Oversight
A New Bill Attacks What May Be the Most Important Law on the Internet
The EARN IT Act would give the DOJ even more power to censor the internet
We already know the Trump administration, led by Attorney General William Barr, wants to find a way to ban end-to-end encryption — a vital security protection used by millions of Americans on their phones every day. Now a bipartisan group of senators, including leading Democrat Sen. Richard Blumenthal, are bizarrely trying to help Barr irreparably damage Americans’ privacy.
The latest salvo in the government’s long-running war on encryption comes in the form of the EARN IT Act (that’s short for “Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act”), a bill that attempts to help blunt child exploitation on the internet. A multitude of critics say it will do little to stop the problem, but it will provide the Justice Department and other federal agencies much more power to both censor the internet and give them the ban on encryption they have clamored for for years.
The rise of end-to-end encryption over the past several years has been the one bright spot in the ever devolving landscape of privacy on the internet. Services like Apple’s iMessage, WhatsApp, and Signal provide important protection to…
