If you are not familiar with EARN IT a law proposed by Attorney General William Barr and sponsored by Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), you better get familiar with it.
Publications around the world are sounding the alarm bells.
EFF – Imagine an Internet where the law required every message sent to be read by government-approved scanning software. Companies that handle such messages wouldn’t be allowed to securely encrypt them, or they’d lose legal protections that allow them to operate.
Tutanota.com – EARN IT is a law proposed by Attorney General William Barr to stop American tech companies from using encryption. The bill pretends to deal with the very serious issue of child exploitation online, but in reality will put an end to encryption and security online for everyone. Instead of actually providing law enforcement with more money and more officers, it attacks free speech and security online.
NakedSecurity – While we’re all distracted by stockpiling latex gloves and toilet paper, there’s a bill tiptoeing through the US Congress that could inflict the backdoor virus that law enforcement agencies have been trying to inflict on encryption for years.
At least, that’s the interpretation of digital rights advocates who say that the proposed EARN IT Act could harm free speech and data security.
Sophos is in that camp. For years, Naked Security and Sophos have said #nobackdoors, agreeing with the Information Technology Industry Council that “Weakening security with the aim of advancing security simply does not make sense.”
Obviously no human being in their right mind wants to be lax on protecting children from sexual predators or exploitation. But as the EFF points out
It doesn’t help organizations that support victims. It doesn’t equip law enforcement agencies with resources to investigate claims of child exploitation or training in how to use online platforms to catch perpetrators. Rather, the bill’s authors have shrewdly used defending children as the pretense for an attack on our free speech and security online.
So pay attention because this could affect various app you use that provide E2EE as well as see some of your favorite sites shut down because they will not or cannot comply.
Tip of the cap to Rob Monster
My two cents:
“Like they can’t and don’t already do that anyway and haven’t been for years.”
What has national and international hero and true American patriot, NSA whistleblower Bill Binney already been telling us for years?
I have *always* assumed there is no such thing as privacy with regard to Uncle Sam. Privacy is only a matter of degree as far as I’m concerned.
I worked for Uncle Sam in the late 1980’s and as a patriotic American myself that part of my life history is certainly one of the prized patriotic privileges of my life. This occured before the “World Wide Web,” and before a lot of things involving today’s technology. We made use of the “Internet,” but nobody was even calling it that to my knowledge. Even then with late 1980’s technology we knew explicitly that everything we did on computer equipment was completely monitored and recorded. I waited till 2002 to buy my first home computer, and even then there was already talk about a “backdoor” for Uncle Sam.
I have assumed “zero privacy” ever since the beginning and think it’s best that everyone else does too, no matter what you do or use. Sure, you may be able to have “privacy” to a meaningful degree with your ISP, your city, some sites you visit, etc., but assume the opposite with regard to Uncle Sam.
When people are crying “warning, warning – we may do this,” and especially when they include “but we really don’t want to and would rather not,” it’s best to assume the warning is a sham and “it” has already been in place and is already being done since 5 or 500 miles ago. In this case of course there is no pretense about not even wanting to no less.
Within a few minutes of any platform being raped of its privacy, all criminals who are not of very low IQ will have assumed new routes of communication. Rules like this increase control/moderation over the population hence it is well due that direct democracy implemented so that no single person, group, or party, can decide on any law, bylaw, rule, and therefore only the will of the individuals, collectively, has any validity. Representative democracy (fake democracy = authoritarianism) must become irrelevant. Attempts to undermine this process which have already occurred via laws proposed in this news post must be retroactively punished since it constitutes treason without comparison. Even the worst murderers and rapists are less culpable than the evil practitioners who continually try to enslave the populace through reducing the individuals power to decide the direction of their lives jointly with other individuals.