The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever • Hacker News Board

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#181

Post by xvector » Sun, Feb 06, 2022, 2:04 AM UTC

snarf21 wrote: post #144

loteck wrote: post #24

The 3 Techdirt links in the article are especially helpful for catching up. EARN IT is another skirmish in the 30+ year old Crypto Wars. For those who care about defending privacy and encryption, exhaustion is not an option. Power-hungry governments must be viewed similarly to an APT in this context. They are following their very nature, and they will never stop inventing new approaches. There is no other option exce…

While I agree with you, I think the last 5 years have shown that exhaustion wins. It is just a matter of time. People won't stay vigilant. They just want to provide a life for their family. Life is hard enough without having to stop clueless and bribed politicians from ending freedom on a weekly basis.

I don't think this doomer/fatalistic mentality helps anyone. History has also shown that even exhausted people can fight and win.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#182

Post by charcircuit » Sun, Feb 06, 2022, 2:12 AM UTC

notfed wrote: post #169

charcircuit wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think the company should also hold a key. They would use this key after verifying that a warrant is valid. I also think giving out hardware keys with rate limiting / logging features along with key rotation / revocation is essential to reducing abuse.

This is called a backdoor, whether you like it or not. Pinky-promising not to abuse the backdoor key doesn't make it not a backdoor. Backdoors will be abused by governments. Have we learned nothing from the Snowden leaks?

>A backdoor is a typically covert method of bypassing normal authentication or encryption in a computer, product, embedded device, or its embodiment. >Wikipedia

My suggestion isn't covert, nor does it bypass encryption.

>2. A means of access to a computer system that allows unauthorized users to circumvent normal authentication procedures. >thefreedictionary

People with warrants are authorized to access the messages.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#183

Post by kurthr » Sun, Feb 06, 2022, 2:16 AM UTC

mrandish wrote: post #10

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 t…

I agree it's dangerous not only for civil society, but also against other nation states. I have wondered why the TLAs seem enamored of this sort of anti-encryption legislation (since presumably they are the likely only technical enough members to write and promote it). My best guess is not that they "hate freedom" or that they are "compromised agents of a foreign power", but simply that they are fighting the last battle. The older cold war generation has retired, and people in positions of power within the TLAs are simply so consumed by foreign terrorist threats, that they aren't thinking about the fact that if they can read (and forge) these communications, then so can our geopolitical adversaries. Furthermore, the possible disruption of our entire economic (banking) and political system are made possible by such a vulnerability.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#184

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Feb 06, 2022, 2:19 AM UTC

EarlKing wrote: post #93

treis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a free society and democracy before the internet.

We had a society in which all media was controlled by a handful of corporations who dictated what people saw and thought. That is not by any means a free society. Then along came Bulletin Board Systems and then the Internet, and all that changed. Legislation like the EARN IT Act is meant to turn back the clock to silence the voice of the people so that, once again, only the voice of the bourgeoisie can be heard.

[deleted]

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#185

Post by Terry_Roll » Sun, Feb 06, 2022, 2:25 AM UTC

pixl97 wrote: post #54

treis wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a free society and democracy before the internet.

There were many attempts by the same people to monitor phone and mail communications.

The international standards do just fine for enabling spying. Take Call Line Identification (CLI) aka Caller ID.

Any device plugged into the ptsn phone system which can display caller id has to have v23 dial up modem protocol facilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caller_ID#Regional_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITU_V.23

This means _anyone_ with access to the ptsn can upload malicious firmware to a telephone, ATA gataway or dialup modem if the hardware is designed to allow it, & firmware space permitting!

I do find govt legislation somewhat lacking though, for example porn sites now have to have "are you 18 or over", but social media like reddit or twitter does not and regularly on reddit illegal porn (child & animal) is making the front page of reddit before moderators take it down.

Social media sites like reddit or twitter are exempt from the 18year old porn checks because the porn content is not the bulk of their content, it covers many things like jokes, darwin awards, Karens having a psychotic episode and other things like that.

So would parents want their kids seeing illegal porn or mental health breakdowns on social media sites like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook/Whatsapp groups because the current legislation allows the "are you 18 or over" checks to not be applied to facebook, reddit, twitter, whatsapp and other social media platforms?

I know the flip side argument for illegal content is its supposedly stopping an adult from doing it to a child, but I'm not convinced on that point considering how many parents and siblings are behind child abuse and dont post online, but use fraternal networks like the masons and religious organisations to abuse under the pretence of teaching people life lessons!

