New bill threatens journalists’ ability to protect sources | Hacker News Reader

New bill threatens journalists’ ability to protect sources

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212 pointspseudolus120 comments

There have been quite a few large threads about the EARN IT act:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

This one doesn't seem to add significant new information:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

It's understandably a very controversial law, but there hasn't been any new information in a while. There may be some coming when they hold another hearing.

This is akin to reporting “Giant asteroid on collision course with earth, many journalists expected to be killed.”

Basically, the article is saying that the EARN IT act would defacto outlaw end-to-end encryption. Thus people could not securely communicate with each other. One group of people affected by this would be journalists trying to securely communicate with sources.

Can you please explain why this isn't a big problem to you?

That doesn't seem to be what was said.

They are saying it is a big problem. A problem much bigger than the already awful "journalists will have hard time protecting sources".

He's just noting how the article is focusing entirely on how this bill will affect journalists in particular rather than literally everybody.

That's understood. That's obviously a huge problem, but isn't it worth pointing out one of the bigger issues of the bill? There are many, many people who agree with this bill who may not have thought about this specific issue. It's worth pointing out how the ends that supposedly justify the means, can have major, major faults.

The weakening of structures that allow political journalists to expose corruption is not a small issue and should be discussed on its own.

In other words, I'm asking: "Why does this topic not deserve its own conversation?"

>That's understood. That's obviously a huge problem, but isn't it worth pointing out one of the bigger issues of the bill?

That's not "one of the bigger issues" of the bill. It's not even that interesting as an issue -- journalists have other ways to talk to sources. Deep Throat didn't use "end to end encryption".

But not allowing end to end encryption affects all of society (e.g. everybody's text messages, chat, and voice calls), not just some specific use case of a specific line of work.

One specific example doesn't make the whole set of journalists who need to communicate with others over the internet. Consider that during a pandemic, people are limited in travel, and over the internet is the de facto way of communication.

Do you think that a system like this won't be abused in targeting journalists trying to expose corruption? Surely that's a big issue.

You’re ignoring that E2EE is how anonymous communication is done now, including communicating with journalists.

I'm not ignoring anything. Communications of the masses use electronic media and will continue to do so, and those will be compromised if E2EE is forbidden. Masses aren't gonna stop talking and writing to each other digitally.

Journalists however, having a special need to protect their sources, and being aware of a potential lack of E2EE can always find other ways - similar to what they used to hide their sources before E2EE, when their phones could be tapped, etc, including intermediaries, face to face meetings, etc.

Journalists might be hurt from killing E2EE, but theirs is less of an issue (and they can take precautions). The big issue is with masses lacking E2EE.

Which demographic do you think sources come from: "journalists" or "the masses"?

> Journalists however, having a special need to protect their sources, and being aware of a potential lack of E2EE can always find other ways - similar to what they used to hide their sources before E2EE, when their phones could be tapped, etc, including intermediaries, face to face meetings, etc.

Except now there's stingray towers, scraped social media profiles, phone metadata, databases of license plate reader data, Palantir, CCTV with facial recognition, Clearview AI, and an army of private tech companies attempting to create detailed profiles of everyone on the internet and selling that information to god knows what malicious actors/governments.

As technology has progressed, journalists have accordingly updated their methods for protecting sources. E2EE is one of the technologies in the 20th/21st century that is essential to that end.

Will journalists really lose access to their sources, or will they simply abandon US-based companies for secure communication?

If a potential source is too afraid to reach out, did that source even exist in the first place?

I think the impact is certainly concerning, but I doubt that it's likely that most sources are currently even using E2E encryption in the first place I'm not trying to minimize this, either: the EARN IT act is a huge problem. I suppose my point is that you can't get rid of good encryption, but you can prevent US companies from using good encryption which is simply going to push people offshore.

This could even have totally perverse impacts: suppose that China can read your messages, but all you care about is that your provider is not hosted in the US?

Journalist centered articles far too often have a bad habit of that sort of selfish attitude of thinking protections should be limited to them by some sort of credential and not a "universal press" despite the obvious backfire potential involved with it - or their sources for that matter.

Hell even the article is lukewarm criticism instead of speaking truth to power and saying that it is bullshit and so is the purported goal. If you want to stop child molesters you stop the molestors first as opposed to the byproducts. And even though the byproducts do their own damage cracking down on the bulletin boards is completely removed from being helpful.

The way things are going in the US today, I would not be surprised if hindering the free press was an intended effect of this law, rather than a byproduct.

