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

cyberlaw.stanford.edu

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

#301

Post by McDyver »

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.

> They just want to provide a life for their family.

That's true, and keeping people worried about their next paycheck is a great way to control them.

The good thing about this "great resignation" or "great renegotiation", is that some people are starting to take that fight into their own hands. They are shifting the power and taking control of their own lives.

Eventually their focus will no longer be on short-term survival, and thry will take control of other aspects of their lives that currently are not so pressing.

I'm hopeful that younger people will be more aware, and see through these boomer games.

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

#302

Post by [deleted] »

nyokodo wrote: post #272
j16sdiz wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

disclaimer: I am not American, and know nothing about American politics. I think all these start around Trump's administration. Trump start calling some media/social media as fake news, and some media/social media start censoring his supporter. After seeing the worse effects of misleading information, many free-speech-supporter back off alot.

> Trump...misleading information...free-speech-supporter back off alot. Trump is a correlation to (not cause of) both the left and right in America turning sharply populist and inward looking in recent years. Populists tend not to be concerned with principles like freedom of speech, or the concerns of the global community.

[deleted]

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

#304

Post by roenxi »

Joeri wrote: post #292
kragen wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These people seem incapable of understanding the existential threat to free society and democracy posed by limiting everyone's ability to communicate private thoughts. The existential threat this bill poses to free society and democracy is exactly why they're supporting it. It's not some accidental side effect. They're opposed to the existence of free society and democracy because it limits government power, which…

Free society means limited government, and the only way for the government to be in favor of that is for the government to vote against its own interests. I would argue that a free society protects people’s rights, and this is impossible without a strong government. As for voting against its own interests, the government in a true democracy is quite literally the will of the people. We get what we vote for. So if peo…

My government has just spent 2 years - a pretty significant percentage of a lifetime - working to keep me from travelling more than 5km from my home and made it illegal for me to see my friends. And I'm not even going to have a sympathetic audience if I try to claim this is against my wishes or wellbeing.

Run me through, in simple terms, how much worse it could get? I suppose they aren't trying to kill me, which is a nice minimum standard? These people have no respect for my rights. They don't think my rights rate on the scale of their objectives. And they want to spy on my mail - possibly to figure out from my phone if I've gone 6km from my home? I would quite like strong encryption by default and a weak government, please.

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

#305

Post by 3np »

callalex wrote: post #252
kragen wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's definitely an abridgment of your rights to free speech. The Anarchist Cookbook is an interesting study: prior restraint was never exercised against it because Hoover's FBI decided it was protected by the First Amendment, and it was published by the same (commercial) publisher as Charles Bukowski, The Sensuous Woman , and The Turner Diaries , selling some two million copies in all. But it's so famously terrible…

Why are you writing years as if they are C octals? Standards in communication are important.

As can be seen here, it’s really distracting. Writing years like that is a great way to have people ignore or forget what you’re actually wanting to communicate.

Which is unfortunate, as they do have some interesting thoughts that are now masked by insisting on their own edgy year format.

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

#307

Post by [deleted] »

vkou wrote: post #273
zdragnar wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But we all know Excepting the approval of end to end encryption and residential zoning, pretty much every problem thread on HN is littered with comments about how we need more regulation and laws to solve X or Y or Z. Wanting the "good guys" to have more power is pretty much the default response on here nowadays. I remember earlier- including before I had signed up for an account- when HN was much more libertarian,…

> Wanting the "good guys" to have more power is pretty much the default response on here nowadays. The alternative to giving a democratic government power isn't 'nobody has power'. The alternative to giving a democratic government power is ceding it to undemocratic, unelected oligarchs. When a democratic government has it, you get some say in how it is used.

[deleted]

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

#308

Post by radicalbyte »

roenxi wrote: post #304
Joeri wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free society means limited government, and the only way for the government to be in favor of that is for the government to vote against its own interests. I would argue that a free society protects people’s rights, and this is impossible without a strong government. As for voting against its own interests, the government in a true democracy is quite literally the will of the people. We get what we vote for. So if peo…

My government has just spent 2 years - a pretty significant percentage of a lifetime - working to keep me from travelling more than 5km from my home and made it illegal for me to see my friends. And I'm not even going to have a sympathetic audience if I try to claim this is against my wishes or wellbeing. Run me through, in simple terms, how much worse it could get? I suppose they aren't trying to kill me, which is a…

My government has restricted travel in order to stop a pandemic virus spreading to the point where hospitals are overwhelmed and we start seeing 10% of the population dying instead of 0.5%.

Thankfully they have also implemented a nationwide vaccination scheme and a vaccination pass which is accepted pretty much anywhere worldwide.

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

#309

Post by vkazanov »

vkou wrote: post #290
kragen wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they're worried about criminals and terrorists, as well as protests; nobody wants to watch their children die in a home invasion or a burning skyscraper, not even politicians, and nobody wants habitual violent criminals to repeatedly victimize innocent people (unless they identify strongly with the criminals). Peaceful protests can be a powerful instrument for change, including taking away government power,…

> Remember who won the elections after the overthrows of Mubarak, the Shah, and the Tsar. A mostly liberal-democratic provisional government that was violently overthrown eight months later by a Bolshevik coup because it refused to deal with the same problems (war and famine) that caused the Tsar to be overthrown? Have we all forgotten the February revolution..?

That's a very interesting definition of "liberal"! They were about as liberal as the british parliament at the time, and that I cannot call liberal in any sense of the word.

And they did lose it in no time, yes

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

#310

Post by roenxi »

radicalbyte wrote: post #308
roenxi wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My government has just spent 2 years - a pretty significant percentage of a lifetime - working to keep me from travelling more than 5km from my home and made it illegal for me to see my friends. And I'm not even going to have a sympathetic audience if I try to claim this is against my wishes or wellbeing. Run me through, in simple terms, how much worse it could get? I suppose they aren't trying to kill me, which is a…

My government has restricted travel in order to stop a pandemic virus spreading to the point where hospitals are overwhelmed and we start seeing 10% of the population dying instead of 0.5%. Thankfully they have also implemented a nationwide vaccination scheme and a vaccination pass which is accepted pretty much anywhere worldwide.

With benefit of hindsight, turns out there was never a risk of 10% of the population dying. The disease isn't that deadly, even if the hospital system did give out (and the numbers I've been looking at seem to suggest that the risk of the hospital system giving out was oversold - it didn't look fun but it also didn't seem to buckle enough to justify the authoritarian response in my eyes).

If I were being uncharitable towards people who basically put me under a form of house arrest - which I am - I might note that the government will only revoke my rights in a way justified by your poor grasp of the figures some of the time. Which is hardly comforting when people argue that strong governments will somehow protect me from a threat that only emanates from government. This "strong governments protect rights" argument is weak. Nobody has ever threatened my rights as profoundly as my strong government.

Maybe "rights" is too strong a word, they're only applicable for about 90-95% of the time. "Privileges which only get stripped when they feel it is a good idea" is a mouthful though. The dust hasn't even settled enough to tell if the interventions worked.

Anyway, they shouldn't be reading my mail. These people clearly don't represent the interests of a big chunk of the population. And me.

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