The religious stance, at least new testament, is to prevent the spread of STD's and to avoid mental health issue when cognitive dissonance sets in during middle age, but Govt's and education needs to tackle this problem to avoid people being exploited through lack of knowledge of the law, because the whole population doesnt even get taught a TLDR of law for life which makes it possible for clever people to exploit less knowledgeable people, which isnt on in my books either.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#186

Post by vore » Sun, Feb 06, 2022, 2:30 AM UTC

cnelsenmilt wrote: post #160

omeze wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of. Look up Western Unions role in the 1876 US election[1]. Stolen communications to support a specific candidate and a compromise between political parties on military presence sounds like a very precarious position for free society to be in. [1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/how-the-robber-b... (also referenced in Tim Wu’s The Master Switch)

One way to look at it then is that we have dealt with similar issues before and survived.

Well, as they say, "past performance is no guarantee of future returns".

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#187

Post by javajosh » Sun, Feb 06, 2022, 2:31 AM UTC

We have to give them something for CSAM, or they'll keep coming at free speech in general using CSAM as cover.

I strongly recommend considering the invention of a sticky, client-side program that scans all images passing through your network interfaces. It is also allowed to send red flagged images to a jury that will be a first hurdle to doing anything: determining it's really a CSAM matter.

I've proposed this before, and got shouted down. Partly because its client side and can be theoretically disabled. But I think it can be made as difficult as black box baseband firmware to undermine. I do not believe the argument that consumers are sophisticated enough to disable this scan, if implemented well. We have demonstrated the ability to force-run processes at every level of abstraction for general compute hardware.

Our best hope is to implement something that has a reasonable chance of catching actual CSAM without generating false positives and without being exploited to prosecute people deemed problematic for arbitrary reasons. Otherwise we get what is probably happening now, which is the secretive scanning of all messages, prosecution limited only by the cost of parallel construction.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#188

Post by bradleyjg » Sun, Feb 06, 2022, 2:36 AM UTC

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #137

bradleyjg wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does that matter? Cops weren’t listening to those old face to face communications. That was practically impossible which is analogous to the technical impossibility of listening in on E2EE connections. Instead they were cracking cases in other ways (physical evidence, confidential sources, etc.)

To play Devil's Advocate: people had to meet up for face-to-face communications, but they don't have to meet up for remote communication.

That’s a true fact but why does it make traditional policing impossible?

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#189

Post by heartbeats » Sun, Feb 06, 2022, 2:37 AM UTC

ridaj wrote: post #6

prepend wrote: post #2

I wish they would address real problems like arbitrary enforcement of TOS that damages users with no recourse. There’s no regulation for what happens when Google or Facebook or whatever deletes or blocks an account and provides no support. Child abuse is serious, but not that common and this law will do little to change that. The lack of a UCC-style law for big tech platforms affects way more people. This seems like…

> There’s no regulation for what happens when Google or Facebook or whatever deletes or blocks an account and provides no support. Yes there is, per the trade regulations you're entitled to a refund . Wait I'm only partly sarcastic. If you think you're entitled to anything provided as a free service then the problem starts there. Do I miss the days when ISPs provided email as part of your subscription? Then made you…

These companies are providing critical infrastructure. If I run a business that's dependent on the phone lines and they cut me off, I'm entitled to a hell of a lot more than the monthly fee for my line. There's many businesses that are solely reliant on Facebook to earn a living. Should Facebook own them?

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#190

Post by oceanghost » Sun, Feb 06, 2022, 2:37 AM UTC

catlifeonmars wrote: post #72

matheusmoreira wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Law enforcement issues don't override all other concerns. If life is difficult for them, good. That's the point. It should be difficult in order to prevent abuse of power. Encryption is a perfectly reasonable reaction to governments that give themselves the right to surveil the entire planet. Nobody really cares that it makes their life harder. That's exactly what it's supposed to do. It should be incredibly hard if…

> This is how it's supposed to be. According to you, which is OPs point exactly. The discussion needs to be framed in a way that stakeholders are walking in common ground, not yelling at each other at a distance from their respective ideological ivory towers. FWIW I happen to agree with you, but IMO “this is how it’s supposed to be” is not a productive argument.

You're exactly wrong.

The Constitution Of the United States, which I believe in unswervingly-- was written at a time when privacy was the DEFAULT. Any person could walk into any building or any field and speak, anonymously to another person. It cost quite a bit to spy on someone and that was a natural limit to how much spying could be done.

The argument from the other side is always-- the framers didn't imagine a world where everyone is carrying around a device that spies on them and they didn't happen to imagine a dystopian future where people are paying corporations to spy on them with unimaginable devices, so, we should be allowed to do that.

Politely, fudge that.