Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted, for a third time, to advance the dangerous EARN IT bill (S. 1207)—a law that could lead to suspicionless scans of every online message, photo, and hosted file.
In the name of fighting crime, the EARN IT Act treats all internet users like we should be in a permanent criminal lineup, under suspicion for child abuse. If enacted, EARN IT will put massive legal pressure on internet companies both large and small to stop using true end-to-end encryption and instead scan all user messages, photos, and files.
The bill could now be voted on by the full Senate at any time, or worse, included as part of a different “must-pass” legislative package. We need you to contact your representatives in Congress today to tell them to voice their opposition to this bill, along with the STOP CSAM Act – another piece of legislation before the Senate Judiciary Committee that would treat all encrypted messages as possible evidence of a crime.
PROTECT OUR PRIVACY—STOP “EARN IT”
Bill Language Purporting To Protect Encryption Doesn’t Do The Job
Under pressure, the bill sponsors did add language that purports to protect encryption. But once you take a closer look, the text clearly leaves room to impose forms of “client-side scanning,” which is a method of violating user privacy by sending data to law enforcement straight from user devices before a message is even encrypted. EFF has long held that client-side scanning violates the privacy promise of end-to-end encryption, even though it allows the encryption process to proceed in a narrow, limited sense. We were pleased to hear that Senator Lee, raised similar concerns and actually offered suggestions to the sponsors, which he did in a previous session as well. That language was neither debated or adopted in this committee meeting.
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