Key senators have voted for the anti-encryption EARN IT act

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/02/key-senators-have-voted-anti-encryption-earn-it-act

by buu700 • 4 years ago

736 326 4 years ago

What I don't see in the writeup, is which senators are voting which way. I can tell from the writeup what Blumenthal thinks of it, but not any other committee participants.

I really wish politicians would embrace a "we will make policies for things we can understand" motto.

trevoristall2• 4 years ago

I really wish politicians would embrace a "we will make policies for things we can understand" motto.

I don't think they'd make many policies if that were the case

DamnYuppie• 4 years ago

that isn't a bad thing.

mhh__• 4 years ago

It would potentially mean a huge backlog of boring but basically uncontroversial technical legislation, most likely.

zeruch• 4 years ago

That could be a feature or a bug I suppose.

ekianjo• 4 years ago

I don't think they'd make many policies if that were the case

That would be progress.

xmprt• 4 years ago

It doesn't seem like many policies are being made in the first place.

BiteCode_dev• 4 years ago

That's assuming policies are made for the good of society, and not the good of the policy makers.

koolba• 4 years ago

I really wish politicians would embrace a "we will make policies for things we can understand" motto.

If that were the case we’d have a lot less cockamamie gun laws.

icodestuff• 4 years ago

Here's the list of cosponsors, who will presumably vote for it. I don't see the list of committee members who voted for it.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/353...

mdorazio• 4 years ago

Pretty even split down the aisle on this one. Which in this case is a bad thing.

rectang3• 4 years ago

I'm disappointed that Jacky Rosen (D - Nevada) is a co-sponsor. She's a former software developer and should know better.

I just watched some of the Senate hearing on Log4J and she seemed reasonably together on security, open source etc. I was feeling optimistic that she could become the Senatorial analogue to Judge Alsup[1]! But if she's on board with EARN IT, scratch that idea.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-googl...

pmontra• 4 years ago

[politicians embrace] "we will make policies for things we can understand"

I wish that too but to be fair: what would any of us be able to make a policy for if we had to really understand the subject first? I'm afraid we'd have to elect about 1 million politicians and let any subset of them make policies about what they are experts about. This is probably what's already going on except nearly everyone in that million is not elected and is part of organizations lobbying for something.

vkou• 4 years ago

What makes you think they don't understand this?

mawise• 4 years ago

I haven't tried reading the text of The Act, most of the press about it focuses on E2EE-type messaging systems. So presumably if this passes, Signal would have to move offshore or something? (for example)

But what about HTTPS certificates, would The Act have any effect on them? Would there be any legal issues with (for example) running your own Matrix server?

And what about hosting providers (instead of platforms). Would Amazon be compelled to decrypt HTTPS traffic en-mass that's routed to their machines?

CameronNemo• 4 years ago

Signal has threatened to exit the US market in the past, IIRC.

nomendos16• 4 years ago

Signal would either have to go to China or Russia (where it would dance to their tune) or shut down or quietly comply.

It would be "NoSignal" from this Act on.

pyuser5834• 4 years ago

I very much doubt it. Law enforcement doesn’t seem too concerned about regular old HTTPS.

I wonder why?

wmf2• 4 years ago

HTTPS is not end-to-end encrypted (it kinda would be if we used P2P but we don't) so you can subpoena the server.

fitblipper• 4 years ago

Because, it's a massive centralized decrypted data repository, law enforcement can simply ask for the data and the company will hand it over. It's not their data so they don't care to defend it but because of the third party doctrine it's legally their data to hand off w/o your permission.

Peer to peer or end to end encryption removes this trivially easy access, which is why they don't like it.

aaomidi• 4 years ago

Companies like Cloudflare exist.

Jerry23• 4 years ago

I wonder why?

NSLs: https://www.eff.org/issues/national-security-letters/faq

Dragnet/Geofence warrants: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike... and https://www.logically.ai/articles/geofence-warrants-on-the-r...

Dragnet/Mass-surveillance keyword warrants: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/10/04/googl...

Dragnet/mass-scanning of online storage: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/12/20/googl...

PRISM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

RAMPART-A: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAMPART-A

Forced backdoors into "encrypted" email: https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/08/tutanota_backdoor_cou...

And who knows what else is still secret. A good rule of thumb is that if something's in the "cloud" or hosted on someone's computer that you don't directly control, you should assume that LEOs have access to it.

When all the data is centralized, you don't care about the end-point encryption. All you care about is having access to all the databases.

paxys4• 4 years ago

Law enforcement is mostly concerned about corporate servers rather than home ones. E2E encryption puts those servers out of their control, hence the pushback.

brimble• 4 years ago

Most or all of the major trust chains that underpin it are compromised, would be my guess.

pyuser5834• 4 years ago

May crypto advocates are going about this the wrong way.

Instead of emphasizing that crypto should be protected by freedom of speech, they should acknowledge crypto is a dangerous munition. Therefore it’s protected by the Second Amendment.

The second amendment says the right to bear “arms” will not be abridged. Not firearms.

Shouldn’t that protect crypto?

inter_netuser2• 4 years ago

oi, do you have a loicense for that hashing algo from the ATF?

chottocharaii• 4 years ago

I’m guessing you’re not a lawyer

woodruffw8• 4 years ago

This is (hilariously) misguided on two fronts:

1. There is a significantly larger body of jurisprudence dedicated to protecting freedom of expression, versus whatever you think the Second Amendment guarantees you.

2. The right to bear arms does not entitle you to specific weapons. That's why you're not allowed to own a nuclear warhead, and why strong encryption was historically on the ITAR munitions list. Arguing that cryptography is a dangerous weapon (it isn't!) is a terrible idea.

inter_netuser2• 4 years ago

encryption is a defensive technology. It's like arguing bulletproof vests are weapons, but what do definitions really mean these days anyway.

Unfortunately, with encryption (and code as speech) - has not been tested at the supreme court as much as most think. It's still an open question to an extent.

beezle• 4 years ago

So basically this is just the government using private companies to do an end run around the 4th amend.?

wmf2• 4 years ago

It's not an end run because the 4th amendment allows warrants.

raxxorrax6• 4 years ago

Not from the US, but I cannot imagine that it allows dragnet surveillance. Since that is common practice, I don't think the 4th amendment doesn't do anything to be honest.

lyime• 4 years ago

If this passes wouldn't this accelerate the decentralized encrypted communication movement? How can government stop that?

matheusmoreira2• 4 years ago

They can't stop the technology itself but they can throw you in jail for the simple act of using it. How dare you resist their surveillance, right?

dane-pgp• 4 years ago

Imagine if the government forced app stores, anti-virus companies, and OS providers to prevent the installation of "dangerous" applications. How many people are going to jailbreak their phone or run Linux on their laptop in order to install an E2EE chat app?

tempestn2• 4 years ago

And even those who do won't have very many people to chat with.

Andrew_nenakhov3• 4 years ago

For example, by forcing Apple to remove the apps from the Appstore.

(No sideloading is so great, Apple fanboys here say, no big deal, just do your research and buy another device. )

alwillis2• 4 years ago

For example, by forcing Apple to remove the apps from the Appstore.

Apple would fight this all the way to the Supreme Court. This is IMHO a clear violation of the 1st amendment.

With such a conservative Supreme Court, I doubt they would look favorably at restricting speech of a company.

