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