Focusing on concrete harms is important. In front of the supreme court you want to be able to say "This law is devastating to journalism, a fundamental institution in our democracy." Rather than sounding like a screeching privacy activist to nine nontechnical judges.

I wouldn't care if it were devastating only to the current press, it is beyond awful anyway. If it kills privacy that's completely other matter. And SCOTUS judges are anything but stupid, they know what privacy is and how important it is. They maybe don't know technical details of elliptic curve encryption algorithms, but one doesn't need those to understand what's going on, the debate about privacy vs. safety wasn't born yesterday and the judges heard it all already. So no need to pander to anybody, and no need to misrepresent the issue to the public.

> I wouldn't care if it were devastating only to the current press, it is beyond awful anyway

You're confusing the 24/7 TV infotainment with proper journalism. TV anchors peddling stories optimized to maximum viewership for the purpose of advertising is just one aspect to it, and it would be the least hurt by this. Real investigative journalism would be hit much harder.

If 'real journalism' wasn't long in its grave. Remember '60 minutes'? All rigged to make the reporters look like geniuses, and slanted to make every poor schlep look like a conspirator.

I'm not confusing anything, I am saying "proper journalism" is not something that is done in the mainstream press now, at least not in the quantities worth talking about. It's an exception rather than the rule. Pretty much nothing in most of the press is optimized for it. So I don't see why anything we do should be optimized for the needs of the press. Privacy is important, but not because the press is special and they need it. It's because we, regular shmoes, need it. If it also helps the press, well, they are people too. But no more people than the rest of us.

No one is saying anyone on the SCOTUS is stupid. In fact, the opposite is the real problem: they are professional legal scholars with a wide knowledge of legal precedent. Applying legal arguments to real life situations often leads to conclusions that people who aren’t judges or lawyers would consider absurd.

That has been the case for the last 250 years and somehow the republic survived that pretty well. Surely there were some absurd SCOTUS decisions, but there were also some absurd laws, absurd executive orders and absurd government actions on all levels. Nothing changed there, SCOTUS haven't become any different than it was and is as capable of handling complexities of life as it ever was. I don't think there's any need to specifically single out journalists as special protected class that have different rights form all other people and need special care from SCOUS who otherwise will be unable to figure out such thing as destroying privacy on the internet.

And the justices will point out that journalism predates end-to-end encryption and investigative journalism used phones and mail and in person meetings quite effectively.

I don't think that's an effective counter argument. Sourcing journalism in the 21st century means living and working with 21st century technology. It's not reasonable or realistic to tell journalists to go back to using the mail if they don't like their communications being intercepted.

You may not find it reasonable, but you're responding to somebody reasoning it, an argument like this is actually pretty common at court. “it seems kinda crazy” is a losing argument.

And while that's true, adversaries have significantly more resources at their disposal now. So the "old" ways of phones, mail, and in person meetings are no longer secure.

The US has laws against snooping on the mail - so before encryption, it was illegal for the government to even try to snoop (search and seizure). The only reason this is even an issue now is that digital information is not being legally treated in the same way as physical information. If we had laws to prevent the government from ever opening your email, that would be a solution worse than encryption (laws are easier to break than elliptic curves), but it would achieve some of the same goals. However, you will never see the advocates of cleartext laws propose that trade - they don't want the same rules as we had in the 1800s, they want looser rules!

The same ones who are poised to strike off any gun regulations that don't date back to the Revolutionary War, presumably.

And they would be incorrect. End-to-end encryption existed long before journalism. Ciphers have been in use for a very long time. Romans used ciphers to encrypt messages.

That the medium of transmission of the message is different should make no difference.

What it boils down to is whether people are allowed to have private speech or not. Any argument that says I'm not permitted to write an electronic message to you in a way that only you can read is fundamentally equivalent to one that argues I cannot speak to you where someone else is unable to record.

I can't tell you which part of the U.S. Constitution pertains, but I'm fairly certain the Founding Fathers had a robust belief in the right to maintain a private life separate from a public life. Having zero separation between public and private was a more primitive state in ancient Athens, for example. One of the advances of Republican Democracy as a form of government was to say that a) there is a distinction, and b) the government should be restricted from interfering with private life, so long as your actions didn't damage someone else's freedom.

The Founding Fathers explicitly denounced legal mechanisms that could be used to encroach on things like a mother expressing her opinions to a child, or teaching them religion. The trade off for this freedom was to make it harder for the government to police. It was a trade off gladly accepted, because it was well and viscerally understood what the other side of that equation looks like.

