encryption

Timothy C. May: Libertaria in Cyberspace

27/06/2020 by Idelto Editor

Here are a few points about why “cyberspace,” or a computer-mediated network, is more hospitable than physical locations for the kind of “crypto-anarchy” libertarian system I’ve been describing.

Several folks have commented recently about ocean-going libertarian havens, supertankers used as data havens, and so forth. In the 1970s, especially, there were several unsuccessful attempts to acquire islands in the Pacific for the site of what some called “Libertaria.” (Some keywords: Vanuatu, Minerva, Mike Oliver, Tonga)

Timothy C. May: Libertaria in Cyberspace — **The following essay was written by **Timothy C. May** in 1988. The essay “**Libertaria in Cyberspace**” can be found on an **archived version of artofnotbeinggoverned.com**, and is reprinted here on Bitcoin.com for historical preservation. The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own. Bitcoin.com is not responsible for or liable for any opinions, content, accuracy or quality within the Op-ed article.**

Libertaria in Cyberspace or, Cyberspace More Hospitable to Ideas of Liberty and Crypto Anarchy

Obtaining an entire island is problematic. Getting the consent of the residents is one issue (familiar to those on the this list who weathered the Hurricane Andrew diversion debate). Being allowed to operate by the leading world powers is another… the U.S. has enforced trade embargoes and blockades against many nations in the past several decades, including Cuba, North Korea, Libya, Iran, Iraq, and others. Further, the U.S. has invaded some countries— Panama- is a good example— whose government it disliked. How long would a supertanker “data haven” or libertarian regime last in such an environment? (Stephenson’s fascinating Snow Crash didn’t address the issue of why the “Raft” wasn’t simply sunk by the remaining military forces.)

I should note that the recent splintering of countries may provide opportunities for libertarian (or PPL, if you prefer to think of it in this way) regions. Some have speculated that Russia itself is a candidate, given that it has little vested in the previous system and may be willing to abandon statism. If several dozen new countries are formed, some opportunities exist.

The basic problem is that physical space is too small, too exposed to the view of others. “Libertaria” in the form of, say, an island, is too exposed to the retaliation of world powers. (I won’t go into the “private nukes” strategy, which I need to think about further.)

A floating private nation (or whatever it’s called) is too vulnerable to a single well-placed torpedo. Even if it serves as a kind of Swiss-bank, and thus gets some of the same protection Switzerland got (to wit, many leaders kept their loot there), it is too vulnerable to a single attacker or invader. Piracy will be just one of the problems.

Finally, how many of us want to move to a South Pacific island? Or a North Sea oil rig? Or even to Russia?

Cyberspace looks more promising. There is more “space” in cyberspace, thus allowing more security and more colonizable space. And this space is coterminous with our physical space, accessible with proper terminals from any place in the world (though there may be attempts in physical space to block access, to restrict access to necessary cryptographic methods, etc.).

I won’t go into the various cryptographic methods here (see my earlier posting on the “Dining Cryptographers” protocol and various other postings on public-key systems, digital mixes, electronic cash, etc.). Interested readers have many sources. (I have just read a superb survey of these new techniques, the 1992 Ph.D. thesis of Jurgen Bos, “Practical Privacy,” which deals with these various protocols in a nice little book.)

Alice and Bob, our favorite cryptographic stand-ins, can communicate and transact business without ever meeting or even knowing who the other is. This can be extended to create virtual communities subject only to rules they themselves reach agreement on, much like this very Extropians list. Private law is the only law, as there is no appeal to some higher authority like the Pope or police. (This is why I said in several of my postings on the Hurricane Andrew debate that I am sympathetic to the PPL view.)

And this is the most compelling advantage of “Crypto Libertaria”: an arbitrarily large number of separate “nations” can simultaneously exist. This allows for rapid experimentation, self-selection, and evolution. If folks get tired of some virtual community, they can leave. The cryptographic aspects mean their membership in some community is unknown to others (vis-a-vis the physical or outside world, i.e., their “true names”) and physical coercion is reduced.

Communalists are free to create a communal environment, Creative Anachronists are free to create their own idea of a space, and so on. I’m not even getting into the virtual reality-photorealistic images-Jaron Lanier sort of thing, as even current text-based systems are demonstrably enough to allow the kind of virtual communities I’m describing here (and described in Vinge’s “True Names,” in Gibson’s Neuromancer, in Sterling’s Islands in the Net, and in Stephenson’s Snow Crash…though all of them missed out on some of the most exciting aspects…perhaps my novel will hit the mark?).

