBI, we shouldn’t have a “reasonable expectation of privacy” in our emails.

This provision may have seemed harmless in 1986, the year Metroid and Legend of Zelda debuted in 8-bit graphics on the NES. Practically nothing was stored in a digital form back then. But the law is dangerously outdated in 2017, when any citizen can store all of his personal records online in perpetuity through services like Google Drive and Dropbox.

Since 2013, I have worked with Sen. Pat Leahy (D-VT) and several other colleagues to protect Americans’ papers and effects wherever they are found—whether in a server farm, the Cloud, or a safe deposit box.

This week we re-introduced two bills that would go a long way to accomplishing this goal, the ECPA Modernization Act and Email Privacy Act.

The bills would bring online privacy protections up to par with the protections we expect for other forms of communication.

They would require government agents to obtain a search warrant based on probable cause to access our records, with reasonable exceptions for national security searches and emergency situations.

The ECPA Modernization Act is a little broader than the Email Privacy Act, since it also requires law enforcement to get a warrant before they can track your location by using your cell phone location data, but both these bipartisan bills are long overdue updates to our federal privacy laws.

The federal government never relinquishes its power over our lives easily. It has fought these reforms at every turn.

The United States has long sought a balance between participating in international organizations that promote the spread of democracy and protecting the sovereignty of other countries. At times, this delicate balance has been lost and our ability to promote American interests has been diminished.

Unfortunately, it appears our recent involvement with the Organization of American States has tipped toward undermining the sovereignty of other nations.

The OAS was founded on the admirable principle that "Every State has the right to choose, without external interference, its political, economic, and social system and to organize itself in the way best suited to it." And for decades, the United States has been the single largest donor to the OAS.

While the OAS has proven useful in opposing Communism and dictatorships like the ones in Cuba and Venezuela, some of its recent activities have contradicted its founding principle. The organization has pressured Latin American nations to adopt social policies favored by progressive elites, not their own people. Such initiatives, aided by U.S. funding, ignore the cultures of these countries and ultimately alienate their people from the United States.

The OAS exerts pressure on countries through the resolutions of the General Assembly, executive actions of the Secretary General's office, and rulings of the Inter-American Court. The OAS has also used the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to force alien cultural practices on Latin American countries, including formal recommendations promoting abortion in countries whose legal, cultural and religious practices defend life.

It has promoted abortion in countries party to the American Convention on Human Rights, which protects human beings from the moment of conception. Countries like Paraguay took measures in 2016 to strengthen and protect their own pro-life standards in reaction to pressure coming from the OAS and Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

The IACHR also has promoted redefining the institution of marriage, including the 2016 Duque vs Colombia case where the IACHR stated that Colombia's - at the time - traditional definition of marriage reflected, "an obtuse and stereotyped understanding of what a family is." Provocations like that serve no useful purpose for the United States, and indeed hinder constructive engagement with the family-oriented countries of Latin America.

U.S. taxpayer dollars should not be spent overseas to advocate for political issues that aren't even settled here at home. We must ensure that the $41.9 billion we spend on foreign assistance every year does not promote an agenda that many foreigners and Americans alike find repugnant.
Trump has indicated his desire to rebalance our foreign policy to better serve the American people. The State Department can significantly further this goal by ending the progressive cultural imperialism that the OAS spread over the past eight years.

Our national interest lies in promoting security and economic prosperity for Americans, not in telling other democracies what to do. Respecting the cultural and religious differences of our allies should be a top priority for an administration that campaigned on breaking away from business-as-usual foreign policy.

A longer version of this op-ed first appeared in The Houston Chronicle.