Besides, Apple’s App Store is available in many countries around the world; an American iPhone user could get restricted apps from its App Stores in other countries.

raxxorrax6• 4 years ago

No sideloading is so great

Because it improves security... I hate that the loudest voices in our industry so often fail to look beyond the horizon. This is a very predictable weak point.

And mobile security is so great. Not that user data is often exfiltrated by a lot of these vetted apps at all...

nomendos16• 4 years ago

Government can not stop criminals to use end-to-end encryption. With this bill only regular internet users loose privacy! This is not how it is represented to Senators and instead they are offered a lie while they do not understand, so we need to act. Crooked forces are behind this!

29083011397778• 4 years ago

and it will let the use of encryption be evidence in lawsuits and criminal trials

How long until the comparisons to East Germany start? America is apparently gearing up for "If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear", with many seemingly agreeing with this sentiment.

Perhaps more importantly, how have major journalistic networks not written about this bill in the worst possible light? When your sources want to use encryption, which is reasonable given some stories, this exact excerpt seems likely to bite someone in the ass.

While we're on the subject, I thought I'd heard that American polititians were using Signal? What happens when using encryption becomes ammunition for a lawsuit against them? Do they simply assume they have very, very good lawyers, and it'll all shake out because they don't believe they did (are going to do) anything wrong?

echelon4• 4 years ago

how have major journalistic networks not written about this bill in the worst possible light?

I was originally going to ponder if it was because today's generation of journalists aren't privacy preserving, freedom of speech maximalists. While there are some that seek to limit freedoms as long as their "side" is on top, I don't think that's it.

The last five years of political discourse has worn us down. We're tired of the back and forth, constant everyday existential crises of democracy. If every day the world is falling apart, then something like this just looks like business as usual.

We're tired. Frankly we wasted energy on stupid things and lost sight of the war. And now they get to ram this horrible, freedom rotting legislation through.

mancerayder2• 4 years ago

But, if words, hate and disinformation cause what we refer to as harm, don't the ends justify the means?

The collective shout from the new generations is a resounding Yes.

Sadly it's as historically uninformed as it is privileged to believe that words do harm.

raverbashing• 4 years ago

Journalism is dying each day, between naive both-sideism, lazy PR reproductions and entertainment figures in entertainment channels that have "news" in the name

It should go like this: whoever is in favour of this legislation should have no problem showing their private messages in public. Interesting how nobody presents this angle in congress.

tempestn2• 4 years ago

That's a good point. Perhaps as well as writing to representatives it could be helpful to write to EG the Washington Post and ask them to cover the issue more extensively.

hedora3• 4 years ago

We don’t really have journalism in the US anymore. Most of the financially healthy ones are owned by foreigners that are actively trying to sabotage our democracy. The remainder are on life support, and are running with something like 10% the number of reporters they used to have.

Also, Godwin's law was repealed years ago, so you may as well compare to the third reich.

kuraudo3• 4 years ago

Foreigner or us national, all news sourced ultimately serve the interests of their owners.

matheusmoreira2• 4 years ago

it will let the use of encryption be evidence in lawsuits and criminal trials

Is this true? Will use of encryption be evidence of guilt if this thing passes? Incredible.

heavyset_go2• 4 years ago

Exercising the right to avoid self-incrimination is now evidence of incrimination.

paxys4• 4 years ago

If anyone in power in our 3 branches of government was under 80 and actually understood how all of this worked, this would be struck down immediately. Heck, this law would be a non-starter to begin with.

jallbrit• 4 years ago

I'm not sure how much this answers your question, but Congress put out a "EARN IT Act Myths and Facts" documents that contains the following text:

MYTH: The EARN IT Act is simply an attempt to ban encryption. FACT: The EARN IT Act does not target, limit, or create liability for encryption or privacy services. In fact, in order to ensure the EARN IT Act would not be misconstrued as limiting encryption, specific protections were included in the bill to explicitly state that a court should not consider offering encryption or privacy services as an independent basis for legal liability.

idontwantthis• 4 years ago

I contacted my representatives. It took 1 minute. Please do it too.

yoyohello13• 4 years ago

Like our opinions matter. I learned from net neutrality that my representatives will do whatever they want to do, without regard for the peoples wishes.

MattPalmer10864• 4 years ago

If enough people write in it can have an effect. It can provide political ammunition for those who are already supportive of your position.

It may sway representatives who haven't made up their minds and want to get relected.

It probably won't change the minds of those who are already fully committed to the other position.

Your one letter won't make much difference. Many letters can sway opinion to some extent.

I also prefer to participate in the process occasionally.

LocalPCGuy• 4 years ago

This same bill was shelved once before due to outcry about it. They just keep putting it back out there (very similar to Net Neutrality). The key is, to continue the pressure each time it's re-introduced (which is hard, yes). But there is some precedent that vocal outcry and campaigns to write representatives does have some impact.

commoner3• 4 years ago

If you want to oppose the EARN IT Act, but don't want to spend the time, just use the EFF's "Take Action" page and have them send a prewritten email for you. It really does take just 1 minute. Here's a link to the page to make it even easier: https://act.eff.org/action/stop-the-earn-it-act-to-save-our-...

At a minimum, the congresspeople's aides will tally up the emails received to measure their constituents' reaction to the bill.

If you do have the time, an original email written in your own words might have a greater impact. To determine who your 2 senators and 1 representative are, use these government pages:

- Senators: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm

- Representative: https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representati...

Prepare a single email and alter it slightly to make it personalized for each of your 3 recipients. Use the form on the senator's or representative's official senate.gov or house.gov website to reach them, and set the category to "Communications" or "Telecommunications". (The form will block your submission if you include a URL, so don't do that.)

guerrilla6• 4 years ago

Why do people think doing so is effective? Is there any evidence for that?

mcdonje• 4 years ago

It's far more effective than doing nothing. Reps keep track of constituent correspondences and tally them by sentiment. It's one of their main ways of gauging where their constituency is on issues. I guarantee boomers who type google searches into google's facebook page are calling up their reps.

unityByFreedom3• 4 years ago

This could only work if there are monopolies that work with the government. I don't think we're there yet, but it is concerning that lawmakers view this as a viable piece of legislation.

I wish we had a legislature who would recognize the importance of net neutrality to fostering competition. Instead, bills like this seem focused on ensuring monopolies so they can control how they operate.

heavyset_go2• 4 years ago

This could only work if there are monopolies that work with the government. I don't think we're there yet, but it is concerning that lawmakers view this as a viable piece of legislation.

Google, Microsoft and Apple all work with the government extensively, and they, either alone or together, hold monopoly and oligopoly positions in many markets.

unityByFreedom3• 4 years ago

Personally I'm more concerned about the regional broadband monopolies. Google, Microsoft, and Apple won't see sufficient competition if it starts costing more to visit certain websites. That will only entrench the current players.

The current administration is the only thing that's barely holding back Comcast, Verizon etc. from expanding their plans to expand zero-rating across broadband. Eventually there will be another Ajit Pai.

i5heu2• 4 years ago

Ever heard from PRISM?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)

unityByFreedom3• 4 years ago

Yes I was around for Snowden. That program doesn't concern me nearly as much as trying to ban encryption altogether which is what this bill appears to be trying to do.

gonehome11• 4 years ago

I wish HN was better at evaluating anything around this, HN's response to anything on this topic makes it hard to know what the actual truth is. Maybe this act is as bad as people are saying it is, but the Apple policy wasn't and the response here was the same. I'll defer judgement until I can actually read it.

echelon4• 4 years ago

the Apple policy wasn't

The Apple policy on your device ratting you out is abominable and anyone telling you otherwise is trying to sell you a brand.