But will the government allow these sorts of things? Won’t they just torpedo it, just as they’d torpedo an offshore oilrig-like data haven?

The key is that distributed systems have no nexus which can be knocked out. Neither Usenet nor Fidonet can be disabled by any single government, as they are worldwide. Shutting them down would mean banning computer-to-computer communication. And despite the talk of mandatory “trap doors” in encryption systems, encryption is fundamentally easy to do and hard to detect. (For those who doubt this, let me describe a simple system I posted to sci.crypt several years ago. An ordinary digital audio tape (DAT) carries more than a gigabyte of data. This means that the least significant bit (LSB) of an audio DAT recording carries about 8megabytes of data! So Alice is stopped by the Data Police. They ask if she’s carrying illegal data. She smiles innocently and says “No. I know you’ll search me.”

They find her Sony Datman and ask about her collection of tapes and live recordings. Alice is carrying 80 MB of data—about 3 entire days worth of Usenet feeds!—on each and every tape. The data are stored in the LSBs, completely indistinguishable from microphone and quantization noise…unless you know the key. Similar methods allow data to be undetectably packed into LSBs of the PICT and GIF pictures now flooding the Net, into sampled sounds, and even into messages like this…the “whitespace” on the right margin of this message carries a hidden message readable only to a few chosen Extropians.)

I’ve already described using religions and role-playing games as a kind of legal cover for the development and deployment of these techniques. If a church decides to offer “digital confessionals” for its far-flung members, by what argument will the U.S. government justify insisting that encryption not be used? (I should note that psychiatrists and similar professionals have a responsibility to their clients and to their licensing agencies to ensure the privacy of patient records. Friends of mine are using encryption to protect patient records. This is just one little example of how encryption is getting woven into the fabric of our electronic society. There are many other examples.)

In future discussions, I hope we can hit on some of the many approaches to deploying these methods. I’ve spent several years thinking about this, but I’ve surely missed some good ideas. The “crypto-anarchy game” being planned is an attempt to get some of the best hackers in the Bay Area thinking along these lines and thinking of new wrinkles. Several have already offered to help further.

Some have commented that this list is not an appropriate place to discuss these ideas. I think it is. We are not discussing anything that is actually illegal, even under the broad powers of RICO (Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, used to go after “conspiracies” of porn dealers and gun dealers, amongst others). What we are discussing are long-range implications of these ideas.

In conclusion, it will be easier to form certain types of libertarian societies in cyberspace than in the real world of nations and physical locations. The electronic world is by no means complete, as we will still live much of our lives in the physical world. But economic activity is sharply increasing in the Net domain and these “crypto-anarchy” ideas will further erode the power of physical states to tax and coerce residents.

If you are interested in learning about the many methods of crypto anarchy and the myriad of ways to opt-out and vacate the state – Check out these essays below.

No Treason by Lysander Spooner
The Most Dangerous Superstition by Larken Rose
The John Galt Speech by Ayn Rand
Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto
An Agorist Primer by Samuel Edward Konkin III
The many writings hosted at Zerogov.com
Vices Are Not Crimes by Lysander Spooner
Economics In One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
Man Economy and State by Murray Rothbard
Universally Preferable Behavior – A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics by Stefan Molyneux
The Fundamentals of Voluntaryism
Everything Voluntary
The Jones Plantation by Larken Rose
The Free Market: What it is – What it Implies by Tom Rose
The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto by Tim May

What do you think about Timothy May’s Libertaria in Cyberspace essay? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

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US Senators Introduce ‘Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act’ — With Backdoor Mandate

25/06/2020 by Idelto Editor

US lawmakers have introduced the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act to ensure law enforcement can access encrypted information. This bill is “a full-frontal nuclear assault on encryption in the United States,” one expert says. It requires manufacturers of encrypted devices and operating systems to have the ability to decrypt data upon request, creating a backdoor requirement.

Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham and U.S. Senators Tom Cotton and Marsha Blackburn introduced the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act on Tuesday. The new bill “would bring an end to warrant-proof encryption in devices, platforms, and systems,” the committee’s announcement reads.

