LONDON (Bywire News) - US officials have long been looking to sneak their way through end to end encryption. Their latest attempt is the ‘Earn it Act’ which could give them a backdoor into our personal data. Unless tech companies combine to stop it, we could all be at risk.
The bill, which was championed by US Attorney General William Barr, decrees that Government entities and law enforcement officials should have the right to assess user content on encrypted sites. This would allow them to monitor and put an end to illicit activities and would make website owners accountable for all the content produced on their network.
The pretext being given for this bill is to fight child pornography, terrorism and other illegal activity on the web. Although law makers accept that “encryption is an existential anchor of trust in the digital world,” they say the technology can pose a threat to the public and inhibits government investigations of criminal activity including child exploitation rings.
The DOJ would also like to make web companies responsible for illegal content which uses their services. Social media platforms, they say, are often used to groom children online. For example, they say that in 2018 Facebook messenger was responsible for 12 million of the 18.4 million reported instances of child sexual abuse material. Investigations have also found that child sex predators are rife on platforms such as Tik Tok, Yubo and Kik.
A dangerous backdoor
While nobody should underestimate the importance of the fight against online child sex abuse, the bill is dangerous for a number of reasons.
Experts in the crypto sector, see it as a threat to growth. Cryptocurrencies and blockchains rely on secure end to end encryption for safe digital transfers.
Equally, the thought of the government being given a backdoor into internet service platforms should worry everyone given what they’ve been shown to do with that data in the past.
Edward Snowdon blew the whistle on widespread illegal monitoring by the state in 2013. Leaked documents proved the government has obtained access to the phone and internet records of millions of citizens.
More recently it was revealed that the Trump campaign had used social media to target individuals, usually from BAME backgrounds, for voter suppression.
At the best of times, with a government which could be trusted to act in an ethical manner, such a backdoor would be risky. In the age of Trump, Johnson and Cummings, who seem to think that Ethics is a place you drive through on the way to Kent, it would be positively reckless.
Even if they could be trusted, building backdoors into internet service operators would create major vulnerabilities at a time when cybercrime is more common and sophisticated than ever before.
It’s a bit like constructing an impregnable fortress but building a secret tunnel which will be left open and unguarded, and telling the enemy that it’s there.
It would be an open gift to the cyber criminals of this world and make everyone’s personal data much less secure than it already is. Indeed, if you asked a cybercriminal to create their dream piece of legislation, they would come up with something like this.
(Written by Tom Cropper, Edited by Klaudia Fior)