What you deem illegal might not be the same thing Apple is told to treat as illegal. In this country or elsewhere.

You phone should not be the secret police.

gonehome11• 4 years ago

This kind of response illustrates my point.

The apple policy was likely about coming up with a way to enable encrypted photos on iCloud while still having some privacy preserving form of CSAM detection. Since it was only enabled when iCloud photos was enabled it was better for privacy on net than the status quo (unencrypted iCloud photos that are accessible to apple and scanned anyway).

Now we may end up with a worse outcome as a result.

The Bluetooth exposure notification design early in the pandemic was similarly privacy preserving and the average HN response was similarly stupid.

There are just some topics this forum is not a reliable source of accurate information about and this is unfortunately one of them.

This isn’t because I don’t think access to real encryption is incredibly important (I do) - I just think it’s important to get the details right. Otherwise we’ll just get dismissed on these issues for ignoring the specifics and crying wolf on everything.

nescioquid• 4 years ago

I've been reading about this same omniscience-lust of our corrupt republican representative democracy since the early '90s. I had thought that it simply sought to become more subtle, more refined over time. However, like any patzer, it is merely satisfied to give check where it appears.

Are we drawn in bitter impasse, or is there some intervening move to which we can avail ourselves?

The best I can muster (other than amassing a Bezos fortune and simply buying every shyster for sale) is to buy every elected shyster for sale (i.e. some rough approximation of five nine's worth of elected officials). My local newspaper reported on a school bus driver who was shot in the head, for which there is a go-fund-me effort. Every such mutual aid stop-gap is an indictment of our benighted society.

Maybe Hobbes[1] had it right, but then again, waiting for a messiah is tantamount to resigning.

[1] I love most the story about him in which he entered the club in which The Elements was turned to the final page. He chortled something on the order of "bullshit" or "humbug" and turned to the prior page: and so on and so forth to the first page where he could find no quarrel. The story is surely bullshit itself, but smells none-the-less so sweet.

paxys4• 4 years ago

Dianne Feinstein, senior senator from California and presumably elected with majority support from Silicon Valley, is one of the co-sponsors of the bill. Talk about being out of touch. I also have no doubt that she wouldn't be able to explain a single line of text in the bill if asked.

Dma54rhs• 4 years ago

When people think of Silicon Valley I font think pro privacy is the first thing that pops to their mind, quite an opposite actually.

hedora3• 4 years ago

Feinstein voted according to Trump’s wishes more often than many republicans. She routinely pushes legislation that’s designed to destroy the environment, and is unabashedly anti-silicon valley.

The last thing she did that she likes to take credit for was back in the 70’s.

California changed the way its elections are run to allow to democrats to run against each other in the general election, essentially just to eliminate her.

Somehow, she keeps getting reelected.

kuraudo3• 4 years ago

The only ones outn of touch are the people surprised by this. She, her party, and even the Republicans across the aisle are always perfectly sympatico with the wishes of their mostly identical donors.

tehwebguy• 4 years ago

Incredible, once again the Senate is completely incapable of doing anything good but gets their shit together whenever it’s time to do something stupid and terrible. Would be better to just vote against the majority going forward, at least try to tie things up so they can do nothing instead of what they end up doing whenever they get around to doing something.

Truly amazing how Chuck Schumer gets a pass in the media for being so utterly worthless.

ed25519FUUU• 4 years ago

Right majority or left majority the senate always seems to do nothing but work against the people.

krainboltgreene3• 4 years ago

We've never had a left majority in either part of congress.

atlantas2• 4 years ago

I don't understand why people keep voting them back in?? They've been useless for so long, yet people continue to check the box next to their name. Why?

ComputerGuru• 4 years ago

Apathy and groupthink, my friend.

nitrogen• 4 years ago

Some but not all of the reasons: It's virtually impossible for a primary candidate to unseat an incumbent in their own party, and gerrymandering makes it so that opposing parties rarely have solid candidates.

agent86• 4 years ago

One big reason is that many people will insist that their representative doesn't contribute to a problem, or has a particular reason for doing so that excuses the behavior. It's essentially always everyone else's representative that is the problem, and so they vote theirs back in and the cycle continues.

kuraudo3• 4 years ago

Welcome to "democracy," where college studies show that only the rich and powerful ever get what they want while the normal citizen is continuously shafted in new and exciting ways.

whoopdedo• 4 years ago

Mainly because of the two-party system. The pre-selection of candidates forces you to choose between two evils and it most often becomes a matter of the devil you know versus the devil you don't know.

ketz1• 4 years ago

Ppl should start to use messenger apps as dump pipes and use a level 3 encryption. https://github.com/enigma-reloaded/enigma-reloaded

woodruffw8• 4 years ago

I don't know what this is, but I'm more confident in Signal's E2EE than whatever this provides (which I don't know, because the README doesn't include a technical explanation or threat model.)

hda23• 4 years ago

What you're suggesting is exactly what those corrupt senators want.

The reason why popular E2EE messengers are such a problem for authoritarian governments/regimes is the fact that it's transparent and enabled by default. This means that millions (or sometimes billions) of people have strong privacy without having to know anything about it.

Once E2EE is removed from these messengers, those authoritarians can focus on the rest.

Edit: one thing that really confuses me about this whole war on crypto thing is why would a democratic nation want to remove privacy from people. Don't they understand that democracy is fundamentally predicated on privacy? I have a feeling that they do.

ehnto• 4 years ago

The next step is of course to vilify those who seek privacy, now that it's not the default, switching the rhetoric to suggest that anyone using encryption is surely doing so to hide illicit activities. Privacy becomes illegal at that point.

nomendos16• 4 years ago

Yes there will be tons of new open-source end2end encrypted apps that you can install and government shall not be able to enforce it! But the new Act will give them power to proclaim anyone using it a criminal and they can start exercising draconian fines (i.e. hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars life crippling). No matter how you slice this and when you get totality of all possibilities all scenarios end up with world destruction making this the most dangerous and most stupid Act ever!

rolfea• 4 years ago

You can watch the meeting from this morning here: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/02/03/2022/executi...

The discussion on the EARN IT act starts around 1:42:00

Any mention of concerns over encryption are with a really incredulous, dismissive tone. I have a hard time understanding whether that's actual ignorance on the part of the Senators, or if it's some kind of theatrics that plays into the broader politics of the situation.

techdragon• 4 years ago

Based on similar things I’ve seen here in Australian political circles it’s because they are so deeply misinformed that it’s become dogmatic. They like to get simplistic overview briefings and dislike getting sufficiently deep briefings that they can be informed of the fundamental flaws that simplistic briefings pass over.

They also decide who works for them so no subordinate will “make them learn” and everyone perpetuates a cycle of ignorance that leads to the establishment of a dogmatic position that people trying to make things seem more complicated are wrong because I have all my own people telling me it’s not that complicated. Unless they care to be informed and ASK for it, it will never happen.

omeze• 4 years ago

I have no evidence for this, but I think it's highly likely they're using "ignorance" as a form of brinkmanship or plausible deniability. If these senators speak with any of their colleagues, they'll know the risk and reward tradeoffs of these decisions, but they'll choose to side with interests that benefit their own person.