“Terrorists and criminals routinely use technology, whether smartphones, apps, or other means, to coordinate and communicate their daily activities,” Senator Graham said. He claims that law enforcement could not access “vital information” in many recent “terrorism cases and serious criminal activity” even after a court order was issued. Senator Cotton elaborated, “Tech companies’ increasing reliance on encryption has turned their platforms into a new, lawless playground of criminal activity,” adding:

This bill will ensure law enforcement can access encrypted material with a warrant based on probable cause and help put an end to the Wild West of crime on the internet.

The bill also “allows the Attorney General to issue directives to service providers and device manufacturers to report on their ability to comply with court orders, including timelines for implementation,” the committee’s announcement reveals. “The Government would be responsible for compensating the recipient of a directive for reasonable costs incurred in complying with the directive.”

Furthermore, the committee noted that the bill “Promotes technical and lawful access training and provides real-time assistance” and “Directs the Attorney General to create a prize competition to award participants who create a lawful access solution in an encrypted environment, while maximizing privacy and security.”

Backdoor Requirements Hurting People

Riana Pfefferkorn, associate director of surveillance and cybersecurity at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, calls the bill “a full-frontal nuclear assault on encryption in the United States.” She exclaimed:

This bill is the encryption backdoor mandate we’ve been dreading was coming, but that nobody, during the past six years of the renewed crypto wars, had previously dared to introduce. Well, these three senators finally went there.

Andi Wilson Thompson, senior policy analyst at New America’s Open Technology Institute, shares the sentiment, explaining: “This bill is just another attack on encryption, and trying to portray it as a ‘balanced solution’ that could protect privacy is just an attempt to distract from its true intent.” Thompson focuses on issues including digital security, vulnerabilities equities, encryption, and internet freedom.

The Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act “is actually even more out of touch with reality than many other recent anti-encryption bills,” said Andrew Crocker, a senior staff attorney on the civil liberties team of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). He added that the new bill is “even worse than EARN IT,” which he described as “a dangerous anti-speech and anti-security bill that would hand a government commission, led by the Attorney General, the power to determine ‘best practices’ online.”

According to the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Once a warrant is obtained, the bill would require device manufacturers and service providers to assist law enforcement with accessing encrypted data if assistance would aid in the execution of the warrant.

Crocker pointed out that the new bill “would give the Justice Department the ability to require that manufacturers of encrypted devices and operating systems, communications providers, and many others must have the ability to decrypt data upon request. In other words, a backdoor.”

The EFF attorney added: “The bill is sweeping in scope. It gives the government the ability to demand these backdoors in connection with a wide range of surveillance orders in criminal and national security cases, including Section 215 of the Patriot Act.” He warned, “Not only does the bill disregard the security of users, it allows the government to support its need for a backdoor with one-sided secret evidence, any time it feels a public court proceeding would harm national security or ‘enforcement of criminal law.’”

Emphasizing that “The requirements that the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act would impose upon companies would undermine the security and privacy of ordinary people while the real targets of criminal investigations could just migrate to new encrypted services,” Thompson cautioned:

This bill would ensure that companies that provide products and services used by millions in the United States have to offer weaker encryption technology, putting all of their users at risk.

The policy analyst noted: “The idea that an exceptional access backdoor can safely be developed solely for government use has been debunked over and over again by experts, including former senior members of the U.S. Justice Department.” The Lawful Access to Encrypted Data bill can be found here.

What do you think about the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act? Let us know in the comments section below.

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Eric Hughes: A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto

03/05/2020 by Idelto Editor

Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.

If two parties have some sort of dealings, then each has a memory of their interaction. Each party can speak about their own memory of this; how could anyone prevent it? One could pass laws against it, but the freedom of speech, even more than privacy, is fundamental to an open society; we seek not to restrict any speech at all. If many parties speak together in the same forum, each can speak to all the others and aggregate together knowledge about individuals and other parties. The power of electronic communications has enabled such group speech, and it will not go away merely because we might want it to.

