Hey folks – I really encourage everyone who posts action stuff like this to put the date of their post in the text at the top! It’s so hard these days to tell whether a post that’s going around is something happening RIGHT NOW or something that happened months ago.
In this case – as of July 7, 2020 – this is an active issue!
So yes, NOW really is the time to call your reps and senators! Sign petitions, sure. But please call or write, if you can. (Remember that an original email, rather than one using a script, is usually more effective, even if it’s only one line.)
In trying to figure out the status of this, I came across these other possibly useful links:
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/116/s3398
(Where you can track this bill’s progress and status.)
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/06/01/us-senate-should-reject-earn-it-act
An article on the Human Rights Watch website. Pull quote (the letter referenced below is linked above):
The United States Senate Judiciary Committee should reject a proposed law that would jeopardize privacy and free expression rights without effectively protecting children from online sexual exploitation, Human Rights Watch said today in a letter to the committee’s leadership.
https://fcw.com/articles/2020/07/06/johnson-earn-it-act.aspx
An article on the website of Federal Computer Week. Pull quote:
Civil liberty and digital rights groups were unmoved by the changes. The Center for Democracy and Technology said the amendments “do not fix the problems that are core to the bill’s misguided approach,” while the American Civil Liberties Union issued a letter saying the legislation is well intentioned but “would undermine the privacy of every single American, stifle our ability to communicate freely online, and may jeopardize the very prosecutions it seeks to enable.”
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), said the new version of EARN IT “will do even less than the previous version to stop the spread of child sexual abuse material” and urged the committee to table the bill so lawmakers can further vet the proposal to determine if it would do more harm than good.
“By allowing any individual state to set laws for internet content, this bill will create massive uncertainty, both for strong encryption and free speech online,” said Wyden, who instead called for Congress to pass legislation that would boost funding and modernize IT systems for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
I’m including these pull quotes here because this is a complex issue, and I wanted to highlight the basis of the opposition to a bill that, on the surface, seems like it’s about protecting children from online exploitation and abuse, and banning the online exchange of child pornography. That is certainly the intent of the bill, but as with any bill, it’s really important to dig deep enough to figure out if the bill will actually accomplish what it says it wants to.
That is frequently a problem with bills that come before Congress! Bill sponsors always know that they should give a bill a snappy name and summarize it in a way that makes it sound great, and that also makes it sound like opposition to it is supporting the thing the bill is against. It’s not even always a matter of looking for the “poison pill” within bills. Listen to experts who examine bills that sound reasonable on the surface, but that have unanticipated (by the bill’s writers) complications with implementation.
I am not at all dismissing the testimony or aims of the victims who sent statements to the Senate Judiciary Committee. This isn’t a case of “either you want to curb online sexual exploitation of children or you don’t”. This is a case where people in the government received those testimonies and requests for action, and then crafted this bill. But, they may have done a bad job crafting the bill, and this may not be the way to actually take effective action.
And, forgive me, but I am wary of a bill that targets internet privacy when it’s written by the GOP and someone like Lindsay Graham.
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