The EARN IT Act introduced by Senator Lindsay Graham purports to be for the prevention of online child exploitation “and other purposes.” It’s those other purposes that we need to watch. The EFF, an organization fighting for your digital civil liberties, writes the article Congress Must Stop the Graham-Blumenthal Anti-Security Bill, expounding upon the many dangers lurking inside this bill.
There’s a new and serious threat to both free speech and security online. Under a draft bill that Bloomberg recently leaked, the Attorney General could unilaterally dictate how online platforms and services must operate. If those companies don’t follow the Attorney General’s rules, they could be on the hook for millions of dollars in civil damages and even state criminal penalties.
The bill, known as the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) Act, grants sweeping powers to the Executive Branch. It opens the door for the government to require new measures to screen users’ speech and even backdoors to read your private communications—a stated goal of one of the bill’s authors.
Senators Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) have been quietly circulating a draft version of EARN IT. Congress must forcefully reject this dangerous bill before it is introduced.
EARN IT Is an Attack on Speech
EARN IT undermines Section 230, the most important law protecting free speech online. Section 230 enforces the common-sense principle that if you say something illegal online, you should be the one held responsible, not the website or platform where you said it (with some important exceptions)…
EARN IT is a direct threat to constitutional protections for free speech and expression. To pass constitutional muster, a law that regulates the content of speech must be as narrowly tailored as possible so as not to chill legitimate, lawful speech. Rather than being narrowly tailored, EARN IT is absurdly broad: under EARN IT, the Commission would effectively have the power to change and broaden the law however it saw fit, as long as it could claim that its recommendations somehow aided in the prevention of child exploitation. Those laws could change and expand unpredictably, especially after changes in the presidential administration…
Throughout his term as Attorney General, William Barr has frequently and vocally demanded “lawful access” to encrypted communications, ignoring the bedrock technical consensus that it is impossible to build a backdoor that is only available to law enforcement. Barr is far from the first administration official to make impossible demands of encryption providers: he joins a long history of government officials from both parties demanding that encryption providers compromise their users’ security.
We know how Barr is going to use his power on the “best practices” panel: to break encryption. He’s said, over and over, that he thinks the “best practice” is to always give law enforcement extraordinary access. So it’s easy to predict that Barr would use EARN IT to demand that providers of end-to-end encrypted communication give law enforcement officers a way to access users’ encrypted messages. This could take the form of straight-up mandated backdoors, or subtler but no less dangerous “solutions” such as client-side scanning. These demands would put encryption providers like WhatsApp and Signal in an awful conundrum: either face the possibility of losing everything in a single lawsuit or knowingly undermine their own users’ security, making all of us more vulnerable to criminals…
Weakening Section 230 makes it much more difficult for a startup to compete with the likes of Facebook or Google. Giving platforms a legal requirement to screen or filter users’ posts makes it extremely difficult for a platform without the resources of the big five tech companies to grow its user base (and of course, if a startup can’t grow its user base, it can’t get the investment necessary to compete)…
Click here to read the entire article at EFF
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