Mozilla Starts Petition to Oppose the Earn IT Act | Hacker News Reader

Mozilla Starts Petition to Oppose the Earn IT Act

darkrebel.net

46 pointsFjolsvith12 comments

It seems to me that being constantly on guard for these incursions is a losing strategy: We will eventually lose, maybe as soon as the next emergency omnibus package gets passed in response to a crisis...it might be a better strategy to push for new legislation that explicitly enshrines these rights to encryption, privacy, so forth, into law as an extension of the 4th amendment.

The current reminder that hating the 4th amendment is bipartisan.

How so? We all hate to be secure in our persons? Or are you looking at other clauses of that very brief paragraph?

These kind of laws seem to get bipartisan support from lawmakers, has been my experience.

Oh. Yeah - that makes sense.

As to why they do, that is an interesting question.

All sides hate the idea that something you said 10 years ago online in a private conversation between you and a single other person cannot be searched for.

You mean centralized authorities on both sides? If so, that's probably true. Anybody who wants to be in charge has a baby totalitarian in their chest wanting to get out...

If not - can you clarify?

I meant the authorities and those in power - and I would even argue that regular people might.

You see it mostly not in what they say they want, but in what they say they don't want. As people constantly cry out, wondering why the government didn't get access to [priviledged information] or why Apple didn't hand over the information for those terrorists, then the media and the populus will often ask why not and want laws changed so that they can.

Very few people are really willing to say "privacy is more important, and I will tolerate murderers and terrorists getting away with bad things because my rights are more important"

You are right. I tend to not like to lose lives on American soil or American lives overseas, but the cost of "Big Brother" while unquantifiable can be guestimated by the abuses of the CI and Federal LEO communities to date (which I also don't know how to quantify).

It makes me uncomfortable having to make calculations on sparse data, but my bias is to believe that the Feds don't need more data, because they (and the IRS) already don't deal with the data they have responsibly.

It's unfortunate that the terrifying implications of the Earn It act don't translate well outside of tech circles.

It's of course worthy of much more coverage than it's getting, cheers to Mozilla for furthering the conversation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23703367

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