EARN IT act Senate Debate - "Won't somebody please think of the children!" ~O'brien, probably

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Will the EARN IT act pass?

  • Yes

    Votes: 10 15.6%

  • No

    Votes: 54 84.4%
  • Total voters
    64
MarvinTheParanoidAndroid

MarvinTheParanoidAndroid

This will all end in tears, I just know it.
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kiwifarms.net
Joined
Feb 24, 2015
Old news is new again, and the EARN IT act has returned to try & buttfuck the internet once again. The EARN IT act is a thinly veiled pro-mass surveillance piece of legislation disguised as anti-CP legislation. What it does is it demands that websites which fail to 'earn' Section 230 protections by failing to deal with CP will lose their Section 230 protections.

At face value, that doesn't sound too shitty except for when you realize that leaving CP on your platform is already illegal and perfectly actionable in court, it also would mean that if a malicious scumbag were to flood a given site with CP they could report their own posts to have the website in question deleted off the Internet.

It gets worse however, as the EARN IT act also seeks to wipe out all computer encryption on the whole of the internet, leaving literally everything exposed & readily exploitable. The catastrophic security concerns brought about by this are apparently not a consideration worth pondering.


So since this shit could possibly spell out the apocalypse of the internet as a whole. Here is Mutahar summarizing the EARN IT act.
Today, debates over the EARN IT act have begun in the Senate, here is some debate footage.
Shit is looking pretty bleak so far.

The Senate Judiciary Committee has already voted to advance it and the full Senate can now vote on it at any time.
 
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@MarvinTheParanoidAndroid maybe you should include some links in the OP so people can contact their Representatives and Senators.

Here is the bill on Congress's website with a link to find out who your Senator or Representative is and contact them.

I'd send an email and a letter if possible. anything might help.
Also maybe some kind of letter people can send if they are in a hurry or need advice on what to say? The one I sent to my Senators and Reps is here
Dear Senator/Representative:


It has come to my attention that bill S.3538 - EARN IT Act of 2022 has been introduced for discussion to the Senate Judiciary Committee. If this bill moves out of committee for a vote, I ask that Senator/ Representative: vote against this bill. While the bill has been introduced to combat child abuse online, I fear that the steps it wants to take go too far in violating personal liberty and security. The bill wants websites to scan user messages for child abuse and report it to the government, even encrypted and private messages. Something like this is a violation of our right to privacy and against unlawful search and seizure by the government. By forcing websites to scan encrypted messages it opens ordinary citizens to other threats online such as thieves and scam artists as well as marginalized groups already victims of harassment on the Internet such as LGBTQ individuals. Laws already exist on the books to target and arrest people online who abuse and exploit children, and websites are required to report child abuse to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). We do not need anymore laws that violate citizens individual rights when the laws to go after websites that exploit and abuse children are already on the books. If bill S.3538 goes to the floor for a vote I ask that Senator/ Representative: vote against it.

From: X, a concerned voter.

Just some ideas in case anyone is concerned.
 
Once again, boomers who don't know shit about computers are trying to pass legislation that would destroy the internet. As @Strange Wilderness suggested, contact your local senator and politely tell them why this bill is a bad idea.
 
Strange Wilderness said:
@MarvinTheParanoidAndroid maybe you should include some links in the OP so people can contact their Representatives and Senators.

Here is the bill on Congress's website with a link to find out who your Senator or Representative is and contact them.

I'd send an email and a letter if possible. anything might help.
Also maybe some kind of letter people can send if they are in a hurry or need advice on what to say? The one I sent to my Senators and Reps is here
Dear Senator/Representative:


It has come to my attention that bill S.3538 - EARN IT Act of 2022 has been introduced for discussion to the Senate Judiciary Committee. If this bill moves out of committee for a vote, I ask that Senator/ Representative: vote against this bill. While the bill has been introduced to combat child abuse online, I fear that the steps it wants to take go too far in violating personal liberty and security. The bill wants websites to scan user messages for child abuse and report it to the government, even encrypted and private messages. Something like this is a violation of our right to privacy and against unlawful search and seizure by the government. By forcing websites to scan encrypted messages it opens ordinary citizens to other threats online such as thieves and scam artists as well as marginalized groups already victims of harassment on the Internet such as LGBTQ individuals. Laws already exist on the books to target and arrest people online who abuse and exploit children, and websites are required to report child abuse to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). We do not need anymore laws that violate citizens individual rights when the laws to go after websites that exploit and abuse children are already on the books. If bill S.3538 goes to the floor for a vote I ask that Senator/ Representative: vote against it.

From: X, a concerned voter.

Just some ideas in case anyone is concerned.
Click to expand...
Here's another way
 
So for the layman what is the day to day effect this would have on the average user? Are sites like github or archive.org likely to disappear because they are hosting legally grey abandonware and emulators? These articles are all very inaccessible for the average mouth breather.
 
Rebel Wilson said:
So for the layman what is the day to day effect this would have on the average user? Are sites like github or archive.org likely to disappear because they are hosting legally grey abandonware and emulators? These articles are all very inaccessible for the average mouth breather.
Click to expand...
No end to end encryption, all communication is naked because encryption = complicity in crimes.
 
Lol whatever, a law that whips out encryption tanks the digital economy, lol it's always like the boomers could have stopped there and gotten this thing passed and it would be fine.

The issue I have with this stems from our arbitrary enforcement of the law. I'd love to see platforms get fucked dunked on for violating this, but we all know it's going to be used as a pretense.

It's a nonstarter. If it's gonna fuck up encryption in any meaningful way, it's going to fuck up people's stock portfolios.
 
MarvinTheParanoidAndroid said:
No end to end encryption, all communication is naked because encryption = complicity in crimes.
Click to expand...
Not to mention, isn't that a huge security risk for identity theft and whatnot? If we can't have encryption, there goes pretty much any business done online because you might as well be stapling your address and credit card number to a telephone poll.
 
Sperghetti said:
Not to mention, isn't that a huge security risk for identity theft and whatnot? If we can't have encryption, there goes pretty much any business done online because you might as well be stapling your address and credit card number to a telephone poll.
Click to expand...
Yes, it's a security quagmire that would fuck everybody & make the whole United States exploitable to the rest of the world.
 
I sometimes joke (though, wish) that we had politicians that were IT or Computer Science majors that would actually explain to us what would happen to the Internet when things like this bill would happen.

Though, then again, I’d fear they’d shill themselves out to the likes of Silicon Valley or China.

Strange Wilderness said:
According to this site which tracks bills in Congress there is only a 3% chance of this bill actually becoming a law.
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The 3% are possibly octogenarians that don’t even know how text messaging or e-mail works.
 
This proves again that there should have been an age limit for any politicians in position or power
 
Funny they called it the EARN IT act. I'd rather politicians have to actually have some knowledge of what the fuck they're talking about when it comes to legislating tech before writing utterly incomprehensibly retarded shit like this. Some kind of aptitude and understanding tests, you know, so they could "Earn it".

Seriously, it's a fucking phenomenal embarrassment in front of God and everybody that this is even considered rational at all by fucking anyone.
 
People like Lindsay Graham were always what was wrong with the Republican Party. Also I want to see Null's take on this dog shit bill.
 
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