February 3, 2022
New Toolkit from EFF dropped to fight the EARN IT Act
The U.S. Senate has revived a surveillance bill that would have a lethal impact on privacy, security, and free speech. If Congress passes the EARN IT Act (S.3538), it may become too legally risky for companies to offer encryption services. Instead, they’ll be pressured to scan nearly all online content.
We need your support to stop the EARN IT Act before it gets any farther. The Senate Judiciary Committee could vote on this bill as soon as next week. This disastrous bill was first proposed two years ago, and then dropped after overwhelming public resistance. We beat this bill once before, and we can do it again.
I know you all have probably seen support or abort posts about upcoming bills and stuff, but here's why this is so important.
Beyond the fact that this bill would essentially be like Tumblr's tag ban spreading to the rest of the internet, this bill is the next step towards making it nearly impossible to have a private life online. Anyone you talk to would be tracked, the contents of your conversations can be documented (some companies are already doing this -cough- facebook -cough-). The things you look up, the websites you visit, all of it.
This isn't a new thing, and like I said before there are companies already doing this. However, this bill would make it more acceptable for invasion of privacy in order to avoid federal consequences. And if you think you have nothing to hide, just remember that today's heroes are tomorrow's enemies. What is standing for justice today is viewed as anarchy in the future.
It would force companies to scan you, basically. And report anything deemed as "child pornography" directly to the feds. Keep in mind that right wing forces rn are pushing to classify books talking about being gay as child pornography.
You really don't want surveillance to massively increase in a government that's suffering from metastasized fascism and is going to hit the point of no return in 3 years.
"think of the children" has been how we've gotten most every other extremely restrictive privacy law in the last two decades, if not longer. We already HAD perfectly functional laws regarding child pornography, we never needed this. Universally it's about trying to restrict people's lives and push even more surveillance - as EARN IT is doing.
Sex workers, queer people, really anyone they deem as "too promiscuous" WILL end up further restricted by this excessive monitoring. Plus, you know, the whole "this forces companies to do it even if they don't want to" thing which renders many privacy actions we can make irrelevant.
We must stop EARN IT. We have to. They've already passed a handful of laws similar to it, and they'll keep trying to pass more all under the brand of "think of the children" whilst proceeding to not actually care about kids.