Name: In 2020, Congress Threatened Our Speech and Security With the “EARN IT” Act
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In 2020, Congress Threatened Our Speech and Security With the “EARN IT” Act

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Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare ItOne nice thing about democracy is that—at least in theory—we don’t need permission to speak freely and privately. We don’t have to prove that our speech meets the government’s criteria, online or offline. We don’t have to “earn” our rights to free speech or privacy.Times have changed. Today, some U.S. senators have come to the view that speech in the online world is an exceptional case, in which website owners need to “earn it”—whether they intend to carefully moderate user content, or let users speak freely. In 2020, two Senators introduced a bill that would limit speech and security online, titled the EARN IT Act, which is also an acronym that stands for “Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies.”&nbsp;&nbsp;Using crimes against children as an excuse to blow a hole in critical legal protections for online speech, Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) co-sponsored this law. The created a 19-person government commission, stacked with seats reserved for law enforcement, that would create “best practices” for online platforms to follow. This wouldn’t have just targeted big websites like Facebook—the new rules would apply to a local news websites, hobby blogs, and email services, among other online services. Anyone who didn’t follow the “best practices” would lose critical legal protections and could be held liable, or prosecuted, for the actions of the people who use their services.&nbsp;It’s clear what practices law enforcement want Internet companies and website hosts to adopt. U.S. Attorney General William Barr has said it repeatedly—in his view, . But as we’ve explained over and over again, encryption with a “backdoor” is . It doesn’t matter if you call the means of accessing encryption “” or “endpoint filtering” or anything else. Backdoors don’t just get used by good guys, either. Authoritarian governments and criminals are always interested in reading other peoples’ messages.&nbsp;The structure of the EARN IT Act was designed to allow Internet speech to be monitored by law enforcement. It would have let law enforcement agencies, from the FBI down to local police, to Any company that didn’t grant law enforcement legal access to any digital message (a “best practice” sure to have been mandated by the commission) would be subject to lawsuits or even criminal prosecutions. If it had passed, the bill would have been devastating to both privacy and free expression. That’s because without liability protections, websites will censor and regulate user speech, or even eliminate certain categories for speech altogether.&nbsp;But the original bill didn’t even advance out of committee—because public outcry against it was overwhelming. The law as proposed was so unpopular, the EARN IT Act was amended to reduce the power of the government commission. Rather than creating an authoritative law enforcement-dominated commission, the new version of the EARN IT Act establishes the same commission, but simply makes it “advisory.” Instead, the bill gives the power to regulate the Internet to state legislatures.&nbsp;This amended EARN IT Act , and in some ways is even worse. It gives wide berth to legislatures in all 50 states, as well as U.S. territories, to regulate the Internet in just about any way they want—as long as the nominal purpose is to stop the online abuse of children. The Senate Judiciary Committee also passed an amendment that purported to protect end-to-end encryption from being violated by the states. That amendment was a worthy nod to the outpouring of concern for the fate of encryption that this surveillance bill had prompted, but it doesn’t go far enough.&nbsp;Looking beyond encryption, the other real target here was Section 230 (47 U.S.C. §230), a law that has been falsely maligned as providing special protection to Big Tech companies. In reality, .Lawmakers in Congress filled the final months of 2020 with ideas about how to weaken Section 230, a federal law that is . The PACT Act was an effort to address the dominance of the biggest online platforms, but would end up . Another late 2020 proposal, the Online Content Policy Modernization Act, was .&nbsp;These ideas are going to keep coming back in 2021. There’s , but it’s led many politicians into misguided attempts to control online speech, or give police more power to control and surveil the Internet. If a wrongheaded proposal to gut Section 230 passes, the collateral damage could be severe.&nbsp;&nbsp;We all know there are serious problems in the online world, like disinformation, hateful speech, and privacy. By and large, , which still fulfills its goal of protecting user speech. The big problems exist because a few tech companies have too much power. Giant tech companies act increasingly like content moderation systems are .&nbsp;We do need new solutions to these problems. And they’re out there: we need to think about beefing up , reforming , creating , freeing user data by making it , and creating opportunities for .&nbsp;Share ItFor many years, we have urged platforms to operate with more transparency—both to the public and to their users—and to ensure that the people who use their services have the ability to appeal wrongful content moderation decisions. As such, in conjunction with several other organizations and academic experts, we launched...While 2019 saw the EU that through legal and policy circles, 2020 was a very different story as the EU introduced the , the most significant reform of Europe’s platform legislation the EU has...If you come at the nonprofit sector, you’d best not miss.Nonprofits and NGOs around the world were stunned last November when the —the organization that manages the .ORG top-level domain (TLD)—to private equity firm Ethos Capital....EFF filed a in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in support of against notorious Israeli spyware company NSO Group. WhatsApp discovered last year that NSO Group had breached its systems and enabled NSO Group’s government clients to hack into the mobile...One of the most important aspects of cryptocurrencies from a civil liberties perspective is that they can provide privacy protections for their users. But EFF is concerned that the U.S. government has been increasingly taking steps to undermine the anonymity of cryptocurrency transactions and importing the widespread financial surveillance of...Many in the U.S. have spent 2020 debating the problems of content moderation on social media platforms, misinformation and disinformation, and the perceived censorship of political views. But globally, this issue has been in the spotlight for a decade. This year is the tenth anniversary of what became known as...The European Commission is set to release today a draft of the Digital Services Act, the most significant reform of European Internet regulations in two decades. The proposal, which will modernize the backbone of the EU’s Internet legislation—the —sets out new responsibilities and rules for how Facebook, Amazon,...President Trump’s if it doesn’t include a may represent the final attack on online free speech of his presidency, but it’s certainly not the first. The NDAA is one of the “must-pass” bills...“You have to choose: are you a platform or a publisher?”It’s the question that makes us pull out our hair and roll our eyes. It’s the question that makes us want to shout from the rooftops “IT DOESN’T MATTER. YOU DON’T HAVE TO CHOOSE”We’ll say it plainly here: there is...Today, EFF—along with the Center for Democracy &amp; Technology and the Internet Society—filed an in support of U.S.-based users of the Chinese app WeChat, as they fight President Trump’s unconstitutional ban of the application. In its rush to eradicate WeChat from U.S. shores, we explain, the administration...Share It

Email updates on news, actions,and events in your area.DEEPLINKS BLOGShare ItOne nice thing about democracy is that—at least in theory—we don’t need permission to speak freely and privately. We don’t have to prove that our speech meets the government’s criteria, online or offline. We don’t have to “earn” our rights to free speech or privacy.Times have changed. Today, some U.S. senators have come to the view that speech in the online world is an exceptional case, in which website owners need to “earn it”—whether they intend to carefully moderate user content, or let users speak freely. In...

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Joe Mullin

We're the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We defend your civil liberties in a digital world.

In 2020, Congress Threatened Our Speech and Security With the “EARN IT” Act

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