I know Hanlon's razor stands against me, but I just find the dynamics of a highly connected set of professionals in DC too conducive to passive knowledge of these issues to justify a bunch of "key senators" to be fully ignorant on these subjects. I find it way more likely that ignorance is a convenient narrative to push their agenda without accountability from the opposition.

grognak420• 4 years ago

idiocracy was a documentary

danmur• 4 years ago

Thanks. Lots of commending! They must be a commendable lot.

Clubber3• 4 years ago

So if you click on the actual article, there is a "TAKE ACTION" button that will email your representatives. It takes about 15 seconds total, if that. Do it.

hellothere1337• 4 years ago

How come everyone is so surprised and thinks the senators are incompetent? They're all following the playbook and its in not in the elites interest for the average person to have privacy.

DarkmSparks• 4 years ago

Im really in so many minds about this.

On the one hand, encryption shouldnt be necessary.

On the other, much like the RIAA crackdown on mp3s over http brought us torrents and magnets, I would expect the US and UK cracking down on encryption to bring us actually secure clients.

It also stinks of them trying to legalise something they are already doing (see Snowden and the recent declassified cia docs)

nomendos16• 4 years ago

I am Computer Security expert and urge all from point of understanding this both technically and as a value to all of US citizens!

Crooked forces are behind this trying to misrepresent this as ability to read all messages that will allow them to "save the children" which is just an excuse for the "foot through the door" or capability for the totalitarian rule (remember total power inevitably corrupts totally)! If we let our representatives, which do not understand this, vote for this, then we all will regret and have much much harder time to restore right for privacy. There are other both better and cheaper ways that government agencies can protect the children and destroying encryption (or criminalizing it) will not help them, since the real criminals will then use encryption only for their business and we law abiding citizens will be stripped off the ability to use it to preserve our privacy!!!

nomendos16• 4 years ago

I contacted my representative, as it takes ~1min. Please I urge all to do it! p.s. I am Computer Security expert and urge all from point of understanding this both technically and as a value to all of US citizens!

Crooked forces are behind this trying to misrepresent this as ability to read all messages that will allow them to "save the children" which is just an excuse for the "foot through the door" or capability for the totalitarian rule (remember total power inevitably corrupts totally)! If we let our representatives, which do not understand this, vote for this, then we all will regret and have much much harder time to restore right for privacy. There are other both better and cheaper ways that government agencies can protect the children and destroying encryption (or criminalizeing it) will not help them, since the real criminals will then use encryption only for their business and we law abiding citizens will be stripped off the ability to use it to preserve our privacy!!!

vineyardmike• 4 years ago

Me too!

I don't think people typically contact their representatives, but I figured its a good time to start. The EFF made it really easy to lookup and send a canned message to my senators. I plan to try to call the office tomorrow. I assume I'll get stopped at their secretaries, but even that might be enough to just leave an extra bump of persuasion.

onikolas7• 4 years ago

In my mind "Think of the children" is synonymous with "ulterior motive". After reading the comments here, I am adding CSAM to the list of synonyms.

csunbird• 4 years ago

Banning encryption because of some people use it to transfer abusive images is literally throwing baby out with the bathwater. Why not ban sending snail mail as well, as it can be used to send abusive images too?

TheBozzCL• 4 years ago

Don't give them ideas.

We might as well ban sending pictures and audio because least-significant-bit steganography is a thing.

throwthh4363• 4 years ago

There's a bill that genuinely thinks of the children:

https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-gilli...

graycat• 4 years ago

At the US Senate Web site at URL

     https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/3538/cosponsors

     S.3538 - EARN IT Act of 2022

I saw in part:

     Cosponsors:  S.3538 — 117th Congress
     (2021-2022)

     Sponsor:  Sen. Graham, Lindsey
     [R-SC] | Cosponsor statistics:  19
     current - includes 19 original

     * = Original cosponsor

     Sen. Blackburn, Marsha [R-TN]*

     Sen. Blumenthal, Richard [D-CT]*

     Sen. Casey, Robert P., Jr.  [D-PA]*

     Sen. Collins, Susan M. [R-ME]*

     Sen. Cornyn, John [R-TX]*

     Sen. Cortez Masto, Catherine [D-NV]*

     Sen. Durbin, Richard J. [D-IL]*

     Sen. Ernst, Joni [R-IA]*

     Sen. Feinstein, Dianne [D-CA]*

     Sen. Grassley, Chuck [R-IA]*

     Sen. Hassan, Margaret Wood [D-NH]*

     Sen. Hawley, Josh [R-MO]*

     Sen. Hirono, Mazie K. [D-HI]*

     Sen. Hyde-Smith, Cindy [R-MS]*

     Sen. Kennedy, John [R-LA]*

     Sen. Murkowski, Lisa [R-AK]*

     Sen. Portman, Rob [R-OH]*

     Sen. Warner, Mark R. [D-VA]*

     Sen. Whitehouse, Sheldon [D-RI]*

nomendos16• 4 years ago

Do not let US become China! (or worse)

I am Computer Security expert and urge all from point of understanding this both technically and as a value to all of US citizens!

EGreg2• 4 years ago

Love how these same senators protect the right to a gun because “only good guys would follow the law”

nomendos16• 4 years ago

Right to use end2end Encryption is almost equal to right to bear arms (conceptually) It is even worse (read my practical translation below in another post where this leads to)

Puts• 4 years ago

Well this is defensively not gonna make it easier to get a new agreement for data transfer between EU and US.

trasz3• 4 years ago

Which is a good thing for both the European economy and, as evidenced again and again, security.

usrbinbash3• 4 years ago

But it will definitely make it easier for European companies to have a competitive advantage over their US counterparts.

kazinator• 4 years ago

The weakest part of a crypto system is the key, ... and sometimes the key senators.

nomendos16• 4 years ago

Let me translate this into practical arguments depicting where this leads (how both dangerous and stupid it is).

If this bill passes, imagine a world where:

- all cloud files, activity, messages, regular over internet activity (provided by any legal company registered in US or wanting to operate in the US) etc shall be readable by the government

- this would apply to ALL countries in the world

- all companies will not be allowed to use nor support any application on their platform that has end2and encryption

- US government will heave sort of "master key" to not just US but the whole world

- end2end encryption use will be outlawed/criminal and forbidden (if you try to install any app that uses end2end encryption, this can be recorded and government can choose to bring you to court and serve you with draconian fines, regardless what you did over end2end encrypted communication)

- there will be nothing stopping any individual actor (good and bad) to use end2end encryption!

- it is impossible to enforce to stop use of end2end encryption (as nobody can control what runs on end points PC/Windows/OS/Mac/de-googled-Android/etc)

- No more VPN, Telegram, Signal, TOR/onion, emails, HTTPS? (all messaging like skype/whatsapp/snapchat/zoom/tiktok/etc in todays form), etc all will be forbidden/criminalized in today's form until changed to allow government to read it in clear form. This does not mean that there won't be still versions of TOR, VPN, HTTPs that use end2end encryption (without giving master key to the government) no there will be, it will just be criminalized and unenforceable unless government decides to not sue/press-charges to all using it (of which there will be hundreds of millions) but instead reserves right to sue/charge or worse bomb you

- centralization of such great power, by design per system threat model, makes one point of failure as total failure and history has proven that such design always fails (i.e. to translate: basically malicious actor will try and eventually succeed to hack the government central control place to take over this capability and such power in the hands of a really determined malicious actor is infinite!) == so technically/logically this is hugely stupid, not just dangerous for government malpractice (which is also historically more norm than exception)

- Internet division of the world will be forced by this! as imagine that you are some/any country (in Europe, especially China or Russia, but hey any) that just wants NOT TO be without clothes fully open to US spying, then you're left with only one choice to FULLY ISOLATE YOUR Internet (including everything, your infrastructure, your devices, your versions of operating systems, etc,..) so this would HUGELY IMPACT ALL BUSINESSES as they will suddenly not be able to sell anything outside of US (other than to allied or vasal countries)!!! (this is inevitable outcome in short period of time and in a divided world you can draw the prediction where that leads = to all worst outcomes)

PLEASE ALL UNDERSTAND THIS CORRECTLY and ACT asking your representatives TO VOTE AGAINS EARN IT

Feel free to use my description when writing to your representative, as it is more understandable to uneducated people and conveys grave dangers versus just your vote!

