As a non-American, how would they be able to enforce something like this? Is it related to the HTTP specification?
What stops me from encrypting things?
Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption
261–270 of 361 posts
Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption
#262Back in late medieval europa most postal services had a back room, called cabinet noir where letters where carefully opened, read and resealed to check them for signs of treason against the crown or cross. These were often abused for what we today would call economic espionage. For these reasons many rich people employed private couriers who traveled to their business partners in person to hand over messages. Those w…
Everyone should be able to read private politician's correspondence and what they are up to. We should also know their bank accounts and their location at all times. Why should government know those things about us but we can't know that about them? That's a modern slavery.
Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption
#263Back in late medieval europa most postal services had a back room, called cabinet noir where letters where carefully opened, read and resealed to check them for signs of treason against the crown or cross. These were often abused for what we today would call economic espionage. For these reasons many rich people employed private couriers who traveled to their business partners in person to hand over messages. Those w…
To paraphrase someone I know, "once they run out of criminals, they'll just start catching people they don't like". Once they have this ability, it will be much harder to make them give it up.
> "once they run out of criminals, they'll just start catching people they don't like".
Or, just as likely, "once they can catch the people they don't like, they won't need to bother catching the people that you think are criminals".
Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption
#264Back in late medieval europa most postal services had a back room, called cabinet noir where letters where carefully opened, read and resealed to check them for signs of treason against the crown or cross. These were often abused for what we today would call economic espionage. For these reasons many rich people employed private couriers who traveled to their business partners in person to hand over messages. Those w…
> Today many argue the state has a need to access such correspondence to prevent crime, but such a need is like the need of an addict: nothing good can come from it and the people should not enable these institutions to satisfy an ever growing demand for insight into their private lives. One must remember that democracy is founded on the believe that thoughts and words are not crimes and everyone must be free to expr…
In that case why corruption is so rife? With so much tools available they should be able to catch some politicians that indirectly cause death and hardship to millions and yet the law enforcement is focused on catching another student who dared to use wrong plant to relax after tough day.
Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption
#265Things the EARN-IT bill (reminder: supposedly designed to protect children) doesn't do: - Increase funding for child protective services & foster care services - Increase funding for parents (EBT, social work, etc) - Increase funding for schools (comprehensive sex ed, etc) Because our priority is kids! Honestly! Seriously I mean it!
Are you mad that laws against murder (reminder: supposedly designed to protect people) don't include funding for domestic abuse shelters, food pantries, social workers, relocation programs, job retraining, college tuition assistance, and comprehensive sex ed?
This kind of rhetoric is so boring at this point. Trying to destroy a proposal via scope creep is intellectually dishonest and does little more than weaken your own sides position. If I was a senator on the fence about this bill and this was the best argument you could muster against it it would be an easy yea.
Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption
#266The earn it bill is already unenforceable. open source crypto already exists and is available everywhere. so yea. good luck stopping people from using it.
This means anyone implementing and using effective crypto will be flagged for closer monitoring. A jury is made up of twelve people who aren't smart enough to get out of jury duty. It won't be hard for a prosecutor to convince them that going out of your way to use encryption is proof of possessing child pornography. Or terrorist stuff. Or drug stuff. Or whatever else people are terrified of at the time.
Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption
#267Back in late medieval europa most postal services had a back room, called cabinet noir where letters where carefully opened, read and resealed to check them for signs of treason against the crown or cross. These were often abused for what we today would call economic espionage. For these reasons many rich people employed private couriers who traveled to their business partners in person to hand over messages. Those w…
Spot on. And further more, any appeals to safety from politicians should be shouted down as the misdirection that they are.
The root of 99% of crime in the US is poverty. Not private communication.
Trying to solve poverty by spying on everyone’s data is like trying to cure cancer with Tylenol. Even if you temporarily prevent a symptom from occurring, you're still dying of cancer.
So much of political thought in the US is focused on the futile efforts of treating symptoms, and not curing underlying causes.
And the worst part is, if you look at statistics in the rest of the developed world, poverty in fact has a cure! Like in most things, the US is the head-in-the-sand stubborn outlier here.
Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sadly, they did not point to any specific parts of the bill that would support their claims.
The "best practices by a committee they control" requirement which is carte blanche. They could easily set it to considering "key escrow" or "master key" backdoors.
But the worst thing that happens if you fail to implement the best practices is that you lose section 230 protections. If you're and E2E messaging app or the author of device encryption software you don't need section 230 protections to begin with.
Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption
#269All of you smart arses out here and there, we know it, we know. We know, VPNs and other stuff in between are not so secure and not private. Stop saying it, don't you have some other piece of knowledge to be proud of? for god's sake. Tor and Signal are better than Public Cloud, Chrome & SMS if you're looking for privacy. Don't you have common sense? - HTTPS is more secure and private than HTTP - Signal is more secure…
>> We don't have the best security and privacy We today probably have the best privacy tools in all of recorded history. Modern encryption means that anyone on the planet can send a message to anyone else on the planet without fear of government decryption in transit (asymmetric public keys, Tor, PGP, pick your tools). Using freely available tools I can encrypt a file on a USB drive in a way that even an NSA data cen…
We also today probably have the best surveillance tools in all of recorded history. Modern phones mean that anyone on the planet can have their location tracked in real time, and if exploited (perhaps by a malicious update to the OS or apps to add a backdoor), the most intimate information about the user can be harvested in bulk, or they can be watched and listened to, without being served a warrant, even in their own home. These sorts of things were not possible a hundred years ago. They weren't really possible only a generation ago.
Re: Stop the Earn IT Bill Before It Breaks Encryption
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Handing national interstate matters over to states has proven to always be a terrible idea as it leads to a selective representation as they rule over far more than can vote for them. Doing so for the internet is doubly terrible given that location of all parties isn't reasonably known ahead of time nor usually relevant.
> they rule over far more than can vote for them I've never heard the commerce clause explained that way. Very cool.
And very legal.