The EARN IT Act: how to ban end-to-end encryption without banning it

* They could put up a big message saying 'no child porn'. I don't think that would be considered sufficient by a court.

* They could put a 'report' button. Again - insufficient.

* They could make client-side automated content scanners. Might be accepted by a court, but if you provide the scanner to the user, the government could argue it is easy to make images which bypass the scanner, which it would be.

* They could break encryption on some percentage of chats. A court would likely be looking at a particular case, and would consider the service provider not to have done their duty if the particular case at hand hadn't been checked.

I don't really see any reasonable steps which would stand up, other than breaking e2e and doing server-side scanning.

Maybe forget even Tor then, because by running a node at home or in your small business you are not adhering to the "best practices"

When fifty people organise something the government wants to track but it can't distinguish that from the five hundred people ordering an Uber, the five thousand people reacting to a funny cat video or the fifty thousand people who just got a weather update those fifty people have privacy. That's important, it's why for example Signal uses Google's and Apple's generic notification frameworks rather than only using their own. It's also why eSNI plus DoH is on the critical path for the Internet.

Sure, they may try to go after a myriad of individual operators but it's a completely different story that forcing half a dozen US companies to drop e2e encryption.

At least, not headquarterd in countries where the government is known to compel staff to do "things". eg China, Russia, USA, Australia, (etc)

"They can get into everybody's business. I don't think they added much at all to child protection. They sure add a lot to decreasing privacy for people in the country that had nothing to do with the exploitation of children."

Of course they could be fired, the legislature could take action and rewrite the law. There is no pedantry required here, it is simply Graham’s trademark hypocrisy.

... or maybe the Attorney General can declare that a service that allows PGP-encrypted communiques is in violation and will lose its 230 protections. The law as constructed is way over-broad.

I think in tech we can attest to how disruption does not always mean good and how move fast and break things can go wrong.

To be clear, I don't disagree entirely with the idea of term limits or age limits, I just think the counter arguments deserve a fair amount of weight.

Term limits work really well for the Whitehouse. I don't see why they wouldn't work well for Congress. And forcing lobbyists to reestablish rapport, dig up dirt, etc... with new congresspeople every few years would do wonders.

There's a reason financial institutions force people to take holidays. It's good for rooting out theft.

2. The knowledge may not necessarily shift to lobbyists. Legislative staffers could become subject matter experts.

3. California implemented term limits, and provides an interesting data point to show what really happens to a legislature.

https://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/rb/RB_1104BCRB.pdf

I don't think so. I'm an older person, and I've been immersed in these technologies for almost my entire life (since I was 12). There is nothing old hat to the younger crowd that isn't old hat to me as well.

Age is not a reliable indicator of these things.

I’m sure there’s research out there that demonstrates the first 2 points. I’m less sure about the second two, but I’d bet there’s a paper out there that covers at least one of them.

However, I disagree with the second half. Imagine if the Constitution said Senators had to be 55 or older. Would that alone be a reason to conclude that the current Senate makeup was "excessively young"? IMO, the relevant comparison is the median age of people who are adults (and could therefore plausibly serve in any governmental role full-time).

And that is OK. Liberal societies function fine while banning hate speech and naziism and other types of activity. There is not a slippery slope here, we really can just ban the nazis marching in the streets and not fall into a dictatorship. It's worked fine for, say, Germany for the last 70 years.

This isn't a popular sentiment among the capital-L libertarians that tend to populate this site and software development as a whole, but even the US has limits to the type of speech that are allowed. There is no reason that the particular places they happen to have been interpreted are necessarily the optimal ones.

Again, the slippery slope theory has literally been proven false, experimentally. The US is sliding into fascism (executive/legislative lawless and direct attacks on democratic mechanisms and constitutional checks/balances) while upholding near-absolute speech rights, while the EU is maintaining democracy with stronger restrictions. There is no correlation between these things, or there is a negative correlation between these things. The libertarian theory of slippery slope-ism is false.

The problem is that the tech landscape moved to fast and all the wisdom and experience often just doesn't apply anymore but, to make it worse, sometimes it seems that you can bend technology to make it apply but that a very dangerous fallacy. One I have seen politicans step into frequently.

