Under the guise of fighting against online child pornography, American politicians are trying to effectively ban end-to-end encryption on all communication technology platforms for everyone. Newly proposed legislation could force companies like Apple, Google and Facebook to create back doors on their services to make sure law enforcement can easily monitor everything they want or potentially face prosecution for negligently enabling child abuse.
Also Read: Court Orders Telegram to Hand Russia Its Encryption Keys
The Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act
A planned bipartisan measure in the U.S. Senate could stop all messaging services, such as the crypto community’s favorite Telegram and Facebook controlled Whatsapp, from offering end-to-end encryption for users. Under this plan, companies could be forced to engineer back doors into their networks, for government agencies to be able to peer into private communications. Besides the obvious privacy concerns, such back doors could eventually fall into the wrong hands and be exploited by hackers to steal sensitive information, as other back doors have in the past.
The Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) Act is presented as a tool to stop the spread of child sex abuse material (CSAM). Currently, internet companies simply have a degree of protection against lawsuits in the case that some of their users transmitted online child pornography. However, the EARN IT Act will force platforms to earn it. And the way to earn this protection is by complying with requirements set by the government, which will include banning end-to-end encryption.
This plan will curb the power of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, a piece of U.S. legislation which provides immunity from liability for providers of an “interactive computer service” who publish information provided by users. Without
