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Comment by analyte123 | Hacker News Reader

The changes to the existing “Good Samaritan” section basically do what they said they were going to do: change it so that the section about providers not being publishers and the section about liability for blocking are independent, and clarify what “good faith” in blocking means. Basically the standard for civil immunity is slightly higher for blocking content than providing content. This is weird and still a big change by itself, but it is a reasonable topic for debate, I think.

The new ridiculously named “Bad Samaritan” section is a disaster that wipes out the point of the “Good Samaritan” section and is basically a combination of the mandatory CSA reporting law and SESTA/FOSTA for all federal and state laws. It’s so bad it almost seems like a poison pill.

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Can you explain more why the section is particularly disastrous? I agree that it's a dumb name.

  The section: (1) “BAD SAMARITAN” CARVE-OUT. Subsection 
  (c)(1) shall not apply in any criminal prosecution under 
  State law or any State or Federal civil action brought 
  against an interactive computer service provider if, at 
  the time of the facts giving rise to the prosecution or 
  action, the service provider acted purposefully with the 
  conscious object to promote, solicit, or facilitate 
  material or activity by another information content 
  provider that the service provider knew or had reason to 
  believe would violate Federal criminal law, if knowingly 
  disseminated or engaged in.

If someone is selling drugs, distributing copyrighted material, publishing defamatory things, or participating in any other crime on your platform and you know about it, you lose 230 immunity for all content. Maybe this would encourage E2E encryption, but... If you read further, every single provider that allows user content also has to have a tipline for criminal activity and keep records on it.

Interesting. Thanks.

Having a tipline isn't so bad on its own, but then the problem becomes: User leaves unverifiable tip, what do you do with it? It's not like you can break the encryption...

Turn it over to law enforcement. A single chat message is rarely a crime, but can be used to find further evidence of crime.

Turn what over to law enforcement? The ciphertext and timestamp?

A statement from the user who submitted it, including their unverifiable copy of the offensive message. The law is not computer code. They don't need to break ciphertext to get a warrant.

You can do this thing called "message franking" to make it more verifiable, if you want.

The downside is, context matters. If you report messages out-of-order or with important context deleted, you can trick investigators into thinking something was said or implied that actually wasn't. It needs to be carefully designed.

(I blog about cryptography, but you should ask a cryptographer if you want to design something like this.)

I don't design message apps. I just know that law enforcement did just fine before the internet when most communication (face to face, over the phone) wasn't recorded or verifiable.

If we’re talking about content that you literally don’t have access to and can’t see because it’s encrypted, like iMessage or Signal then you don’t need Section 230 protection because you aren’t moderating content.

Sounds like we are turning our entire website infrastructure into a 1984 monitoring system

> Sounds like we are turning our entire website infrastructure into a 1984 monitoring system

It already is one for all intents purposes, just not one that is used ubiquitously (except in the sense of getting us to buy stuff). All that is changing is that the panopticon is becoming slightly more explicit than implicit, making it that much easier to (eventually) flip a policy switch that designates groups wholesale as "enemies of the people" requiring active scrutiny and interference.

I'm reminded of this cartoon:

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-x2BP9Xd7xfo/T7bvuweLPfI/AAAAAAAACj...

Twenty years later and it is still fresh as a daisy.

Ingsoc didn't monitor proles, and didn't always monitor inner party members, so I'd claim its monitoring reach was only somewhere between half and a quarter of our entire website infrastructure.

Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQ6LGrr8iEg

It is also a dumb name because the phrase "Good Samaritan" comes from the unexpectedly helpful behavior of the original Samaritan -- Samaritans and Jews despised each other, so the man who was ignored by a priest and a Levite, but helped by..of all people!..a Samaritan, found cause to remark on this.

(This is all from memory...)

Going by the original parable, this should probably just be "Samaritan carve-out," or maybe better yet as just "Bad actor carve-out".

Anyway...

The obtuseness of the wording definitely stood out.

Any actual Samaritans out there? How do you feel about that language?

It’s a reference to the Biblical parable of the Good Samaritan. It’s not some racist jab.

Neither are most other terms, but that counts for little.

I well understand that. My question is whether modern day residents of, or emigrants from, Samaria feel comfortable with the Bad Samaritan characterization. If it were a large demographic in the U.S., there might be a reaction. Then the question becomes, how large a population do you need before you have to speak carefully about a group.

Yeah, I feel like it’s really weird to have such dissonance about this on HN. Like can you imagine if the phrase was something like Good Chinaman? There would be an uproar.

To me this is like learning that word for getting scammed is just a dig at the Romani.

To some folks out there, those weigh the same.

I had no idea Samaritans were an extant group of people, but Wikipedia tells me that there are around 1,000 people who self-identify as Samaritan, mostly around Mount Gerizim and Tel Aviv. Fascinating.

No doubt they all frequent this forum

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