Using encryption should be considered a right, this way such kind of bills will become impossible.
The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
311–320 of 520 posts
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#312While 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'd personally love to see social media shut down tomorrow, by holding twitter and facebook liable as publishers for the content of every post on their platform, and letting them defend in civil litigation every time they re-publish their users' false statements for profit. But that has nothing to do with government censorship, that's pure libertarianism and letting the publisher bear the cost. The entire notion of inching forward a general level of public disapproval for encryption is indeed terrifying. The template for government now is so well-worn, to take a 2/3rds opinion in the dumb populace and get them to go against the other 1/3rd in the name of safety; yet, we see it much more clearly now. It's easier to fight.
The platforms that are the biggest targets of this are, unfortunately, extremely compromised already by their failure to regulate their own users. Take that and a dose of populist anger, and it's pretty easy to see how important freedoms will be eroded and ultimately, any kind of private speech will be held as grounds for suspicion, even though that speech has nothing to do with these platforms or this law.
Private speech and personal files never belonged on those platforms in the first place, and to me it's hard to believe anyone doing anything illegal at scale would even be using those platforms. What we're concerned with here is how the demolition of their privacy regulations might turn public opinion against those of us who manage our own privacy.
The one bright spot is that we all see it coming.
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
I said P2P, not TOR. With P2P systems you only host your own stuff. So if they want to take someone to court it would be the person with the illegal content on their system... IE. who you want to go after. There is no reason to have to prove anything. Those P2P filesharers that are taken to court are the ones sharing the files, not just random people on the network. With P2P and Federated systems (encrypted or not),…
As a general rule it's unwise to hope for some unintended side effect of bad legislation to solve unrelated problems. The goal of this legislation is surveillance and control. If passed, it will achieve that goal. If it has a side effect of significant number of people starting to use encrypted P2P communication (doubtful imo), they will pass more legislation to make that illegal too, since "child abusers are obvious…
Never claimed to hope for the law to pass and that to happen. It was more speculation on what might happen if it did pass.
Regarding them attacking P2P.. IMO they wouldn't be able to attack P2P specifically without attacking encryption in general. There are to many ways to implement P2P using standard encryption technologies. I think they are starting to realize they can't win that fight without losing the larger war and so are attacking privacy from the angles they can get away with. Like corporate interests to avoid lawsuits.
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a different battle. The government has gone after general purpose encryption multiple times and has been beaten back so far. And while this would definitely be a win for that side of things it isn't the same battle and the Earn IT Act is not about encryption in general. It is about encryption in the context of commercial entities and their managed content.
With greater surveillance power and the precedence of passing this bill the government gains the ability to push a stronger one, including one that targets general encryption. Your intended effect is uncertain at best, I'm not even sure it's going to be a net benefit in the most ideal scenario (losing encryption in commercial setting is at the very least extremely inefficient), and there would certainly be high costs…
I'm sorry I didn't make this clear enough. I don't want this to happen, I'm just speculation that it could have side effects that are helpful to parts of the community that would like to see less reliance on centralized systems. I'm not saying that is worth the tradeoff, because I don't think it is. Just interesting.
Regarding the point that this could/would lead to an attack on general encryption, IMO I think they are doing this more because they are beginning to understand that they can't attack general purpose encryption head on. It is needed in to many places to make it illegal. So they are attacking it from the sides, through corporate interests.
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#315Earlier 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…
I'm probably making assumptions, so I'd like to clarify, which government prohibited travel to such a degree?
In the my US Midwest jurisdiction, the truly restrictive lockdowns closed indoor business, and discouraged gathering, but to my knowledge it was never illegal to travel. And indoor gathering restrictions didn't last more than a few months in private spaces. Although, certain behaviors were strongly discouraged for quite a long time.
I'm assuming based on your units you are not in the US, however.
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#316While 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 think on one side you have security. This means law enforcement, espionage and the increasingly relevant civil security industry. They have pretty straightforward "pro" interests. You also have child protection advocates. They, perhaps rightly, are focused on their own agenda, not the greater picture. It's "not their job" to worry about freedom of speech and association.
This side, like any scrutinized company or government department insisting that "it's a resource thing." IE, their doing all they can with what they've got. Doing better requires something external. More resources, more power, etc. They deliver estimates of how many more children can be saved if only X.
On the other side is more vague. Esoteric digital freedom advocates. Abstract, ideological general freedom advocates. The concentrated, directly interested parties are the social media companies themselves.
So first, social media companies do not want to be stuck in a debate where it's them vs child advocates. They don't want to make esoteric freedom arguments that they don't believe in anyway, and use these to counter child protection arguments.
Second, regulation like this is often beneficial to incumbents. The DMCA, for example. Large incumbents can influence details of legislation, enough that they can at least live with the legislation. It also makes it harder to disrupt them from the outside. Under DMCA, record companies and film studios got what they wanted & social media companies got what they wanted.
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#317I've said it before, I'll say it again. The only way this ends with the preservation of encryption as a standard is a bipartisan fappening-style leak of CEOs, politicians, lawyers, etc. Not just sexual content, but intimate content of any and all kinds: financial records, healthcare visits, everyday texts, etc.
They would find a way to misinterpret the situation and double down, to fight the criminals at fault who did this to them.
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#318Earlier 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…
Sorry for you, but your country's democratic process is probably broken. In my country covid measures were always just the bare minimum to keep things running and lifted/alliveated as soon as possible.
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#319Earlier 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…
I'm probably making assumptions, so I'd like to clarify, which government prohibited travel to such a degree? In the my US Midwest jurisdiction, the truly restrictive lockdowns closed indoor business, and discouraged gathering, but to my knowledge it was never illegal to travel. And indoor gathering restrictions didn't last more than a few months in private spaces. Although, certain behaviors were strongly discourage…
Australia. NSW to be specific since each state had its own response. But US law affects a lot of services I use.
And I wish our government had taken a light-touch approach like yours. Dare I say I wish they'd adopted a philosophy of weak governance and respecting people's rights by letting them make their own choices.
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#320Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's representing the year numeral as YYYYY to avoid a Year 9999 problem and make it into a Year 99999 problem instead. (see The Long Now and other long-term thinking projects)
Wikipedia say Roman empire falls at 395AD, not 0395AD. Text comments are not COBOL, we don't need zero-padding in daily communication.
Good point. So he has actually created a year 99999 format where there wasn’t one before by changing an arbitrary-sized format into a fixed-width one.