<story><title>The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever</title><url>http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2022/02/earn-it-act-back-and-it%E2%80%99s-more-dangerous-ever</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kragen</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;These people seem incapable of understanding the existential threat to free society and democracy posed by limiting &lt;/i&gt;everyone&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;ability to communicate private thoughts.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The existential threat this bill poses to free society and democracy is exactly why they&amp;#x27;re supporting it.  It&amp;#x27;s not some accidental side effect.&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;re opposed to the existence of free society and democracy because it limits government power, which means letting criminals and terrorists run free.  They want the police to have all the power they can get because, as far as they&amp;#x27;re concerned, they&amp;#x27;re the good guys, and giving the good guys more power helps them win against the bad guys.&lt;p&gt;Free society means limited government, and the only way for the government to be in favor of that is for the government to vote against its own interests.  That requires the people in the government to identify more strongly with the people living under the government than with the government itself.  This is precarious at the best of times.  Why would the governing party want to make it easy to organize dissenting political parties and alternative centers of power?  Power might fall into the wrong hands.&lt;p&gt;I know that sounds sarcastic, but try to see it from their perspective, even if you don&amp;#x27;t agree with it.</text></item><item><author>mrandish</author><text>While this bill is strongly opposed by the Internet Society, ACLU, CDT, and EFF, the critiques I&amp;#x27;ve read don&amp;#x27;t get much into the real &amp;quot;why&amp;quot; behind this legislation continuing to be pushed so forcefully. The pretext is, of course, &amp;quot;protect the children&amp;quot; and more generally law-and-order with a bonus side-helping of &amp;quot;stop those awful social media giants.&amp;quot; While these justifications are (hopefully) obvious misdirection to most, I&amp;#x27;d like to see more mainstream discussion about who this bill benefits and why. The legislation &amp;#x27;coincidentally&amp;#x27; achieves exactly the agenda proposed by the &amp;quot;surveillance state&amp;quot; (ie CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS, law enforcement lobby, state prosecutors, etc). While it doesn&amp;#x27;t specifically prohibit public access to encryption, it seeks to create nearly the same effect by making it legally risky for large social media and platform companies to offer end-to-end encryption as a default to law-abiding citizens. It&amp;#x27;s no accident that almost every version of the bill creates this exposure to essentially bottomless legal liability for platforms offering secure communications.&lt;p&gt;Frankly, this scares the crap out of me. These people seem incapable of understanding the existential threat to free society and democracy posed by limiting &lt;i&gt;everyone&amp;#x27;s&lt;/i&gt; ability to communicate private thoughts. While not explicitly outlawing untappable communications, it&amp;#x27;s much easier to identify &lt;i&gt;who&lt;/i&gt; is choosing to use end-to-end encryption when it&amp;#x27;s not the typical default. This will ultimately put all of us who care about secure communications under default suspicion, whether our interest in private comms is a moral ideal, political principle or simply proper technical architecture and data hygiene. In today&amp;#x27;s multi-national environment of nation-state, criminal and privateer (NSO etc) threat actors, insecure communications over Internet infrastructure should only be seen as an ill-advised risky behavior or a technical bug.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Joeri</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Free society means limited government, and the only way for the government to be in favor of that is for the government to vote against its own interests.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I would argue that a free society protects people’s rights, and this is impossible without a strong government. As for voting against its own interests, the government in a true democracy is quite literally the will of the people. We get what we vote for. So if people in general are unhappy with the outcome it is democracy itself that has broken down. The solution to a broken democratic process is not to limit the consequences of that process by shrinking government, it is to fix what’s broken in the first place. In a healthy democracy the government will take up only the responsibilities people want it to take up, and no more than that.</text></comment>
<story><title>The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever</title><url>http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2022/02/earn-it-act-back-and-it%E2%80%99s-more-dangerous-ever</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kragen</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;These people seem incapable of understanding the existential threat to free society and democracy posed by limiting &lt;/i&gt;everyone&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;ability to communicate private thoughts.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;The existential threat this bill poses to free society and democracy is exactly why they&amp;#x27;re supporting it.  It&amp;#x27;s not some accidental side effect.&lt;p&gt;They&amp;#x27;re opposed to the existence of free society and democracy because it limits government power, which means letting criminals and terrorists run free.  They want the police to have all the power they can get because, as far as they&amp;#x27;re concerned, they&amp;#x27;re the good guys, and giving the good guys more power helps them win against the bad guys.&lt;p&gt;Free society means limited government, and the only way for the government to be in favor of that is for the government to vote against its own interests.  That requires the people in the government to identify more strongly with the people living under the government than with the government itself.  This is precarious at the best of times.  Why would the governing party want to make it easy to organize dissenting political parties and alternative centers of power?  Power might fall into the wrong hands.&lt;p&gt;I know that sounds sarcastic, but try to see it from their perspective, even if you don&amp;#x27;t agree with it.</text></item><item><author>mrandish</author><text>While this bill is strongly opposed by the Internet Society, ACLU, CDT, and EFF, the critiques I&amp;#x27;ve read don&amp;#x27;t get much into the real &amp;quot;why&amp;quot; behind this legislation continuing to be pushed so forcefully. The pretext is, of course, &amp;quot;protect the children&amp;quot; and more generally law-and-order with a bonus side-helping of &amp;quot;stop those awful social media giants.&amp;quot; While these justifications are (hopefully) obvious misdirection to most, I&amp;#x27;d like to see more mainstream discussion about who this bill benefits and why. The legislation &amp;#x27;coincidentally&amp;#x27; achieves exactly the agenda proposed by the &amp;quot;surveillance state&amp;quot; (ie CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS, law enforcement lobby, state prosecutors, etc). While it doesn&amp;#x27;t specifically prohibit public access to encryption, it seeks to create nearly the same effect by making it legally risky for large social media and platform companies to offer end-to-end encryption as a default to law-abiding citizens. It&amp;#x27;s no accident that almost every version of the bill creates this exposure to essentially bottomless legal liability for platforms offering secure communications.&lt;p&gt;Frankly, this scares the crap out of me. These people seem incapable of understanding the existential threat to free society and democracy posed by limiting &lt;i&gt;everyone&amp;#x27;s&lt;/i&gt; ability to communicate private thoughts. While not explicitly outlawing untappable communications, it&amp;#x27;s much easier to identify &lt;i&gt;who&lt;/i&gt; is choosing to use end-to-end encryption when it&amp;#x27;s not the typical default. This will ultimately put all of us who care about secure communications under default suspicion, whether our interest in private comms is a moral ideal, political principle or simply proper technical architecture and data hygiene. In today&amp;#x27;s multi-national environment of nation-state, criminal and privateer (NSO etc) threat actors, insecure communications over Internet infrastructure should only be seen as an ill-advised risky behavior or a technical bug.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>treis</author><text>We had a free society and democracy before the internet.</text></comment>