The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
While this bill is strongly opposed by the Internet Society, ACLU, CDT, and EFF, the critiques I&#x27;ve read don&#x27;t get much into the real &quot;why&quot; behind this legislation continuing to be pushed so forcefully. The pretext is, of course, &quot;protect the children&quot; and more generally law-and-order with a bonus side-helping of &quot;stop those awful social media giants.&quot; While these justifications are (hopefully) obvious misdirection to most, I&#x27;d like to see more mainstream discussion about who this bill benefits and why. The legislation &#x27;coincidentally&#x27; achieves exactly the agenda proposed by the &quot;surveillance state&quot; (ie CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS, law enforcement lobby, state prosecutors, etc). While it doesn&#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&#x27;s no accident that almost every version of the bill creates this exposure to essentially bottomless legal liability for platforms offering secure communications.<p>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 <i>everyone&#x27;s</i> ability to communicate private thoughts. While not explicitly outlawing untappable communications, it&#x27;s much easier to identify <i>who</i> is choosing to use end-to-end encryption when it&#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&#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.