UNITED STATES (Times Media Service) – In 2020, a bill was introduced to Congress called the EARN IT bill- Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies. The excuse behind the bill was that it was being instated to protect children and prevent child sexual abuse, but even if such a bill had been meant to do so, the cost of it would be the entirety of the internet privacy of every United States citizen- and, of course, anyone who had their data stored within the US. The bill was entirely intended to do away with encrypted communications in their entirety, meaning that the government could (and would) directly monitor and store every single piece of online communication. And this wasn’t even mentioning the fact that the backdoor into every existing encryption that would be necessary for such monitoring would enable quite literally anyone with the time and inclination to take a look at the personal data of anyone they wanted, with no way of preventing it or making it secure.
Obviously, the bill failed, due to being hideously unpopular and receiving incredible amounts of backlash that wasn’t in the slightest restrained by American political affiliations. It was obviously a terrible idea, for a large number of reasons, and was frankly one of the stupidest and most ham-fisted attempts at surveillance of citizens that the US government has ever attempted. So, obviously, they’ve tried to introduce the bill once again, with few to no changes.
So, why is this such a problem?
Firstly, such a bill would break the back of all encryption software used by all tech companies operating within the US to any degree. With a glaring and obvious backdoor, and the US government’s typical lack of comprehension of data security, previously private data shared with end-to-end encryption would now be on the Internet for all to see. Nothing would be private again, and anyone that attempted to make a private service would be struck by the US government for trying. This, of course, isn’t to mention the fact that corporations would most likely use the same route to observe and record all private communications, using the data for any number of purposes.
Secondly, the response is not just worthless, but entirely incompetent. The level of surveillance that such a bill would place in the hands of the government is comparable to a government intercepting and opening every single piece of physical correspondence that passes through the hands of any delivery service acting within its territory. And this does not begin to address the fact that the portion of child exploitative messaging, out of all those letters that would be opened and recorded, is less than a percent. And this is worsened by the fact that the criminals that trade in this sort of immoral material aren’t particularly going to care what the law is, and thus will continue to use now-illegal encryption channels that the government cannot monitor.
Thirdly, the entire point behind the bill, besides enacting these frankly ludicrous laws, is to establish a commission. In the original version, this commission was given complete arbitration over whatever rules they wanted to make regarding internet privacy- or, more likely, ensuring that there wasn’t any. In the new bill, the commission is simply advisory, and the complete arbitration is given to the legislature instead. So, the response of various Democrat and Republican figures, upon finding that a bill was horrifically unpopular with the public due to its frank stupidity, decided that the best way of responding to such a situation was to worsen everything those people found objectionable about the bill and sneak it through Congress while the public was distracted by Covid. Which is about the level of braindead dishonesty one would expect from the government, so not a huge surprise.
The primary problem with the Internet isn’t that it’s unregulated. The problem is that it’s overregulated, and that most of the regulation is either complete idiocy or politicians spit-shining the boots of corporations. The EARN IT act has demonstrated that the US government, if not governments in general, can’t be trusted with power over the Internet, owing to either complete lack of understanding or directly malicious intent. If the rampant targeting of Section 230- the best piece of Internet law that the US government has ever passed by far- wasn’t enough, EARN IT continues to exist. The mere fact that the bill has been reintroduced shows that US politicians on both sides don’t understand what their citizens want, don’t care in the slightest, or both.
Perhaps the US government should assemble the commission out of third graders, as they would both have a better understanding of the Internet and would be far more empathetic.
Alexander Murphy / Tech Writer (Times Media Service)
amurphy@timesmediaservice.com