Since we desire privacy, we must ensure that each party to a transaction have knowledge only of that which is directly necessary for that transaction. Since any information can be spoken of, we must ensure that we reveal as little as possible. In most cases personal identity is not salient. When I purchase a magazine at a store and hand cash to the clerk, there is no need to know who I am. When I ask my electronic mail provider to send and receive messages, my provider need not know to whom I am speaking or what I am saying or what others are saying to me; my provider only need know how to get the message there and how much I owe them in fees. When my identity is revealed by the underlying mechanism of the transaction, I have no privacy. I cannot here selectively reveal myself; I must always reveal myself.

Therefore, privacy in an open society requires anonymous transaction systems. Until now, cash has been the primary such system. An anonymous transaction system is not a secret transaction system. An anonymous system empowers individuals to reveal their identity when desired and only when desired; this is the essence of privacy.

Privacy in an open society also requires cryptography. If I say something, I want it heard only by those for whom I intend it. If the content of my speech is available to the world, I have no privacy. To encrypt is to indicate the desire for privacy, and to encrypt with weak cryptography is to indicate not too much desire for privacy. Furthermore, to reveal one’s identity with assurance when the default is anonymity requires the cryptographic signature.

We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence. It is to their advantage to speak of us, and we should expect that they will speak. To try to prevent their speech is to fight against the realities of information. Information does not just want to be free, it longs to be free. Information expands to fill the available storage space. Information is Rumor’s younger, stronger cousin; Information is fleeter of foot, has more eyes, knows more, and understands less than Rumor.

We must defend our own privacy if we expect to have any. We must come together and create systems, which allow anonymous transactions to take place. People have been defending their own privacy for centuries with whispers, darkness, envelopes, closed doors, secret handshakes, and couriers. The technologies of the past did not allow for strong privacy, but electronic technologies do.

We the Cypherpunks are dedicated to building anonymous systems. We are defending our privacy with cryptography, with anonymous mail forwarding systems, with digital signatures, and with electronic money.

Cypherpunks write code. We know that someone has to write software to defend privacy, and since we can’t get privacy unless we all do, we’re going to write it. We publish our code so that our fellow Cypherpunks may practice and play with it. Our code is free for all to use, worldwide. We don’t much care if you don’t approve of the software we write. We know that software can’t be destroyed and that a widely dispersed system can’t be shut down.

Cypherpunks deplore regulations on cryptography, for encryption is fundamentally a private act. The act of encryption, in fact, removes information from the public realm. Even laws against cryptography reach only so far as a nation’s border and the arm of its violence. Cryptography will ineluctably spread over the whole globe, and with it the anonymous transactions systems that it makes possible.

For privacy to be widespread it must be part of a social contract. People must come and together deploy these systems for the common good. Privacy only extends so far as the cooperation of one’s fellows in society. We the Cypherpunks seek your questions and your concerns and hope we may engage you so that we do not deceive ourselves. We will not, however, be moved out of our course because some may disagree with our goals.

The Cypherpunks are actively engaged in making the networks safer for privacy. Let us proceed together apace.

Onward.

What do you think about Eric Hughe’s “A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto?” Let us know what you think comments below.

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The Vacate Manifesto: How Today’s Technology Can Solidify Abolitionist Goals

11/04/2020 by Idelto Editor

20 years ago the cypherpunks of the new internet era came up with vast ideas describing privacy, anonymity, and encryption. Some of them brought these ideas to practice.

***The following is a featured manifesto written in 2015 by Jamie Redman that first appeared on the website notbeinggoverned.com (the site is no longer under maintenance). There’s also a video below of the entire transcript.***

Today we live in a world where we have the tools to bring about a new era of living. Life without third-party intrusion and parasites meddling in our wealth and private affairs. Decentralized services are slowly making us all nodes in a mesh pattern of pure human action. The ideas of anarchy are coming to life. Things like Tor, I2P, Bitcoin, Bittorrent, the Pirate Bay, online data houses, the Silk Road, Open Bazaar, Defense Distributed, 3D printing, mesh networking, encrypted chat and messenger services, so many ideas are spontaneously rising. These are the subliminal messages of anarchy dropped into the eyes of society. The idea is the very root of Agorism to create a wonderful counter-economy and completely vacate the state. Now the information era is upon us.

