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Oppose the Earn IT Act

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Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#61

Post by paulgb »

darkarmani wrote: post #51
blisterpeanuts wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are already extraordinary chilling effects on speech -- try criticizing Black Lives Matter on any major social media, for example, and you will likely be censored, doxxed, and even receive death threats. Up until now, major social media (FB, Twitter, Youtube etc.) have been free to suppress conservative voices in the name of opposing racism and white supremacists. The tech platforms have been shielded from laws…

You are suggesting a technical solution to a cultural problem. Speech is supposed to have consequences. How else could it be? > Up until now, major social media (FB, Twitter, Youtube etc.) have been free to suppress conservative voices in the name of opposing racism and white supremacists. I guess nazis can be seen as conservative voices by definition. But isn't that the same thing as Fox in the other direction? Corp…

> Cancel cultural is a bad cultural phenomenon. We need to develop a healthier culture to fix this problem. Hamfisted Federal laws are not going to make a significant difference here without causing significant harm.

I started writing a reply to parent before I saw yours but I stopped when I saw this sentence because there's no way I could put it better.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#62

Post by mindslight »

blisterpeanuts wrote: post #37
unreal6 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you clarify what you mean by the "230 Loophole"? Many believe that tech companies should be fully responsible for anything said on their platforms. If this were the case, I believe this would have an extraordinary chilling effect on speech.

There are already extraordinary chilling effects on speech -- try criticizing Black Lives Matter on any major social media, for example, and you will likely be censored, doxxed, and even receive death threats. Up until now, major social media (FB, Twitter, Youtube etc.) have been free to suppress conservative voices in the name of opposing racism and white supremacists. The tech platforms have been shielded from laws…

To the extent that a cancel mob was created by the editorialization of a company (eg promoting specific posts), they can already sue the company for its part - section 230 does not apply to the data that the company itself publishes. And to the extent that the cancel mob organized itself organically, attacking a company for providing a conduit is a direct attack on free speech.

That said if this does pass, we can only hope that the attractive nuisances of webapps will fall out of fashion. User-advocating client software is the real anti-censorship future. Of course what will likely happen is the frog will slowly continue to boil, and the censorship regime will be extended to p2p communications as well.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#63

Post by Shared404 »

danboarder wrote: post #35
mikestew wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can run, and with that platform your opponent will conveniently turn it around into "my opponent supports child molestors and terrorists". Because if you think you'll simply walk up to the podium talking about something most folks could not give a working definition for, boy, are you going to be in for a shock when your opponent "dumbs it down" for the audience. Which is how we end up with stuff like the EARN IT…

In that case we need to provide working definitions advocating for privacy and information freedom that the average consumer can appreciate and support. I'm open to ideas. One approach is to explain that without private encrypted communications your information cannot be free: instead it will be monitored and censored by the many parties that believe we should not see or say one thing or another. Privacy enables free…

For what it's worth, if you happened to run on this platform in an area where I had a vote, you would probably get it.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#64

Post by Klonoar »

programmarchy wrote: post #13

Thankful for Mozilla and EFF, but have any tech elites spoken out against this or put money into defeating it? Thiel, Musk, Altman, Graham... hello? Should we assume SV is complicit?

Not even touching on those individuals, it's been bothering me that it feels like mostly silence from Google, Apple, Facebook (who this would presumably really hit at), etc.

I'd really love to be missing something. It feels like this is just fading into the background... and while I can acknowledge the idea that you might just try to fight this as unconstitutional after it passes, that feels inherently risky given this administration (if not downright stupid).

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#65

Post by antepodius »

president wrote: post #44

Has anyone considered that maybe there are actually people in this world that want to be able to catch criminals and terrorists? Even if the bill does result in adding backdoors (which is all based on speculation anyway), you don't think people and technology would recalibrate itself to overcome issues caused by backdoors? I find it insane that people think technology is so much more important than the potential for…

It's Liberty vs. Security.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#66

Post by asdkhadsj »

blintz wrote: post #3

I cannot believe that the one thing we have bipartisan consensus on is destroying strong encryption. I guess I’m biased since this is essentially my whole livelihood, but this is crazy, right?

I'm most curious on when they'll be knocking on the door of open source projects next. Notably, anyone who uses any crypto.

As much as I hate it, I can at least understand the back door argument from a [ignorant] lawmaker perspective. If I pretend and say their intentions are noble, I understand.

What concerns me though, beyond the obvious backdoor problems, is the who is next? Because I doubt big corporations will satisfy their greed for power and information. Especially since anyone who has anything to hide or cares about security will move into open source.

As a developer with a passion for developing distributed, encrypted software - when are they going to threaten me? Worse yet, the software I write I purposefully do not have control over. So am I going to be held liable for the fact that I literally cannot help them?

No matter what they threaten me with, the best I could do is break the application for future users. So what are they going to do to control these distributed systems? Especially ones who truly aim to be distributed, P2P & self hosted by every user?

As terrifying as the current anti-encryption behavior is, I'm oddly more concerned about the move after this.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#68

Post by darkarmani »

ipnon wrote: post #33

The primary impediment to combating child sexual abuse material is the scarcity of law enforcement agents relative to the scale of offenders.[0] Law enforcement agencies are already at the limit of how many offenders they can prosecute because offenders are primarily detected by agents who are posing as offenders or by agents who are posing as victims. The solution proposed by the researchers in the referenced docume…

So, create some dog-and-ponies AI start-up for this in the districts of the most influential lawmakers, with stated job counts (for AI-mechanical turk work that hires lots of people).

Tie the "correct" solution to their real political motivations and it will get done in a heartbeat. It has to be something they can sell to their base though.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#69

Post by Shared404 »

president wrote: post #44

Has anyone considered that maybe there are actually people in this world that want to be able to catch criminals and terrorists? Even if the bill does result in adding backdoors (which is all based on speculation anyway), you don't think people and technology would recalibrate itself to overcome issues caused by backdoors? I find it insane that people think technology is so much more important than the potential for…

Alternately, we could recalibrate the methods used to catch criminals and terrorists so that we did _not_ have to yield up all of our information to the gov, as well as every script kiddie with an internet connection.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#70

Post by treis »

blintz wrote: post #3

I cannot believe that the one thing we have bipartisan consensus on is destroying strong encryption. I guess I’m biased since this is essentially my whole livelihood, but this is crazy, right?

>I guess I’m biased since this is essentially my whole livelihood, but this is crazy, right?

There's clearly a valid argument from the other side. For example:

>Facebook announced in March plans to encrypt Messenger, which last year was responsible for nearly 12 million of the 18.4 million worldwide reports of child sexual abuse material, according to people familiar with the reports.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...

It's not clear how many of those lead to convictions but even a tiny fraction of a percent represents a significant number of children being rescued. Encrypting Messenger, as an example, will stop 3/4s of abuse reports and make it much safer and easier for paedophiles to exchange images. There's a pretty direct line from that decision to an increase in abuses like:

>“inserting an ice cube into the vagina” of a young girl, the documents said, before tying her ankles together, taping her mouth shut and suspending her upside down. As the video continued, the girl was beaten, slapped and burned with a match or candle.

>“The predominant sound is the child screaming and crying,” according to a federal agent quoted in the documents.

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