Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption
Unpopular view, but unrecoverable encryption deployed at web scale is a cancer on society. While unrecoverable encryption provides additional privacy to law abiding citizens, it normalizes low level criminal activity at scale.<p>There has to be a better trade-off here that minimizes the risks of 3rd party access, and gives law enforcement and the intelligence agencies the tools they need to do the best possible job.<p>If I had to choose, I’d rather my consumer endpoints be hardened but have vetted and protected exceptional access mechanisms on the encryption.<p>In practice, this bill is likely to lead to cut corners by big tech, who won’t be legally mandated to actually build increasingly responsible encryption recovery mechanisms for LEO. This will enable big tech to say, “I told you so”, because they were simply doing the minimum amount that was required of them legally.