We seem to have forgotten that.

I believe that, with respect to government, the separation of private and public life you’re referring to falls squarely under the 4th amendment.

The open question to me is how we can maintain this separation with respect to employers. The nature of employment as changed dramatically since the early days of the republic, and I don’t believe the Founding Fathers could have conceived of the type and size of employers we have today.

That employers have abused their power over employees to control their private lives is a matter of historical fact (see the Ford Sociological Department: https://jalopnik.com/when-henry-fords-benevolent-secret-poli...). Clearly, we need legal protections for workers to prevent these types of abuses of power.

> And the justices will point out that journalism predates end-to-end encryption

When do you think cryptography and end-to-end encryption specifically was invented? I think you're likely to be thousands of years out.

Only one of the justices (Sotomayor) regularly appeals to specific examples. The first amendment free speech clause would likely be the most effective argument, followed by the fifth and fourth amendments.

I've wondered for a long time whether the second amendment also has anything to say about cryptography.

I have heard that argument made, but it seems to be a peculiar result of the government classifying private key encryption as a weapon to keep it secret during the cold war.

I think that the founding fathers would have believed people had a right to encryption, but that it was covered by the tenth amendment or first amendment. I believe that at least some of the founding fathers did use codes and invisible inks. I can't imagine any of them would have seen codes as weapons.

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Not sure which part is about cryptography. Unless you consider algorithms to be "arms", but then what isn't?

> Unless you consider algorithms to be "arms"

As the Arms Export Control Act did.

> but then what isn't?

Things not named in the United States Munitions List.

That's not a functional definition, that's "government does what it wants" definition. No point in having Constitution and Bill of Rights then - the government can put whatever freedoms it wants on United States Freedoms List and remove whatever it wants from there anytime it wants to. If there's nothing outside contemporary whim of the government and any government decision is as legitimate as another - then what's the point of discussing constitutional amendments and rights anyway? Rights are what the government says they are, and that's it.

If you reduce all legislative action to "whatever it wants ... anytime it wants to" then there's no point in discussing any of this; they can just pass an amendment to the Constitution.

You're right, it's not a common-sense definition, it's a "rule of law" definition. If the government decides to regulate encryption as arms, then it must deal with the consequences that it is admitting that encryption is arms, and that the constitutional limits on how it how it regulates arms apply to how it regulates encryption. Individual laws form a system, and even though parts of the government can change individual laws, they must still obey the system as a whole; that's what the rule of law is about.

The second amendment has long been acknowledged to not allow blanket and unlimited access to weapons, the US Government could pretty trivially counter-argue that end-to-end encryption is military grade and beyond the needs of the consumers - if that tactic was taken it'd be difficult to defend the necessity of consumers to have access to that level of encryption in a technical manner that'd hold sway on the supreme court.

To be honest the second amendment, for all the out-sized media attention it receives - is a rather ineffective and unimportant portion of the Bill of Rights - falling quite far down any reasonable ranking.... Still more important than the third though - especially since the US routinely ignores the spirit of it.

That said amendments 1 & 4 are probably quite relevant, especially 4 - this law, while covering a novel subject not previously assumed, aims to specifically deprive persons of their rights to private communication including in cases where just cause cannot be established.

> To be honest the second amendment, for all the out-sized media attention it receives - is a rather ineffective and unimportant portion of the Bill of Rights - falling quite far down any reasonable ranking

Particularly since most of the US's peer countries manage to get along quite well without anything like it.

Why on earth is this downvoted?

There are many “freedom” indices[1] that measure the rights afforded to individuals in each country. These indices are published and maintained by groups all along the political spectrum. They all include things like due process and free speech but I’ve yet to come across one that gives weight to an individual’s access to weapons.

The “Human Freedom Index”[2] published by the ultra-libertarian Koch-funded Cato Institute doesn’t even include it.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices

[2] PDF page 24/numbered page 18 https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/human-fr...

The parent said "most of the US's peer countries manage to get along quite well without anything like it", which is a bit vague, but you have to think about how all the peer countries have done in the last 240 years. Remember that the USA's peers from 1776 weren't Sweden, Germany, and England, they would have been the Latin American countries, and other colonies like India. The USA has definitely done better than any of its peers from 1776.