Government agencies have many different ways to FULLY protect the children and not to destroy the world, only if they use competent people!

Gareth3213• 4 years ago

It would destroy the US tech sector. In Europe, no company would be permitted to store any data on any servers operated by a U.S. company. They might go further and require the company to have no association with the U.S. counterpart, if this Bill is sufficiently broad, which I believe it is. In other words, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Dropbox, Apple, Amazon, etc. etc. would lose their entire European customer base.

Of course the wheels of the EU move slowly, and there aren't a lot of strong alternatives at present, so I don't expect this to cause a sudden crash. The decline will be slow but assured. I don't understand how the legal architects of this can be this naive. Or perhaps they just don't care.

boudin• 4 years ago

I would expect companies that can do so to move most of their activities out of the US and silo their US operations.

catfishx2• 4 years ago

Imagine hacking that master key...

So will I have to shut down my personal Nextcloud and Matrix server? Also what will happen to SSH? it's also E2EE

nomendos16• 4 years ago

As stated 3rd party actor breaching/hacking government is guaranteed! Another factor if money which is not on the individual side, but on a state actors (i.e. China will focus all to get there and per history it will get there).

In addition chance of "the beast" finding a method to break any new end2end encryption is likely/tbd/time, however individuals/open-source shall be finding another new method over night :-) as I ~40 years ago on 8bit computers I made very similar algorithm to Rijndael AES and I was a kid and that was ~20 years before AES was invented!

raxxorrax6• 4 years ago

The only way out of this is embracing to become a criminal. You have to even the playing field with intelligence agencies breaking the law without any consequence. They have to justify their existence, citizens do not.

You have to protect yourself because the government cannot and will not do it. So focusing on illegal channels is the obvious choice.

nomendos16• 4 years ago

that is "Oblivion" scenario if this passes or 2nd version is The World will face the music that would destroy it I'd rather try to act now with ~100000x less effort to stop this immensely stupid and dangerous act

vanderZwan• 4 years ago

The "misguidedness" (is that a word?) of it all reminds me so much of Cory Doctorow's "The Coming War on General Purpose Computation"[0][1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

[1] https://github.com/jwise/28c3-doctorow/blob/master/transcrip...

58x14• 4 years ago

Iconic and extremely relevant.

nomendos16• 4 years ago

Hehe eventually it is https://www.thefreedictionary.com/misguidedness My life crossed Cory's ;-) long time ago, so not sure if it was subconscious influence.

EGreg2• 4 years ago

To test whether HN has become an echo chamber censoring any viewpoints they disagree with, I will share my actual viewpoint on end-to-end encryption. I have posted it elsewhere in the past:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25030085

First, my bona fides: I am a huge proponent of decentralization, empowering people and giving them control over their own data, relationships, and identity. I distrust large states and organizations and hold them to a very high standard of not harming people. I have put my money where my mouth is and reinvested nearly 90% of our company’s profits to build open source alternatives to Big Tech companies, and routiney give away our software on github. We have built probably the most useful and battle-tested open source alternatives for Web2 and Web3, in the world: https://intercoin.org/overview.pdf

Now, having said all that… as someone who designs distributed systems that reach millions of people across 95+ countries, I have had to seriously consider my responsibility in designing the systems. It would not be very difficult to circumvent whatever laws various jurisdictions have. But regardless of the laws, consider what your tech is enabling. (I wish FB and others did this, but the capitalist profit motive keeps them from doing it, they have to extract rents and distract you at dinner with notifications and get you addicted to arguing online, and suck you into virtual reality or they lose money).

OK, so now to the point

If you are relying on end-to-end encryption to protect you against state-level actors or police, you have already lost and have been reduced to sneaking around. The real solution is to work together fix your democracy and make it a more liberal democracy, with more sensible laws that allow greater freedom of actions and make the punishments fit the amount of harm it caused, with punitive multipliers that account for the probability of not getting caught.

End-to-end encryption, if you uncompromisingly apply critical thinking and call a spade a spade (which is what we should be doing as designers of distributed software) is just an abdication of any sort of governance about what to do about any speech. Freedom of speech is certainly a lofty goal, and personally I don’t think the CSAM in and of itself is the problem — rather it is the acts before and after the content. Terrorists plotting an attack for example, or any group organizing to harm people. Even financial collusion.

Forget states and think organizations. Consider that organizations find it desirable to know whether an employee was using their messaging system and giving away company secrets or plotting to harm the company. A dating site may want to know if a predator is luring women into a trap or duping elderly people into giving up their money. Sex trafficking and many other harms can be investigated.

Now what is the proper way to handle encryption? Due to dropping costs and minituarization we will soon have ubiquitous cameras and surveillance everywhere anyway (including college dorms etc. to solve allegations of rape). The recorded info should all be encrypted at the camera, and anything sent over the network must be encrypted. BUT…

There should be a process to decrypt specific minutes from specific cameras, following a process that involves a complete audit of those trying to access the footage. For example: only if a court case is brought and the video is subpoenaed can the keys be produced, by having the judge, lawyers and the tech companies come together, and only for specific times and specific cameras. In other words: the answer is watching the watchers to only access the info for the correct reasons and always ahve audit trail, rather than having no possibility of watchers in the first place and not knowing whether a rape occurred or not.

Based on this example with cameras, we can extrapolate to communication and groups. If there is suspicion of a group, our society should have the means to decrypt its messages, but ONLY via mesns that highlight WHY, and WHICH times. Certainly it should be possible to do after a crime is alleged to have been committed, and false claims of a crime would be punished too. The remaining question is rather about “precrime”, and whether we should “chill” speech of eg determined would-be criminals plotting something, rather than letting them discuss it and catching them before they commit their destructive acts. For that, there is still open discussion.

But for the rest — the EFF is wrong. We can have freedom of speech, and yet ways to have due process to investigate speech that was tighly related to crimes committed before and after it. What we should REALLY be doing is making sure our agencies (which don’t have to be top-down run by the State, they could be fulfilling yearly contracts paid by neighborhoods or cities) are using the Accountability software the software industry should standardize. The agencies serving us should be more transparent. Rather than citizens sneaking around, they should demand their government become more transparent. The tradeoff of secrets vs transparency which should be discussed is that of GOVERNMENT. 99% of the time, government secrecy harms society, why do we allow it?

To summarize about how our society SHOULD ideally function:

1. Have neighborhoods exercise consumer choice in agencies and courts, let those face market competition. The vouchers used by neighborhoods can be a single payer system by states, but neighborhoods choose to renew contracts or not.

2. Agencies should act transparently. In the case of a court case, responsible platforms should allow decryption by agencies following specific procedures and the public should always have access to the entire audit details

3. We still need https, ie encryption in transit. We still need decentralization and resiliency, so content cannot be taken down, and people’s identity and choices aren’t controlled by specific third parties.

