Senators proposed the EARN IT act in March 2020. It’s supposed to be about protecting children from abuse, rape and exploitation. Instead, though, it’s a crippling attack on encryption on the internet. It just passed the senate judiciary committee.
Simply put, the EARN IT bill is the US government’s plan to scan every message online.
Imagine an Internet where the law required every message sent to be read by government-approved scanning software. Companies that handle such messages wouldn’t be allowed to securely encrypt them, or they’d lose legal protections that allow them to operate.
Mullin, J. (2020, March 17). The EARN IT bill is the government’s plan to scan every message online. Electronic Frontier Foundation. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-bill-governments-not-so-secret-plan-scan-every-message-online
It’s hard to overstate how important encryption is to the modern internet, and to the world at large. It’s not just about communicating person to person! When you enter your credit card to purchase a pair of socks, you’re relying on encryption to keep your credit card safe. If you’re logging into Facebook or iCloud, you’re relying on encryption to keep your password safe. Increasingly, websites are using encryption by default so that your web browsing can’t be intercepted or even modified en route to you. If you’re reading this article, your browser downloaded it through the an encrypted and secured connection.
“This is a profoundly awful proposal on multiple levels,” says Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, of the EARN IT Act. “It uses the laudable aim of fighting child exploitation to cynically launder law enforcement’s unsuccessful, decades-long effort to undermine strong end-to-end encryption.”
Newman, L. H. (2020, March 5). The EARN IT Act is a sneak attack on encryption. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/earn-it-act-sneak-attack-on-encryption/
The EFF has chimed in, too:
The bill will create a new government commission, dominated by law enforcement agencies, and give it unprecedented power over websites both large and small.
Protect our speech and security online: Reject the Graham-Blumenthal EARN IT Act. (n.d.). EFF Action Center. https://act.eff.org/action/stop-the-earn-it-bill-before-it-breaks-encryption/
I want to clarify that trying to stop child rape and exploitation is a noble goal, even a necessary one for a healthy society. The problem is that the measures taken are far in excess of that. A door doesn’t just hold a person in prison. A door also keeps people out of your house while you’re gone, or keeps your cat from leaving unexpectedly.
Let’s put aside the stupidity of this proposal, and even put aside how impractical it will be. If it’s signed into law, everything changes. Once neither you nor the service you are connecting with can trust encryption, the very nature of the kinds of things we can do online changes. A company simply can’t take credit card information over the internet over the long term if there’s no longer a reasonable expectation that it’s secure. It’s hard to imagine how much this could change the internet.
If you live in the United States, please raise your voice against this. In addition to instructions on how to contact your representatives on the EFF website, there’s also a petition.