Earn-IT threatens encryption and therefore user freedom

I know this isn't the point of your post, but what does your party affiliation mean in this context? I have known people from both parties who believed their party affiliation was central to their anti-authoritarian stance, and people from both parties who thought that their preferred form of good government would control people.

Do you think your party loyalty made you a more likely target, or should have made you a less likely target?

That said, I use Tor for anything medical related. The NSA might wonder why I am licking my paws so much, or why I keep worrying about foxtails in my ears, but they haven't knocked on my door yet.

The part of the bill that mentions E2EE (Section 5) is an amendment to the Communications Act of 1934, namely the famous Section 230 which contains: "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider."

So the EARN-IT act would seem to me to modify Section 230 to not apply in cases of child sexual exploitation law, importantly "any charge in a criminal prosecution brought against a provider of an interactive computer service under State law regarding the advertisement, promotion, presentation, distribution, or solicitation of child sexual abuse material". However despite this amendment, using E2EE would not "serve as an independent basis for liability of a provider", whatever that means.

This seems more notable to me than the whole "creating a committee to create best practices" sections but I could be misreading or misinterpreting the bill honestly, I'm no expert.

Could it be suggested that banning end-to-end encryption may put citizens, businesses,institutions & infrastructure at risk from hostile nations (Russia in this instance), who may seek this as a potential attack vector?

Therefore we position EARN-IT as a national security threat over individual privacy.

>Now, I also encourage people to not use Tor. I feel it is backed-doored and mostly controlled by Nation State actors to identify 'interesting' subjects via meta-data analysis alone.

No, you should encourage them to use it as much as possible to increase the anonymity set. Tor is not 'backdoored' (it is Free Software) and it is incredibly unlikely for most relays even to be malicious. Rather, Tor has a defined threat model and in the interest of offering high performance with low latency at a low cost, eschews the so-called 'Anonymity Trilemma' and it is thus possible to trace connections through the network if you can monitor the entry stream as well as the exit stream. There are a large number of entities who control various parts of the physical infrastructure between each link of your Tor circuit, from your router, to your ISP, to the local internet exchange point, and every other hop along the way to a destination. If an adversary controls even one of these entities in between you and your chosen guard relay, and between your chosen exit relay and the destination (including even the destination logs), it may be possible to perform correlation attacks to confirm whether or not a particular user connected to a given host (something which is easier to do if the stream is more 'distinct' from other streams, as well).

Tor is a tool which serves to significantly increase the cost of undermining user privacy, and while it is true that it should not be treated as some end-all-be-all of internet privacy, I fail to understand why it should be discarded, rather than treated as just one of a number of tools in the toolkit. For example, if you are attempting to make it more difficult for these global adversaries to trace you, you may consider physical indirection (driving around), adding a layer of wireless relays before the connection to the Internet backbone, exclusion of relays in countries which your own nation can more easily influence in your torrc file, inducing dummy traffic in some capacity, preferring anonymity over pseudonymity, and a myriad of other techniques.

EFF really failed to connect the dots here.

I don't see how, from a plain reading of the bill's text, one can argue what their letter claims.

Can someone connect these dots?