4. Content can harm society (and be exacerbated with botnets retweeting stuff). Individuals do not have the right to unfiltered megaphones, responsible publishing platforms should require peer review (like in science, or wikipedia talk pages) before disseminating information.

The profit motive and capitalism prevent #4 and co-opt ideals like “freedom of speech” to allow pushing messages to groups and radicalizing them. It is not an accident people globally are increasingly divided and hateful politically due to the Internet.

commoner3• 4 years ago

The EFF's position against the EARN IT Act is in the best interests of people in the U.S. and of people who use U.S. technology services in any country. Nobody needs to undermine end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to investigate anything, including speech. Surveillance is becoming more common, but that does not justify the elimination of E2EE. If the government already has access to plenty of data through surveillance, there is no reason that the government should violate its citizens' privacy even further by preventing citizens from having legal access to E2EE. I agree that laws should protect individual rights and freedoms, and I recognize the use of E2EE as one of those freedoms. Trust in government is no substitute for E2EE, which also protects the communications of users from being intercepted by people outside of their own government.

MauranKilom• 4 years ago

Now what is the proper way to handle encryption? Due to dropping costs and minituarization we will soon have ubiquitous cameras and surveillance everywhere anyway (including college dorms etc. to solve allegations of rape). The recorded info should all be encrypted at the camera, and anything sent over the network must be encrypted. BUT…
There should be a process to decrypt specific minutes from specific cameras, following a process that involves a complete audit of those trying to access the footage.

I see your point with this, and I don't contest that it's a conceivable technical solution (all caveats aside). But I don't want to live in the world you describe. That is, it's not a societal solution to me.

nomendos16• 4 years ago

Shortest path to the 1st solution is often centralized, which is where we are now.

Decentralized design is the next TBD step which will follow together with defining how societies could better work with new form of decentralized direct democracies to maximize potential in each of us in a golden rule, maturely balanced way. Decentralized money will follow in new design forms too. I have lots of ideas and number of solutions to propose, but all that takes time and preferable evolution.

However, now we need to stop this evil!

specialist2• 4 years ago

Thank you for posting your vision. It's so easy to just criticize. Divining and then advocating for a better world is really hard.

Pretty sure I agree with most of your points. Especially wrt EFF.org; after all these years, I still can't figure out what they want. It'd take me a (long) while to determine if I agree with your conclusions, because this is hard hard topic.

I was also weened as an anarcho-libertarian. I've never forgiven the Clinton Admin for the Clipper chip. And it's been all down hill ever since.

But hot damn. There are seriously bad people in the world. How can I ignore real world evil and actual human suffering, just to maximize my own (perceived) well being?

I have friends who work on public safety policy like human trafficking. It's absolutely horrific. And I can barely acknowledge child pornography as a thing -- I mean what the actual fuck -- much less register how bad things are.

After decades of pondering this stuff, I still have no clue, no ideas on how to balance the needs of the few with the needs of the many.

However, any position which simply ignores the negative consequences of encryption technologies is not serious, and not worth further consideration.

FWIW, I've done work on both election integrity and electronic medical records. Individual privacy is precious to me, and a hill I was willing to die on.

throwthh4363• 4 years ago

There's already a bill that advocates for a better world for children. But it seems like it won't be passed:

https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-gilli...

EARN IT actually undermines child safety:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20220202/17411648407/senat...

gorgoiler• 4 years ago

Section 5:

“[Use of end to end encryption] shall not serve as an independent basis for liability of a provider […]” but the fact that you did so can now be used against you in court.

The spirit of this bill is to make WhatsApp liable from the moment they become aware of specific instances of child pornography being shared on their platform, and only then after they’ve been shown to be doing nothing to take it down. If they don’t do anything after they’ve verified those specific instances then they are liable.

What’s being implied by all the senators and the journalism around this is something like “everyone knows that in general these E2E platforms carry child porn, so in general they need to turn off E2E.”

The text of the bill doesn’t seem to be talking in generalities. It’s talking about specific criminal cases involving specific instances of abuse? Or maybe it anticipates some sort of action where the government is the plaintiff?

It’s all very confusing.

riedel• 4 years ago

I think the EFF does a very bad job at providing counterarguments to the "fact checking" done by the senators. Maybe someone could provide better more nuanced criticism if anyone tries to reach out for their reps. In Europe a similar situation is coming up and I see the fundamental criticism of some NGOs sometimes not helpful, because this might be just dismissed as radical.

commoner3• 4 years ago

That section was added to the original 2020 bill as an amendment by Senator Patrick Leahy. The Center for Internet and Society (Stanford Law School) has a blog post explaining why that section is not strong enough to shield service providers that offer end-to-end encryption from legal liability:

Leahy’s encryption amendment isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. There’s still skepticism among tech policy wonks and cryptographers alike over Leahy’s encryption amendment. It essentially gives providers a defense against liability, which is less strong than the a priori immunity from liability in the first place that Section 230 currently provides.
CDT predicts that it will invite prolonged litigation over whether potential liability is “because of” the provider’s use of encryption (if so, the case is barred) or because of some other reason (if so, no bar).[3] CDT told CyberScoop that the “consistent threat of litigation … will be a strong disincentive against providing [end-to-end encryption] and continuing to have to defend that decision in court.” With potentially wide variation in state CSAM laws, “the worry,” as Techdirt says, “is that we won't know whether or not offering end-to-end encryption would be seen as violating state laws until long and costly cases go through their lengthy process.” The Internet Society’s Joe Hall agreed, telling CyberScoop that the amendment is “a fig leaf of protection for strong encryption” that leaves providers “to fight it out in court, which is far from cementing protection and clarity for encryption, the bedrock of our lives on the internet and in the real world.” I couldn’t have said it better.
It’s not clear how many cases against providers would actually be precluded by Leahy’s amendment. Plaintiffs and state AGs could readily come up with other grounds besides encryption on which to premise liability for an encrypted service (at least as a pretext, even if encryption is really the ultimate reason they’re mad). CDT also points out that the Leahy amendment doesn’t stop the AG-headed commission from recommending anti-encryption best practices (as any commission with Bill Barr at the helm will likely do). That would’ve been a freebie for Leahy to throw in, especially with the commission’s fangs removed anyway.

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2020/07/earn-it-act-threa...

OOvsuOO• 4 years ago

Encryption should be a right in the bill of rights. Simple. Everybody has secure mail. We're getting hacked every 11 seconds in America. Wake up! Adjust bill of rights to reflect the new tech.

I think the internet has spoiled everything. Life used to be affordable now prices are going crazy everywhere. I blame the internet. If we didn't have it then we would have less wars, less drama, and more vary in living standards so everybody can get a piece of the pie. Now there's no pie left but the crumbs and crusts which are not very tasty.

boppo1• 4 years ago

Listen, we're going about this all wrong:

"Hillary Clinton, Biden, Kamala and other Deep State actors want to use the EARN IT act to read your messages and check if your kids are vaccinated. Next year, if your children haven't had 5 boosters, CPS can take them and you could face jail time! FACT!"

Anyone have MS paint and a few sockpuppet FB accounts? I'm only 20% kidding here.

Edit: forgot to fit "globalists" in there

logicchains• 4 years ago

Edit: forgot to fit "globalists" in there

Just need to add Bill Gates and George Soros to the list and you've got it covered.

catfishx2• 4 years ago

Will SSH also be affected by this?

unglaublich• 4 years ago

The Achilles' heel of the internet is that it's controlled by the US.