Is it as much ageism as outright restricting rights based on age? That seems far more like ageism except it is so deep in our cultural DNA we don't view it as such. If we can, as a group, say that everyone below a certain age cannot have rights such as voting, thus saying they have no ability to have a say in politics that will impact their entire lives, then why can't we have age caps like saying no one over 60 can be elected in government because <insert some reasoning that mimics the same logic not letting any 17 year old vote>?

The lack of an upper age limit is potentially far more damaging in the modern era than not having a lower age limit. People in the founding fathers' times didn't live into senility, if you made it to 60 you were doing pretty good and probably not going to make it for another 3 decades. We have had at least one definitely senile president in the last 30 years and the evidence strongly suggests our current one is suffering from dementia as well. The two leading Democratic presidential candidates are both 80+ years old and one of them is looking awfully senile in public too. Dementia is a serious threat to American democracy in the modern era.

The structure of the American political system means that the people most likely to make a successful run are the ones that have spent 30-40 years building political capital, and those are inherently the oldest among us. Without some form of check, you end up with rule by octogenarian which is where we are.

What's the average age of a Senator these days? 65 or so? And that is the most likely place a presidential campaign can be launched from. And you would want to be a senior senator to be able to beat out the other senators...

However, specifically with regard to age limits, it's interesting to note that the law which prohibits age discrimination in the US also explicitly allows for mandatory retirement for "bona fide executives or high policymakers" who are age 65 or older [1]. In addition, many areas of the government such as the military and State Department have mandatory retirement ages. So one would naively expect our elected officials to fully support a similar policy being applied to them!

[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/statutes/adea.cfm

There are also the throughly mixed messages sent. Ageism is enshrined into law even past the threshold of 18. It is just defined with maximum hypocrisy such that a 20 year old is too incapable of drinking while a senile nonegarian year old with Alzheimers severe enough to have the mental capacity of a child is. Now there are obvious dangers to sunsetting rights but that double standard both normalizes the reverse and both equality and spite make "what is good for the goose is good for the gander" viscerally tempting to those who were disadvantaged. Not the best of mentalities but it is easy to see how someone who couldn't rent a car until recently would be less than sympathetic.

Why is that the dichotomy? How about, they know what they’re talking about, and simply care about different things than you do?

Issues include:

* Defining expertises to not become outdated or too general to give any specialization advantage.

* Handling border cases and deciding when every domain may vote on it.

* While allowing specializations would the subdivisions actually be more expert in practice? We have already seen how "sabotour boards" assemble as those who are most interested in it are those who oppose it.

I have already taken it as a given that qualification gatekeeping would take Goodheart's Law to new levels as refusing to recognize reality gives more concrete power. Still it is an interesting concept.

The question that will be on the revenue committee exam: "do tax cuts pay for themselves"? (I mean, I know the answer, but which one is going to be "correct"?)

It's much simpler to realize that the majority of the people above a certain age can no longer stay current with technological developments. Yes, some of them can, but the vast majority are starting to lose it and certainly aren't absorbing anywhere near as much as they used to.

Just like the minimum age limits also throw away a certain number of potentially qualified younger candidates who do have enough life experience to make good decisions, it's OK that upper age limits would exclude a certain number of older candidates who could still keep up with things.

I suggest we start there, and we start with politicians homes ;-)

The tech companies assume power and disclaim responsibility. It is their job to police their pipes, so respectfully and urgently I disagree.

Concerns about historical corruption within three letter agencies is best addressed by working towards technical solutions that enable proper checks and balances amongst involved players: governments, tech oligarchies, and commoners. The current trend is towards a growing sea of entropy without checks and balances, and this is unacceptable to governments motivated to maintain/increase order and reduce suffering. Resistance via deployment of technical libertarian mechanisms at scale isn’t a solid long term solution.

The federal government isn’t aiming to ban math, encryption, pgp, one time pads, steanography, etc. Instead the goal is to prevent the proliferation of unbreakable encryption at scale, as that growing void enables criminal activity at scale, despite the growing surveillance apparatus.