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Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

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Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#181

Post by stickfigure »

xenophonf wrote: post #158
dontcarethrow2 wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A society that mistrusts its own citizens to a point where all those that whisper to each other are called criminals, dealers, traitors or terrorists is rotten at its core. I mean you said it yourself, dealers. This is why I believe EARN IT will even be celebrated. Generations who accept a war on drugs as sane, did we ever think these people will produce offspring who can think for themselves? The ones who somehow d…

> Let's ramp up those genetic studies and get rid of the undesirables already Holy shit, this is straight up racism. How the hell you got from protecting freethinkers to eugenics, I have no idea.

Poe's law strikes again.

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#182

Post by mdifrgechd »

hardly_a_mirage wrote: post #156
Jon_Lowtek wrote: post #144

Back in late medieval europa most postal services had a back room, called cabinet noir where letters where carefully opened, read and resealed to check them for signs of treason against the crown or cross. These were often abused for what we today would call economic espionage. For these reasons many rich people employed private couriers who traveled to their business partners in person to hand over messages. Those w…

> Today many argue the state has a need to access such correspondence to prevent crime, but such a need is like the need of an addict: nothing good can come from it and the people should not enable these institutions to satisfy an ever growing demand for insight into their private lives. One must remember that democracy is founded on the believe that thoughts and words are not crimes and everyone must be free to expr…

Yes, your point applies to many modern discussions and an often used rhetorical device I see is to jump away from the "should we do this" discussions and into the "does this work discussion" (to paraphrase jurassic park a bit). Common examples that won't make me popular are climate change, current anti-covid measures, and not eating meat. People get hung up on technicalities about whether ice cores show evidence of some climate relationship, or whether staying home reduces disease transmission, and pretend that those facts automatically lead to a conclusion about how we should behave, while bypassing the discussion about the kind of world we want to live in. I hypothesize that people feel on firmer ground when they shift their ideological arguments into facts about causality, instead of head on discussing why they value a certain kind of society.

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#183

Post by sandworm101 »

izzytcp wrote: post #104

All of you smart arses out here and there, we know it, we know. We know, VPNs and other stuff in between are not so secure and not private. Stop saying it, don't you have some other piece of knowledge to be proud of? for god's sake. Tor and Signal are better than Public Cloud, Chrome & SMS if you're looking for privacy. Don't you have common sense? - HTTPS is more secure and private than HTTP - Signal is more secure…

>> We don't have the best security and privacy

We today probably have the best privacy tools in all of recorded history. Modern encryption means that anyone on the planet can send a message to anyone else on the planet without fear of government decryption in transit (asymmetric public keys, Tor, PGP, pick your tools). Using freely available tools I can encrypt a file on a USB drive in a way that even an NSA data center running for a billion years wouldn't decrypt. Those sorts of things were not possible a hundred years ago. They weren't really possible only a generation ago.

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#184

Post by loughnane »

knobcore wrote: post #178

If you're so scared about your government that your activity might get you thrown away for life and it doesn't involve murdering someone, then you need better government, not better security because those kinds of governments will just say you murdered someone without any proof and lock you up or kill you anyway if they don't like you.

I know of no government ever that has been so benevolent that its citizens didn't benefit from privacy and security.

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#185

Post by crpatino »

Jon_Lowtek wrote: post #144

Back in late medieval europa most postal services had a back room, called cabinet noir where letters where carefully opened, read and resealed to check them for signs of treason against the crown or cross. These were often abused for what we today would call economic espionage. For these reasons many rich people employed private couriers who traveled to their business partners in person to hand over messages. Those w…

> And yes, it is true that these totalitarian methods ar efficient in fighting street level crime.

You give too much credit to police states.

What happens in reality is that criminals with connections and a minimum of self restrain are folded into the "dark side" of the State, while their rivals are cracked down hard. In this way, a number of low-impact, high-revenue illegal activities are tolerated (in exchange of bribes), crime syndicates are expected to self police and not break whatever taboos were imposed from above; and then this "dark side" of the government do put a lid on top of the deviant side of society, diverting their energies into activities that do not challenge the status quo.