The USA went from being a backwater that produced cotton and tobacco to being the pre-eminent global economic and military power, and it did this while avoiding totalitarianism and (devastating) war on the home front (i.e. WWi and WWii did little damage to the continental USA). Even the countries that started off far ahead of the USA (Germany, England, Sweden, etc.) have had much worse journeys over the past 240 years.

I disagree with this on two major points:

I don't think that social evolution is an individual journey for countries. England as a nation might have a founding date around 927 though there have been some pretty major upheavals since then - it isn't fair to measure modern day America a success by comparing it to 1120 England - I think that as a global community all but the newest countries are on mostly even footing with those more aged and ancient countries being at someone of a disadvantage due to having much less solid bases in their constitutions/founding documents - more recent organized countries have been able to learn from history and create founding documents that allow them to have a more stable society... though many of those are in extremely volatile areas of the world.

Canada is like a hundred years younger than the US and doing a fair bit better and Australia founded a mere twelve years after the US is clearly within the peer range and is pretty close to the top of that list with New Zealand (founded slightly more recently than that in 1840 which puts it closer to US unification following the civil war) is usually really close to the top of most of these rankings.

Additionally, I'm not certain the validity of some of the points mentioned above:

In terms of the US's journey it gets the advantage of geography and the same advantage Canada and New Zealand received - it wasn't a theater of war during WWI & WWII, Australia actually suffered catastrophically during WWI with massive numbers of casualties received when participating in the Asia Minor theater (Gallipoli is part of the Australian cultural memory) and in WWII Papau New Guinea was a territory (albeit a relatively autonomous one) of Australia and was a heavily contested theater.

In terms of economy, the USA wasn't a cotton churning backwater on founding, it had a strong plantation based economy but as the world industrialized so did America. Britain & Germany definitely take the cake in terms of the most extreme economic transformations but America was on the upper end of the curve - it did quite well in industrialization building a strong power that it transformed into global power as the other colonial powers collapsed.

Lastly, I don't know if the US really is the pre-eminent power of the globe - certainly in terms of military it's on the top of the pile... but economically - dutch and british service industries move a lot of money around and, the ordering you didn't mention, quality of life for the citizenry, is one category America is really hurting in at this point with endemic obesity, poor healthcare and extremely poor education.

The feeling that the legacy press class would suffer under this legislation is probably a selling point of the bill, for much of the public.

Reminds me of my elementary school French language teachers, when I would ask them why somebody would want to learn French in Anglo Canada, and they say "you can get a government job!".

The core problem with this is that it concretely undermines the basic privacy of every American.

The fear is that journalists will focus on the one concern that affects them. Politicians see that and give journalists an exemption. Everyone else is still screwed.

Ah, but much like backdoors in encryption, a single exemption is all that is needed.

If journalists are exempt, suddenly we all become journalists.

Presumably, the exemption would come with a definition, which not all of us can meet.

In a world where anyone can publish, you'd be hard pressed to come up with a definition that wasn't accessible to most anyone.

You're assuming the definition would be broad enough to cover "anyone." Maybe it includes something like "belongs to a recognized news organization," or some such. What are your press credentials? What if you were no longer "recognized"?

If it said "belongs to a recognized news org" I'll bet the Washington Post would figure out a way to allow you to affiliate yourself with them so you can use E2EE.

Or someone could start a news org and get "recognized" and then allow anyone to affiliate.

People are creative. They'll find a workaround.

> Washington Post

Only if Jeff Bezos wants us to be "affiliated" with them. Same goes for every other media outlet, and their respective billionaire owners.

When your "workaround" depends on the benevolence of billionaires, it isn't a very good workaround.

Who said anything about benevolent billionaires?

I could start a "news" organization and allow anyone to affiliate. We'd publish articles on our online newspaper once a week. Maybe hire a correspondent to be part of the White House press pool.

You can start a “news” organization, but would it be recognized? You keep saying “people are clever,” but somehow don’t seem to realize that legislators and judges are people, too. And, they’re the ones with the power here.

Honest question: Do you think the EARN IT act is NOT specially about ending E2EE?

Highlighting the potential issues for journalists makes sense, as there you can consider it an unconstitutional violation of the right to a free press.

Thiugh I feel it would also be a violation of a combination of the right to free speech and the Tenth Amendment, that line isn't as clear cut.

So, this seems to be the gist of the article.

> [I]t’s not possible to identify [child exploitation material] without also having the ability to identify any and all other types of material — like a journalist communicating with a source, an activist sharing a controversial opinion or a doctor trying to raise the alarm about the coronavirus.

