muh ChInA! muh ChInA!
I bet they shave their legs too!
feels remind
let those who are doing good do good still
let those who are doing evil do evil still
EARN IT: PRIVACY, ENCRYPTION, AND POLICING IN THE
INFORMATION AGE
by: Jonathan Bennett
May 6 2020
"You may have heard about a new bill working its way through the US congress, the EARN IT act. That’s the “Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act of 2020”. (What does that mean? It means someone really wanted their initials to spell out “EARN IT”.)
EARN IT is a bipartisan bill that claims to be an effort to put a dent in child exploitation online. It’s also managed to catch the attention of the EFF, Schneier, and a variety of news outlets. The overwhelming opinion has been that EARN IT is a terrible idea, will make implementing end-to-end encryption impossible, and violates the First and Fourth Amendments. How does a bill intended to combat child pornography and sex trafficking end up on the EFF bad list? It’s complicated.
First off, we have to cover the Communications Decency Act, and section 230 specifically. So let’s wind back the clock to 1996. The internet was young, but there were already flame wars. Two important court decisions had recently happened, and together they put Internet service providers in an odd place.
The first decision, Cubby vs CompuServe, was a result of a posting in a forum controlled by CompuServe. Cubby, Inc. was the target of what they considered to be defamation, and they brought a lawsuit against CompuServe for hosting the material. The court found in a summary judgement that because CompuServe was unaware of the contents of their forum, they were acting as a distributor, and not liable for the contents of the forums. This would be the equivalent of a bookstore having no liability for the contents of their books.
The other decision, Stratton Oakmont v. Prodigy, took a different path. This case also tested the liability of a service provider. In this case, because Prodigy exercised “editorial control” over bulletin board postings, it was ruled to be acting as a publisher rather than a simple distributor. As a publisher, Prodigy was liable for the postings that were allowed on their services.
These two decisions meant that a service provider took on much more liability by policing user content. Simply allowing every post would be the safer stance, but would predictably result in a terrible experience for the majority of end users. Congressmen Chris Cox and with Ron Wyden, began work on a provision to protect service providers while still allowing them to police what content would be allowed on their platform. Their work became an amendment to Title V of the Telecommunications Act of 1996. While most of the rest of Title V, the Communications Decency Act, was struck down as unconstitutional, Section 230 is still an important bit of law to this day."
https://hackaday.com/2020/05/06/earn-it-privacy-encryption-and-policing-in-the-information-age