After the financial crash, many went to the streets to “occupy”. The idea was to occupy government and all things related. To get the voice heard and spread true direct democracy. Yet this a fallacy. Just as you cannot decimate an idea. You cannot ask a parasite to help you out. The idea of Occupy Wall Street was to simply be heard and get help from the government. More government is the last thing people need. Being heard by the government never happens. When you cry that the children and students in your country are in debt, it’s an utter absurdity to cry for more government. They are the very creators of the problem. Look what it got Occupy. They brought in the police state. They showed everyone around the globe who was boss by shutting you down with a gigantic slap on the face. People got beaten and pepper-sprayed on camera. For what? For more government, the very beast who is starving you? Today I ask you to starve them. Join the counter economy. Vacate the state.

The idea is to vacate the state and it’s edicts by any means necessary. The oligarchs laugh at us. So we ignore them. If you are to occupy anything; occupy your self and become an individual node in a decentralized land. Choke the state, with counteraction and economic freedom. We can build better infrastructure. We can build a better noncoercive tomorrow. We can starve the state by using cryptocurrency. We can house vast amounts of transparent data on the Bitcoin blockchain. Start our own marketplaces, escrows, trusts, and organizations without the need for third-party validation. Reputation systems are coming which will be just as powerful as anonymous private systems. A new era of enslaving information to be instantaneous and global electronic transactions for everyone. Technology and information will replicate biology in a manner that all of it will be distributed until there cannot be a third party. No sign of authority. It will be too blurry to recognize authorities in a decentralized land. Until we’ve completed the task of vacating all elements of their system.

We vacate the state. Vacate Wall Street and the central banks. We vacate the military by encouraging others to walk away and starve the industrial complex with our counter-economic actions. War feeds off of our use of the dollar and fiat currencies. We vacate the vote by not participating in their election systems, by simply walking away from the charade and opting out. We vacate taxation by avoiding it at all costs. We vacate public schools and let the young learn, rather than be subordinated. Not to fall in line, but to create a new.

The tools are now here to unleash the beast of direct action and many are doing this every single day. Ensuring privacy, anonymity and reputation and trust systems on the very same tokens. We must show our intentions of a stateless society with practice and proof. For emulation to grow and gravitate towards a noncoercive and nonviolent future. It must be done in front of the people for them to see. The cry for Occupy Wall Street is dead. The idea is to vacate and to claim pride in the shadow economy. Vacate the state by any means necessary. We vacate and create anew.

If you are interested in learning about the many ways to opt-out and vacate the state – Check out these essays below.

No Treason by Lysander Spooner
The Most Dangerous Superstition by Larken Rose
The John Galt Speech by Ayn Rand
Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto
An Agorist Primer by Samuel Edward Konkin III
The many writings hosted at Zerogov.com
Vices Are Not Crimes by Lysander Spooner
Economics In One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt
Man Economy and State by Murray Rothbard
Universally Preferable Behavior – A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics by Stefan Molyneux
The Fundamentals of Voluntaryism
Everything Voluntary
The Jones Plantation by Larken Rose
The Free Market: What it is – What it Implies by Tom Rose
The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto by Tim May

What do you think about the Vacate Manifesto? Let us know in the comments below.

The post The Vacate Manifesto: How Today’s Technology Can Solidify Abolitionist Goals appeared first on Bitcoin News.

Encryption Standards Threatened Under Pretext of Battling Coronavirus

22/03/2020 by Idelto Editor

Governments around the world have been trying for some time to bypass encryption and backdoor messaging apps. End-to-end encryption was preventing authorities from stopping terrorist attacks, we were told, and personal privacy had to be sacrificed for the greater good. Now, as the coronavirus spreads through the world, the powers-that-be claim public health is being jeopardized by the oversharing of false or misleading information pertaining to the pandemic. The encryption battle is warming up.

Also read: Can’t Lock Down Bitcoin: Trump Ponders Halting Stock Trading, Grounding US Passenger Flights

Coronavirus Provides the Latest Pretext to Steal Civil Liberties

In the age of social media, misinformation travels fast. Enough has been written about the “fake news” that spread like wildfire during the 2016 Brexit and U.S. Presidential elections, but suffice to say misinformation is once again at the forefront of debate four years on. This time Whatsapp – rather than Facebook and Twitter – is in the cross-hairs of legislators due to the rampant sharing of inaccurate coronavirus information on the platform.