Other people suspect that the real goal of the bill is to force facebook/WhatsApp et al to do away with end-to-end encryption, which would be the only way the companies could police the material (and AG Barr has "expressed his desire for this outcome": https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2020/03/the-earn-it-ac... )

The EARN IT act is not about child exploitation at all. Because the effect will be the opposite -- it'll be pushed underground and away from law enforcement's reach.

It will put children in direct danger in order to further the actual goals of the legislation, which is to effectively ban E2EE in order for the intelligence community to put more deep surveillance in place.

I agree. These things are really about expanding bulk collection programs, not about catching whoever the big bad guy is at the moment.

Australia's metadata retention law was sold as a child protection scheme, and immediately after it was made into law it was repeatedly abused by intelligence employees to spy on girlfriends, used to investigate petty crimes and given out to any government agency who asked for it including local councils and tax agencies.

As soon as it's law, the children are irrelevant. This is mass surveillance legislation, and child protection is the shiny marketing.

The gist of the bill is that the government demands the ability to monitor everything you do, say and write, all the time.

In a perfect world we would all agree that the fact that some few individuals may commit legal transgressions should not allow the government to strip us all of our privacy - even if it wasn't blatantly unconstitutional.

The scary part about the EARN IT act is that I've written both my congressman and my senator (both Democrats), and they're completely on board with the "Think of the children!" bullshit justification for this. I really expected better out of Mark Warner.

Fear-mongering wins elections. It is a sound bite. "Senator Mark Warren thinks we should protect criminals who exploit children!!!!!" The general voter doesn't care about the rest of the details. People are afraid to be on the wrong side of it. If this doesn't pass, then even a single case is proof that we should have voted yes on EARN IT.

Why does "think of the children" work but "senators want to look into your bedroom" doesn't?

It is a good question. My guess it is about perception. People don't really think the bad will happen so it is "free" to think of the children instead. Probably need someone more versed in human psychology to answer this.

Probably because that immediately becomes:

Senators want to look in your bedroom so they can see you fucking children.

I think it is a combination of a) People think they have nothing to hide, and b) Nobody is running ads with the later.

Because you can come up with all sorts of rebuttals from certain individuals, like "I don't care if they invade my privacy, they are welcome to look into my bedroom all they want, there is nothing interesting there". We already see a form of that reasoning from people regarding personal data tracking, saying stuff like "i have nothing to hide".

On the other hand, you cannot come up with a similar simplistic argument when someone brings up "think of the children" without giving out some really bad soundbites of yourself. You cannot just say "well, I don't care about children, it wouldn't affect them much anyway" without being represented as a heartless moron by the opposition.

Disclaimer: this is just all for the sake of the argument. I, personally, am very strongly against this "think of the children" bs tactic and am fully in favor of E2E encryption. It is just sad that the "think of the children" argument is so effective solely due to the emotional appeal and how difficult it is to fight against that argument without coming off in poor light.

Flip the script: "Senators want to look into your children's bedroom".

Weakening encryption endangers everyone, children included. I don't want my kids to be using digital products that can be backdoored by bad actors.

That move would be pretty high-risk/high-reward, but I would be for sure cheering if/when that happens.

Because senators don't want to look into your bedroom and it's obvious. We all know this. A story most people remark with gladness on is that Al Capone was sentenced to 11 years in jail for tax evasion over $215k. AFAIK, there is no minimum amount above which you're eligible for the 5 years. In addition, most states have a sales tax evasion penalty (California can put you in jail for a year). Now, many Americans commit sales tax evasion all the time fairly purposefully when they buy online.

People love the fact that Al Capone was put away, but they don't want to be put away for their miserable $200 unreported either. They give the government the overarching power and then trust it to use it right.

That's what the Senators in your Bedroom argument misses. Everyone knows the senators don't want to look in your bedroom. Everyone knows that the senators want to look in the terrorists' bedroom. The only worry is that some rogue senator will look in your bedroom knowing you're innocent but Americans trust in the rule of law and believe that won't happen. The Senators are on your side. They're the good guys. The Child Pornographers are on the other side. They're the bad guys.

Now, I support E2E encryption. But it's obvious to me why this argument won't convince anyone. The real argument is more subtle and involves the erosion of civil liberties and the deleterious effect that will have on the American Republic. I think enough Americans generally understand this that they will protect it.

