Action Alert
Stop the EARN IT Act to Save Encryption
Congress has revived the EARN IT Act, and it’s even clearer than before what the nefarious purpose of this proposal is. The bill enables every U.S. state and territory to pass laws that put companies who offer encrypted services at the risk of criminal prosecution or civil suit. The goal: put in place universal message scanning with government-approved software.
The Senate Judiciary Committee could vote on this bill as soon as next week. We need you to contact your Senators right now and tell them to reject this plan.
take action
TELL CONGRESS TO REJECT THE EARN IT ACT
Under the guise of fighting child abuse, the sponsors of the EARN IT Act want to coerce private companies to scan every message, photo, and website on the Internet. Then those scans will be checked against U.S. law enforcement databases.
End-to-end encryption is vital to our privacy, security, and freedom of speech. But it will be completely undermined by the kind of universal scanning that these Senators are promoting.
We’ve never let state legislatures regulate the internet, and we shouldn’t start now. EARN IT will create a race to the bottom, as every internet service—small or large—will have to figure out how to comply with the most restrictive state law, or risk prosecution and endless lawsuits.
We urgently need your support to kill the EARN IT Act before it gets any further in Congress. This disastrous bill was originally proposed two years ago, and disappeared after significant pushback—nearly 200,000 EFF supporters told their representatives to oppose the bill. We stopped this bill once, and we can do it again.
take action
TELL CONGRESS TO REJECT THE EARN IT ACT
Yours,
Joe Mullin
EFF Activism Team
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