Does it make for a safer place to live for the common citizen? Maybe. While it may be less likely that you will be injured in an armed robbery, you will also be more likely to get your money swindled by this scheme or another... and you will have less chance of redress when this happens.

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#186

Post by knobcore »

upofadown wrote: post #110

PGP was specifically created to combat this sort of legal threat. It is proof that encryption is ultimately controlled by individuals. The identity management is completely decentralization and it works over pretty much any medium. It seems that the world has somehow forgotten the lesson. People can only see the centralized systems and don't realize that the problem they are trying to solve is not solvable in general…

Encryption might be unstoppable but they can always just assign you an IPV6 address and encryption fingerprint that becomes your new online social security number that is required from the compiler on up.

Notarize your apps buddy and sign into your app account... ;)

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#187

Post by BlueScreenDeath »

knobcore wrote: post #178

If you're so scared about your government that your activity might get you thrown away for life and it doesn't involve murdering someone, then you need better government, not better security because those kinds of governments will just say you murdered someone without any proof and lock you up or kill you anyway if they don't like you.

Like they did to Ross Ulbricht?

[1] https://freeross.org/real-untold-story/

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#188

Post by ciarannolan »

colinb wrote: post #18
AmericanChopper wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is welcome to compete with American tech, and has been trying very hard at it for quite a long time.

Hmm. I'm not sure the Chinese government would agree with your first statement. They seem to be getting significant US opposition to their technology advancement. Yes, I'm aware of some of the issues surrounding IP copying. I won't call it theft because the word is contentious and there are those in this forum who don't think you can steal ideas. I'm also aware of the US' own history of gathering IP to bootstrap its…

> They seem to be getting significant US opposition to their technology advancement.

Do you think that's related to China allowing zero domestic tech competition, but demanding that their companies be allowed to compete in the rest of the world?

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#189

Post by panax »

ptyyy wrote: post #149
ghastmaster wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You see, the EARN IT Act grants the Attorney General broad authority to force tech companies to do whatever he wants I looked and could not find this. That article did not offer any specifics either.

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2020/01/earn-it-act-how-b... Scroll to summary, specifically "Section 230 immunity for CSAM can be earned via 1 of 2 “safe harbors”."

Here is some more criticism of the EARN IT Act supporting that https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/03/the_earn-it_a...

Lindsay Graham has repeatedly sought to weaken encryption and mandate backdoors and key escrow. Also in June this year following the EARN IT Act he introduced the Lawful Access To Encrypted Data Act (LAED) which would mandate backdoors:

https://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/2020/06/there%E2%80%99s-n...

LEAD is extreme and has little support. It is widely believed that the LAED was not intended to be passed but is meant to help pass the EARN IT Act by making the EARN IT Act seem like a more moderate and reasonable piece of legislation.

The EARN IT Act is really a ploy by Lindsay Graham and others to bypass Congress on this issue which they cannot otherwise get passed, and allow a small group of people who are not even security experts to develop regulation and mandates (which will probably be against encryption) under the guise of fighting child porn.

Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption

#190

Post by knobcore »

loughnane wrote: post #184
knobcore wrote: post #178

If you're so scared about your government that your activity might get you thrown away for life and it doesn't involve murdering someone, then you need better government, not better security because those kinds of governments will just say you murdered someone without any proof and lock you up or kill you anyway if they don't like you.

I know of no government ever that has been so benevolent that its citizens didn't benefit from privacy and security.

This implies that said governments are bad. Or have the perception of it.

You know who benefits from VPNs, privacy, and security?

The proud boys. Russia. China. Steve Bannon. And their bots, that's who. They are a threat to civil society at present, and they're using that very privacy and security to organize to destroy the thing you're trying to "protect" by drinking Barlow's kool-aid.

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