> The same New York Times investigation found that law enforcement agencies devoted to fighting online child exploitation “were left understaffed and underfunded, even as they were asked to handle far larger caseloads.” The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), established by Congress in 1984 to reduce child sexual exploitation and prevent child victimization, “was ill equipped for the expanding demands.” It’s worth asking, then, why EARN IT does not instead empower these agencies with additional resources to solve crimes.

This is a very striking point that I think even the least tech aware person could understand.

Also, the acronym EARN IT is marketing genius for the US. I can really easily see that convincing a lot of people of its validity just because it's kind of sassy/obstinate and for some reason Americans gobble things like that up. "You want encryption? Well why don't you EARN IT by not being a pedophile. - Karen 2020"

Bills often have these kinds of names. Don't want mass-scale surveillance? Guess you're not a PATRIOT.

Of course, it will also be trafficking or child porn or terrorism as the reason. We all know this is about surveillance unchecked.

The EARN IT act is not really to prevent online child exploitation. It can't be. Because this act will push the people involved in those practices underground to places that cannot be censored like Tor.

In fact, the EARN IT act puts children directly in danger.

When evidence of child exploitation is pushed out of the regular internet, it becomes much harder to discover and prosecute.

Do you have any experience in investigating online child sexual offences?

I am just wondering what basis you are making claims like "the EARN IT act puts children directly in danger".

I never understood one thing about American Politics. A lot of folks who are fierce advocates for people being able to keep weapons, go quickly up in arms against encryption. As if the guns somehow can't harm the children. Even though the US has had so many school shootings, it seems a lot of politicians are still hell bent on saying encryption harms children, while guns somehow don't land in the conversation.

I’ve never heard anyone say they were against encryption.

It was a straw man. Designed to make you think less of a certain group of people.

Well. You can be pro-gun and pro-encryption. Technically encryption is actually considered under the same rules as ammunition by US customs.

Are you sure you aren't thinking of ITAR et al? "Customs" is a bit of a broad statement here.

Maybe! Was referring to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_...

Is ITAR part of customs or something different?

This is because law enforcement, which is strongly pro gun, is also against encryption, because encryption makes blanket surveillance and evidence gathering more difficult. Politicians from strongly pro gun areas also tend, politically, to be strongly pro military and law enforcement.

Why is law enforcement pro gun though? Shouldn't they be anti gun logically, as it would make their job a lot more easier if there are fewer weapons outside.

They tend to be pro-gun because they tend to be to the Right of the American political spectrum.

this is sort of circular though. the original question was "why is pro-gun consistent with anti-encryption in US politics?".

I suspect there's no satisfying answer to the question, as most people don't logically derive their political positions from first principles. there's no reason to expect them to be consistent.

There are special interests groups on both sides of the issues but that then is a wash, they net out. The difference is that pro-gun, anti-encryption aligns nicely with business (concentrated power), against which you have the interests of average people who are harmed by these two things (distributed power). You tend to see concerted, continuous astro-turfing and the like for the former because their concentration makes them highly motivated. Whereas average people only speak up as aggressively when their awareness reaches a critical threshold, and that tends to go in fits and and starts, it depends on problem highlighting in the media. Businesses can afford to keep their PR departments working every day.

Playing devil's advocate, it's easy to say there are far more victims of CSA and child pornography than of school shootings among children.

Personally speaking, I think opponents of encryption and guns are in the same anti-freedom camp. Neither should be banned or regulated because all arguments in favor of those things I find to be dishonest or questionable.

Gun deaths are on a consistent downward trend for the last 30+ years despite record gun and ammunition sales. Plotted on the same chart, you'll find as gun sales increased the amount of gun deaths was decreasing at the same time. This isn't to say they're correlated, my argument is that they're not correlated in either direction (and so a ban argument makes no sense).

> Playing devil's advocate, it's easy to say there are far more victims of CSA and child pornography than of school shootings among children.

Is there any decent data that backs this up? Anecdotally, I have always felt like CSA is a fairly niche issue that is blown way out of proportion, but I don't know how/haven't bothered to confirm or deny this belief.

EDIT: I found this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4311357/ which seems way too high. Then again it's not exactly something the victims would openly talk about in most cultures, so maybe I'm severely underestimating the prevelance of the issue?

Nevertheless, if it is true that 95% of perpetrators are well known to the victim, that doesn't sound like this abuse is happening online. So I don't see how backdooring E2E could possibly help here.

