Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cyberlaw.stanford.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 520 posts

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

#321

Post by kelnos »

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.

I think that view is a little too simplistic. There are some powers you probably just shouldn't give to governments, ever. There are some powers that are fine to give to governments, because they're unlikely to be abused, because abusing them confers little benefit to the abuser.

Then there is a third class of power, where it's useful for the government to have it, but abuse of it can be really bad. So you need to make it really hard to abuse that power. Maybe using the power requires a lot of people to agree. Maybe a list of difficult-to-forge and difficult-to-abuse conditions need to be met before that power can be used. Maybe the power is designed so a lot about how it is used ends up being public, so people can audit its use. And so on.

But I think if there's a power that is likely to be abused by government, and really hard to put checks on that (ab)use, then the government just should not have that power, no matter how useful that power might be.

The problem with assuming that last bit isn't a big deal because they're the "good guys" is that even if they genuinely are the good guys, you never know who is going to get elected during the next cycle (or the next-next, or the next-next-next, or...). They might not be the good guys, but they still get to use that power, and certainly won't pass laws to take that power away.

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

#322

Post by kelnos »

treis wrote: post #50
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…

We had a free society and democracy before the internet.

In theory, but often the level of freeness, and your access to democracy, depended on the color of your skin or your gender. (Which is still the case today, to a great extent, but it was even worse 30, 50, 70, 100, etc. years ago.)

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

#323

Post by raziel2p »

strulovich wrote: post #150
bpodgursky wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would require people willing to be single-issue voters, the way many are on abortion or firearms. Would anyone here switch party votes to a candidate who sided their way on tech privacy — even if they disagreed on other core principles like abortion, gun rights, religion in schools, etc? Maybe a few, but I'm not convinced many.

Those single issue voters are the not present in many other countries besides the US. This might show that the right arguments and lobbying can turn what is not a big political debate into a wedge over time.

they absolutely are - you'll find plenty of voters in Europe who care about nothing other than immigration, for example.

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

#324

Post by heavyset_go »

roenxi wrote: post #310
radicalbyte wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> With benefit of hindsight, turns out there was never a risk of 10% of the population dying.

There's a 10-fold increase in deaths when those with COVID can't get the medical care they need.

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

#325

Post by riedel »

roenxi wrote: post #310
radicalbyte wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The argument I think was never any concrete number of deaths. Our constitution (Germany) at least makes quantitative and qualitative arguments about human life difficult (epidemiology can still inform political decisions).

Normally the pandemic would have been considered an increased risk of life: restriction of basic freedom would have been cancelled by any court. However, we saw triage like situations in countries around us. At the beginning of the pandemic France supposingly had people dying in elderly care because the hospitals were overloaded. Italy and Portugal were close to a failure of their hospital system.

Now with many people vaccinated and omicron in the game the situation is different. But I also see this slowly acknowledged by political decision makers. This does not excuse the often really messy and not consistent, often randomly changing rules. There were prepared protocols for (influenca) pandemics but they were not enacted when the WHO announced the pandemic. We IMHO never got ahead of what was happening since.

I am currently having COVID being healthy and boostered, I am quite happy that I did not catch it earlier.

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

#326

Post by closeparen »

noduerme wrote: post #312
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'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 i…

What you are proposing is that the only writers we should hear from are professionals at publishing institutions, who have editors to vet their work and lawyers to defend it.

That is certainly a take on what The Discourse should be! Return to the print media era, basically. But it is weird to see this take expressed in the same form it wants to end. Hacker News is social media and YCombinator is surely not going to stand beyond everything everyone posts here, or turn it over to spammers.

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

#327

Post by bambax »

kragen wrote: post #41
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…

> 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

Strong disagree. A good government protects freedom from big private companies that feast on it. Antitrust laws cannot be enforced by a weak government, and without those, there can't really be freedom.

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

#328

Post by kelnos »

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.

Perhaps not, but the parent did say that one purpose is to prevent the abuse of power.

And sure, someone might follow up with "but I trust my elected officials/police/FBI/etc. not to abuse power". But then you can provide examples of times when that trust was misplaced. Or point out that elected officials are elected in and out and law enforcement officers quit/retire and are hired all the time, and the incoming people might not be so trustworthy.

So yeah, "this is how it's supposed to be in order to prevent the abuse of power" may not be a complete, ironclad argument, but it's a good jumping-off point to further discussion.

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

#329

Post by fsflover »

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.

People who are busy with their own life can at least support EFF etc. with donations.

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

#330

Post by roenxi »

heavyset_go wrote: post #324
roenxi wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> With benefit of hindsight, turns out there was never a risk of 10% of the population dying. There's a 10-fold increase in deaths when those with COVID can't get the medical care they need.

Countries are reporting in-practice death rates as high at 0.6%, worst case, slight outlier [0]. So even if it were possible for somehow no-one to get medical care (which is difficult to see happening, it takes a while for a wave to burn through and most people don't catch it so there is a lot of potential to beef up the response short-term) and the death rate multiplied 10-fold (which is also open to challenge, depends on a lot of factors and assumptions about how effectively community care could be provided) it still wouldn't reach 10%. That 0.6% might even be a country where the hospital system fell apart, I don't know what healthcare looks like in Peru.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_...

Post reply on HN