As governments and medical bodies scramble to educate the public on the dangers of coronavirus, Whatsappers have apparently been busy sharing medical misinformation and fake cures, leading to calls from politicians to stop trading unverified info on the encrypted platform. Legislators, of course, want to go one step further than making impassioned pleas to share only sound advice: they want to prohibit encryption without a mandatory backdoor for state access and strip away Section 230 protections.

Notice how much people are pushing proposals that depend on indefinite mass surveillance. This stuff is a wet dream for people who dream of a scary excuse to know the movements of every citizen, all the time. https://t.co/kM9JaJE8W8

— Peter Todd (@peterktodd) March 20, 2020

As Marty’s Bent newsletter lamented on March 20, “Crises are seen as opportunities by sociopaths who want to tighten the grip of their control over you. When the masses are sufficiently scared and fear is palpable in the air the kleptocrats look to pounce,” adding:

In the face of the spread of COVID-19, you better believe the incompetent kleptocrats are licking their lips in anticipation of the Stay Healthy Act they are inevitably going to draft and attempt to force down our throats. They will use “public health and safety” as emotional Trojan Horses to lower your guard and leverage your fear to accept draconian measures that erode your civil liberties.

An End-to-End Privacy Grab

Because Whatsapp messages are encrypted in a way that allows them to be viewed only by sender and recipient, it is argued that such measures would halt the spread of dangerous medical misinformation. Of course, this overlooks the fact that authorities have been seeking to get around encryption protocols for years now. The covid-19 panic is merely the perfect trojan horse to push through a troubling bill that effectively bans end-to-end encryption and facilitates the scanning of internet communication en masse.

In response to criticism, Whatsapp says users can forward viral messages to special fact-checking accounts – but they are hardly likely to abandon encryption and jeopardize users’ security, and the same is true for pro-encryption tech giants like Apple and Facebook. Last month, Facebook spokesman Thomas Richards told the Washington Post the company was committed to encryption that “protects everyone’s safety from hackers and criminals.”

Ultimately, people should be able to parse legitimate and illegitimate information of their own accord; verifying the validity of any piece of information is but a click away. As one Twitter user said in response to Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar’s plea for accurate information-sharing, “In a democratic country people are entitled to act in their own best interests, do their own research and question the wisdom of those in authority. This isn’t North Korea.”

These days of uncertainty and chaos, your government will use the opportunity to increase its power. The excuse will be your own protection and they will put in place measures that in any other situation it would be unthinkable. Expect mass surveillance.https://t.co/inDOthfOon

— Jaime (@_j4ime_) March 20, 2020

EARN IT Bill Presents a Flagrant Threat to Privacy and Security

The Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) bill currently progressing through Congress had its first hearing on March 11, and is widely viewed as the biggest threat towards end-to-end encryption. If passed, the act would make encryption providers responsible for “dangerous” or “illegal” user-uploaded content, and grant governments access to encrypted user data. It also places the responsibility for determining “best practices” in the hands of a small, 19-member committee with implicit bias: the committee head is Attorney General William Barr, who has fought tooth and nail to undermine encryption for years.

Before covid-19 supplied a convenient pretext, the bipartisan bill’s advocates claimed it would help to tackle child sexual exploitation. On March 5, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden called the proposal “a transparent and deeply cynical effort by a few well-connected corporations and the Trump administration to use child sexual abuse to their political advantage, the impact to free speech and the security and privacy of every single American be damned.”

It is not just diehard security advocates and activists who should be worried about the potential impact of this draconian act: it’s everyone who values personal liberty, privacy and free speech. If you are uncomfortable with the dystopian vision of governments reviewing all your digital messages and listening to your calls, you should oppose it vigorously. You can sign a petition to reject the Act here.

I know covid and corn kinda dominate the news cycle here, but they are trying to gut encryption in USA. If you live here write your rep, it takes less than 5 minutes https://t.co/HMIbT01jJu

— JerryHowell✪ (@pennykoin1) March 20, 2020

In many ways, EARN IT seeks to replicate the Patriot Act which was hastily pushed through in the wake of 9/11, with coronavirus fears being weaponized to justify the urgent need for greater oversight into people’s movements and activities. It would give ostensibly democratic governments the same obsessive surveillance power as regimes in China and North Korea and stifle independent thought.

Like the coronavirus, the all-out assault on encryption shows no signs of letting up.

Do you think the coronavirus is being exploited to erode civil liberties? Let us know in the comments section below.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock.

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