> Anecdotally, I have always felt like CSA is a fairly niche issue that is blown way out of proportion, but I don't know how/haven't bothered to confirm or deny this belief.

I mean, you could say the same thing of school/mass shootings. it's terrible when they happen, but they make up a pretty small fraction of total homicides.

About 1% of the male population has a sexual interest in children. Most of these people will never act on that interest, but some of them do go on to commit offences.

There is a range of jargon, and that makes searching for information a bit trickier.

OCSE = online child sexual exploitation. CSEA = Child sexual exploitation and abuse. CSAM = child sexual abuse material.

Here are some UK stats:

> Law enforcement agencies in the UK are currently arresting around 450 individuals and safeguarding over 600 children each month through their efforts to combat online CSE.

> In the UK alone, it is estimated there are 80,000 people who present a sexual threat to children online.

> Statistics from the National Crime Agency (NCA) show that last year 2.88 million accounts were registered globally across the most harmful child sexual abuse dark web sites, with at least 5% believed to be registered in the UK.

These are good reports, although they're obviously written from a child protection viewpoint.

http://www2.paconsulting.com/rs/526-HZE-833/images/WePROTECT...

https://homeofficemedia.blog.gov.uk/2019/06/25/fact-sheet-on...

https://www.iwf.org.uk/report/iwf-2019-annual-report-zero-to...

>> Nevertheless, if it is true that 95% of perpetrators are well known to the victim, that doesn't sound like this abuse is happening online

But that abuse often gets put online, or is traded to access other images.

How do we know 1% of the male population has such an interest?

How do we know it is often put online? Surely, it's incredibly stupid to upload evidence of yourself committing a crime? How much is happening behind closed doors that does not? Can we even tell?

The children is a smoke screen. The government wants control. Encryption threatens that control, because now citizen communications can not be snooped onto, so nobody knows what those sneaky bastards are up to. The government hates being in that position. So they invent plausibly sounding excuse (which is usually protecting children, because it's politically impossible to be against protecting children unless you're a crazy libertarian and nobody listens to crazy libertarians) to change this. It didn't take long for surveillance which was sold under the guise of fighting terrorism to be abused for every government purpose they liked, from drug war to getting dirt on political opponents. Same will happen immediately with this law, if it gets passed.

That article said nothing. Here's the bill text for the curious: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/senate-bill/339...

This was the least informative article I’ve ever read on TC. It does not make clear how the ability to protect sources is endangered.

Can’t journalists continue to protect sources by not naming them, and communicating via encrypted apps? What is changing?

The EFF has a good write up that explains what’s actually wrong with it[0].

[0]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/earn-it-act-violates-c...

> This was the least informative article I’ve ever read on TC.

You evidently started out with a better experience of TC than mine. :-)

Do cloud providers require section 230 protection for mere hosting? Or does the buck stop at their customers operating user-facing services on their infrastructure?

I read the whole article and couldn't understand what the proposed legislation actually proposed, specifically rather in vague "it's gonna cause problems!" way. Completely terrible journalistic work. Ironically, in an article emphasizing how important it is to protect journalists.

The article doesn't really add much that we didn't know already (through other articles). You can search EARN IT on here or EFF for details or Signal's write-up on it. They want to hold people liable for "reckless endangerment" for offering anything that could be used to facilitate child exploitation.

Encryption by it's very nature makes it very difficult to pursue, Barr has pushed much rhetoric of what he would push in the committee for this bill, and the writers of the law refuse to specifically exempt encryption despite having many opportunities to do so.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23040209 CLOUD Act may also be attack on encryption.

I like the sound of that. I hear the words "according to someone familiar with X" far too often. Not interested in speculation, hearsay, gossip, scapegoat to promote one's own intentions...Lazy and agenda ridden through and through.

Sometimes I wonder if there are unintended side consequences of an explosion in the ability of people to be private and have all their concerns / issues kept private (or more strongly, anonymous). And sometimes it makes me feel like an old Scalia for asking whether privacy is really a fundamental right. Or at least, whether we're fully considering the downsides of privacy as strongly as its benefits.

Privacy now lets us hide things that we didn't want others to intrude upon. That may be a good thing. But I can also imagine that a byproduct of increasingly stronger privacy is that the social function of monitoring and group shaming of bad behavior is diminished. You no longer are allowed to know what your neighbors are doing, or speak up because someone's privacy might be violated. People used to know what taxes their neighbors paid. If you didn't want to be gossipped about, you didn't engage in certain behaviors.