DaiPlusPlus• 4 years ago

Rather the US than the PRC or Putin though.

But I'd prefer the EU, imo.

nomendos16• 4 years ago

You're missing the point about this evil act. I'd also pick US as is now, but to summarize after this act US becomes greatest evil against all other and itself.

odiroot• 4 years ago

Don't hold your breath. We have plenty of political forces here that don't like encrypted communication. SPD in Germany would gladly see Telegram be completely banned.

They even brag about this in their own party-media: https://www.vorwaerts.de/artikel/innenpolitik-spd-gegen-tele...

nix23• 4 years ago

I would prefer Iceland, let's make Iceland the Sheppard of the Internet-(Core) ;)

nomendos16• 4 years ago

Still yes US holds main strings. This act is about grabbing it all, so my high certainty prediction is that US would loose all it had. (read my longer post)

danuker• 4 years ago

my longer post

For the convenient clicker: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30298373

shp0ngle• 4 years ago

Yeah let’s move it to Russia and China, that will make it more free

angio• 4 years ago

The internet doesn't need to be controlled by a single country, and there are other countries in the world besides the US, Russia, and China.

peoplefromibiza3• 4 years ago

it's interesting every time something about the US being the US comes up, someone brings up China or Russia.

It's a knee jerk reaction at this point, but, in all honesty, China and Russia have 3 times the internet users US has (China is also building internet infrastructures in many African countries), that can't be easily discarded.

And for many of them the "american internet" is less free, more invasive and more dangerous than their own.

tigerlily2• 4 years ago

More like the Achilles' heel of the US is that it's controlled by the Internet.

MomoXenosaga2• 4 years ago

Not in China. A country that takes it's sovereignty very seriously. But one can argue they've turned it into their own intranet.

i5heu2• 4 years ago

I guess this is the end of "sending customer data to the us". Quite impressive how fast the US-politics can burn billions in $, endanger the technological lead and build a massive opportunity for Europe!

I, as a European could not be happier about this, from a economic standpoint.

Hope you guys over there are not drifting to a surveillance dystopian.

SCUSKU• 4 years ago

I would say we have been since 9/11.

rapnie• 4 years ago

Then there's chatcontrol in the EU. Welcome to Europe.

https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/members-of-the-european-par...

ChuckNorris899• 4 years ago

I, as a European could not be happier about this, from a economic standpoint.

Please, let me play you the world's smallest violin.

This trope, constantly celebrating that $CURRENT_YEAR will finally be the year of EU tech dominance over US giants, has been on repeat ever since Snowden revealed that the NSA is in bed with every major US tech company and is actively spying on EU users. And that was all the way back in 2013.

Sure, the Facebook empire is crumbling now, but since 2013, we still have no EU competitors for Google, Microsoft, Apple, AWS, etc. despite this knowledge that US tech companies have no regard for privacy and that the US government is using them to spy on us.

pastacacioepepe3• 4 years ago

The fragility of the American exceptionalism.

What if we don't want FAANGs in Europe? What if it's harder for FAANGs to develop in Europe because they can't be as aggressive and careless as american corps are?

Personally I don't want Europe to allow huge monopolistic corps to take over our economy.

Why would we want Google, the search engine that provides ads and spies on you instead of providing good results?

Why would we want Facebook/Meta, the ridicolously troubled corporation hated by pretty much everyone at this point?

Why would we want Amazon, famous for exploiting it's workforce, using old wild west methods against unions, exploiting its own sellers by copying their products and selling them for less?

Why would we want Microsoft and Apple and their cartel like attitudes, when we could have a different paradigm of software/hardware that goes to benefit everyone, instead of existing only as a competitive advantage to take over the market?

All of this companies will do anything in their power (lecit or not) to increase their market share and avoid paying taxes.

You can keep your silicon valleys and your oligocratic economy, thank you.

rascul• 4 years ago

The bill hasn't passed yet. It went through a committee, but it has not passed in either the House or the Senate. There's still plenty of opportunity for this bill to get voted out.

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/117/s3538

neycoda• 4 years ago

It's creeping forward. It seems Republicans are a captive audience, Corporate Democrats are on their way, and Progressives and Libertarians are about the only ones pushing against it.

rmbyrro2• 4 years ago

I'm not American nor European.

The US tech industry is lightyears ahead of European counterparts because of factors other than meeting market demands for privacy.

I don't think this is going to fundamentally change anything.

DyslexicAtheist3• 4 years ago

I don't think this is going to fundamentally change anything.

me neither.

my in-laws (90+) in Japan are excited about a new DoCoMo phone and always talks about the latest features. He is not an engineer. He is also not a rare case in that country (or that continent).

My own mother back in EU and most of my family are deeply ambivalent at best, or absolutely opposing new Tech / data-driven ideas.

Europe is like the polar opposite of Asia in that sense. The US is some kind of weird middle-ground. When I returned from Asia to EU after 10 years over there I had a reverse-culture shock that lasted at least 5 years. Everything looked backward and stagnant to me. As I get older I realize I'm also becoming very critical. But age can't explain the ambivalence otherwise Japan would be the most Technology hostile society in the world.

tagoregrtst8• 4 years ago

Get off your high horse.

This is a long term international effort where irrelevant Western countries in the peripheries (that’s the EU) have nibbled away at encryption protections to make it easier for the US to do the same. It’s part of a two decades long effort by Western elites to correct their mistakes from the nineties - namely loosening the noose on information and privacy.

Australia, France, UK all have draconian laws that would cause outrage (or are outright unconstitutional) in the US. The only data protection the EU has is because fussy Eurocrats are annoyed that the US (and not them) get to syphon all of European’s data.

The US is really flawed, but I wouldn't move back to the EU for double my family’s income.

disgruntledphd2• 4 years ago

The US is really flawed, but I wouldn't move back to the EU for double my family’s income.

Which of the 27(8) countries did you live in, as they are rather different?

peoplefromibiza3• 4 years ago

Australia, France, UK all have draconian laws that would cause outrage (or are outright unconstitutional) in the US

at least in those countries you don't have to resign for what you do in your bedroom, consensually, behind closed doors...

The only data protection the EU has is because fussy Eurocrats are annoyed that the US (and not them) get to syphon all of European’s data.

[Citation needed]

this comes up every single time, but it's false nonetheless.

The term "eurocrats" in Europe is used in a negative way only by people who don't understand how EU works, usually from far right.

Nowadays the term Eurocrat has come to encompass staff from all EU Institutions and not only staff from the European Commission.

Although the term Eurocrat might convey negative connotations for some, specialists of European Union and its institutions Didier Georgagakakis and Jay Rowell use the concept of Eurocracy as a way to describe and analyse EU actors and professionals interactions [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocrat

DyslexicAtheist3• 4 years ago

Hope you guys over there are not drifting to a surveillance dystopian.

that's not a local problem but a global one. Many EU countries are well on their way into dystopia. The dystopia is an unavoidable side-effect[1] of having technology and categorizing everything in systems (and systems of systems). This argument gets attacked by "BUT everything can be used for good or bad". But Technology is not neutral.