It cuts both ways I think. People now can report on things privately, yet increasing privacy itself enabled more bad behavior.

Privacy (and anonymity) allows people to get help that they previously felt ashamed to raise or report. That may be a good thing. But maybe it also lets smaller and smaller (more individual) concerns take the stage away from things that are bigger more pervasive but less attention-grabbing important issues. Maybe we become a more individual-focused society because we gravitate towards paying attention to individual stories of troubles.

I don't know. I'm not an expert in this area. But I wonder if sometimes privacy isn't overdramatized by its advocates and painted with the positive brush when there are negatives as well.

Increasing privacy?

Can you demonstrate where privacy has increased when compared to some previous time in history?

This is the "I've nothing to hide" fallacy. The question will become: who gets to decide? Who will watch the watchers? If everything you say and do is captured, it won't be societal norms but some singular point of view based on who is in power. Governments have shown an inability to protect citizen's rights when give this kind of power. Look at China and North Korea and Russia for proof. We don't have to conjecture about this, we know. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. I prefer freedom with consequences.

Honest question: do you know your neighbors are doing today, pre EARN IT passing?

Well, the courts, of course. That's the idea.

Well, I'm certainly not advocating for the "you've got nothing to hide" position. I'm not even actually engaging on the specific topic of this thread, the journalistic vs. anti-crime etc aspect of privacy.

What I'm talking about is that the technologically-driven, everyone-of-course-wants-more-privacy natural inclination will produce certain side effects that you may not realize. And at some point governments (or social networks, down to the neighbor-level) will be powerless to counter -- and again I'm not even talking about those anti-terrorist/anti-crime points. I mean the gradual degradation of a sense of community. There's a bunch of writings on this topic.

The fall of close knit communities could be attributed to the rise of urbanisation, rather than privacy.

You don't have to look far.

The NSA used their limitless power to spy on their lovers.

The U.K. uses their powers to spy on political groups.

Privacy is about protecting a minority from exactly the kinds of group shaming you have talked about. Minorities are necessary to prevent fragile monocultures of thought. I think the majority viewpoint has enough advantages without needing busybody privileges too.

Yes, that's true. Especially, I think, the minority group known as "billionaires" needs privacy to make sure their activities are protected from being shamed, and to preserve their valuable diverse viewpoints. It's time we stopped picking on them and using our advantages to suppress their rights!

I don't really care what a billionaire is saying or doing, provided they're not bending the laws to their advantage.

This is something they could do, even if privacy was outlawed and it almost certainly wouldn't be for them (EARN IT targets Section 230 of the CDA, so mainly hits the average folk) and would be for everyone else. This is still a "nothing to hide" argument.

Billionaires are wealthy enough to hire full time people to figure out their privacy, they aren't going to be affected by this law. Nor is "billionaires will be able to be private too" a convincing argument to me. But someone worried about being able to text a friend without their husband reading messages to find out where they are going will be affected by this law. The next Snowden story might not make it to the press in one piece. Etc etc.

Years ago, you didn't have private companies rummaging through your mail.

Years ago, you didn't have police putting cameras up on poles to look over into your home.

Years ago, libraries did not report you for reading the wrong book.

If you think privacy has only gotten stronger, then I have some words for you.

We are in the most privacy-focused time in history. You can live your life without interaction, and requiring people/govt to respect your privacy more than ever before, relying on fewer and fewer others in the community. Everything is moving towards the individual. All your examples are minor tech-focused small matters in life that have little to do with fundamental shifts in society.

Face recognition, border searches rifling through your data, NSA mass-surveillance, Prism, every busybody agency going through people's data like food standards in the UK (that is the end goal of initiatives like this once they get you "used" to the lack of privacy), the CLOUD Act which lets foreign govs request any data they want from U.S. companies without oversight, giant data-stores of data which doesn't need to be stored ready to be Equifax-ed.

20 / 30 years ago, could the government identify precisely where you were and when without having to question witnesses? Was it even possible for this data to be leaked? Could they serve a warrant (or administrative order as warrants are overrated nowadays) on an Amazon Home assistant? An always-on listening device. Privacy is slipping away a bit at a time.

> "every busybody agency going through people's data like food standards in the UK"

The fact that you believe this suggests to me that you have mainly acquired your opinions through highly biased and sensational sources.

Perhaps you could restate more specifically what you mean by the FSA "going through people's data", or give some specific examples of what you believe are oppressive breaches of privacy that have been committed by the FSA?

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