We just pretend it's neutral because we wouldn't know who to hold accountable when dealing with cause/effect in complex systems of systems (emergence). Consider the following[2]:

In a society such as ours, it is almost impossible for a person to be responsible. A simple example: a dam has been built somewhere, and it bursts. Who is responsible for that? Geologists worked out. They examined the terrain. Engineers drew up the construction plans. Workmen constructed it. And the politicians decided that the dam had to be in that spot. Who is responsible? No one. There is never anyone responsible. Anywhere. In the whole of our technological society the work is so fragmented and broken up into small pieces that no one is responsible. But no one is free either. Everyone has his own, specific task. And that's all he has to do.
Just consider, for example, that atrocious excuse… It was one of the most horrible things I have ever heard. The director of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was asked at the Nuremburg trials, “But didn’t you find it horrible? All those corpses?” He replied, “What could I do? I couldn’t process all those corpses. The capacity of the ovens was too small. It caused me many problems. I had no time to think about these people. I was too busy with the technical problem of my ovens.” That is the classic example of an irresponsible person. He carries out his technical task and isn’t interested in anything else.

[1] The Technological Society, by Jacques Ellul https://archive.org/details/JacquesEllulTheTechnologicalSoci...

[2] The Betrayal by Technology, by Jacques Ellul (1993 film), 06:51: https://youtu.be/BOCtu-rXfPk?t=411

tastyfreeze• 4 years ago

Drifting? We have been there for a long while. The FBI implemented Carnivore in 1997. It is foolish to think surveillance has done anything but grow since then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_%28software%29?wprov...

usrbinbash3• 4 years ago

Sorry, can't hear anything, over the sound of hand-rubbing by Non-US tech companies looking forward to the ENORMEOUS competitive advantage they will be able to offer if this is actually implemented :D

miohtama• 4 years ago

The best move for the US based messaging companies (Signal, are there others?) would be to leave the United States.

Apple, Google, Facebook cannot leave.

Telegram has never been in the US.

usrbinbash3• 4 years ago

Apple, Google, Facebook cannot leave.

Well, that's their problem.

I think we will see a lot of companies founded in the next decade ready to take over such services in the EU. China already has its local companies, and the rest of the world will not be far behind.

trasz3• 4 years ago

What do you mean, "can't leave"? Of course they can spin off another company registered outside the US and turn the old one into a subsidiary.

tigerlily2• 4 years ago

So you want to stop me from using math? Good luck with that.

jas-• 4 years ago

I have not read the details on the bill. However, a quick glance just reminds me of how counter productive and opposite of what our tax paid for research outlines as best practices for protecting data.

The NIST SP 800 series publications were paid for by our tax money and outline how encryption should be used for ALL. Not to mention sets standards for all of the intricacies that come with development, implementation and validation of strong algorithms for use in commerce, medical, federal, military and even GAH personal use.

https://www.nist.gov/cryptography

jimhefferon• 4 years ago

US folks who are interested in writing their Senators can find information at https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm?OrderBy...

FWIW, I sent the email below (largely cribbed from the EFF).

Dear :

I am a constituent. I urge you to oppose the EARN IT act, S.3538. It does not strike a reasonable balance between fighting crimes and the rights of users to privacy and encryption.

The bill empowers every state or territory to create sweeping new Internet regulations, by stripping away the legal protections for websites and apps in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. The states will be allowed to pass whatever law they want to hold private companies liable, as long as they somehow relate their new rules to online child abuse.

The bill’s sponsors have stated that EARN IT will pressure Internet companies to do widespread scanning of user messages and photos. This scanning is incompatible with strong encryption. Consequently, the act allows states to pass laws that will punish companies when they deploy end-to-end encryption, or offer other encrypted services. This includes messaging services like WhatsApp, Signal, and iMessage, as well as web hosts like Amazon Web Services.

The sponsors have falsely claimed that the act would protect children. But abusive images are already highly illegal under federal law. Any Internet platforms that knows about child sexual abuse material being distributed or received are required to take action on it, and can be severely prosecuted if they do not.

EARN IT would lead to penalties for people and companies that use encryption. The harm done by this will fall on vulnerable people. Once we allow encryption to be compromised in order to scan for one thing, authoritarian regimes will demand the same capabilities to track information shared by activists and journalists. Another example is that people subject to domestic abuse, including children, won’t have secure channels of communication to report and reach out for trusted help.

Once again, I urge you to oppose the EARN IT act.

Thank you,

atlantas2• 4 years ago

Not only urge them to oppose it, but make it clear that it's a dealbreaker.

I will vote you out if you support this bill. End of story.

BitwiseFool• 4 years ago

"I will vote you out if you support this bill. End of story. "

I wish this threat would work on Senators who don't represent purple states. Come hell or high water, my home state will re-elect the same Democrats until the day they die or retire.

Edit: Yes, we can try to vote for a different Democrat in the primary but that rarely ever succeeds, especially against a tenured incumbent. I wish there was a runoff system so the vote isn't split amongst ~6 competitors and the incumbent.

colinmhayes• 4 years ago

This threat is utterly empty in most states.

CRConrad10• 4 years ago

The states will be allowed to pass whatever law they want to hold private companies liable, as long as they somehow relate their new rules to online child abuse.

Ah, so child abuse is kind of the new interstate commerce, only for states in stead of the feds?

fullstop• 4 years ago

I have contacted both of my senators and local congress on this. I don't think that it will change much, but at least they know my feelings on the matter.

0F• 4 years ago

I just called both my senators about this.

kkarpkkarp• 4 years ago

US and A: you can't ban people from owning guns because it could be against the constitution (2nd amendment) but you can ban encryption and ignore 4th amendment to the constitution :)

FollowingTheDao• 4 years ago

Whether or not this bill passes I think this may be the end of the "personal" internet for me. No more using accounts or cloud services, just use my old linux thinkpad to look up stuff if I am desperate.

kerneloftruth• 4 years ago

"Key Senators", but none are named in a list. If the call to action is to contact them to persuade them, and the title speaks of "Key Senators".... then name them! Better yet, include contact info.

acd10j• 4 years ago

It seems we are all fighting a losing war, each year Governments of world take away some of our liberty in name of protecting us. And worse part is this is happening across political lines. Pretty grim picture worldwide really.

AnIdiotOnTheNet2• 4 years ago

There's so much "dem boomers and normies don't understand technology" in this thread, not to mention hyperbolic statements about the end of all privacy, and I feel fairly confident that the vast majority of commenters have, like myself, not read the bill. Not that most of us are likely to understand precisely what it means without a legal background anyway.

Is there a competent analysis of the bill I can read? I think this is the bill: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/353... which to my untrained-in-law eyes seems to do nothing more than establish a commission that makes recommendations to service providers.

Like, don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's good reason to oppose this, I'd just like those arguments in a form that isn't a bunch of nerd-oriented rage-porn.

throwthh4363• 4 years ago

Read this techdirt article. Make sure to click and read all the links within the article. Also make sure to read the PDF of Wyden's child safety bill.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20220202/17411648407/senat...

Edit: They got other articles on the same topic, collected here:

https://www.techdirt.com/blog/?tag=earn+it

RadixDLT• 4 years ago

Does this mean we can't use VPN anymore?

frogperson• 4 years ago

This country is fucked. The senate does what they want, most of them are not afraid of being voted out. This or something like it will eventually pass. It will be a Brexit level disaster, and take 20 years to unwind. The small majority of people that want this passed are absolutely relentless, and seem to have enough money to influence enough senators to get this passed.

This will eventually pass.

fontenot-jon• 4 years ago

same racket as net neutrality. dont bother, these clowns cant enforce it without having all of us take down ALL their shit to tax them harder for their greedy stupidity

Key senators have voted for the anti-encryption EARN IT act

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