That’s been the takeaway from every examination of the FBI’s access to NSA Section 702 collections. The FBI says one thing, does another, and months or years down the road, the system of checks and balances decides to call bullshit.
Archiv: Techdirt (independent media)
Cooper Davis Act: Another Attempt By Congress To Regulate That Which They Don’t Understand
In many ways, this is similar to the CyberTipline for CSAM that requires websites to report details if they come across child sexual abuse material. But, CSAM is strict liability content for which there is no 1st Amendment protection. Demanding that anything even remotely referencing an illegal drug transaction be sent to the DEA will sweep up a ton of perfectly protected speech.
Worse, it will lead to massive overreporting of useless leads. I’ve mentioned just recently that we get a ton of attempted spam comments here at Techdirt, over a million in just the last six months alone. A decent percentage of these appear to be pushing what are likely to be illegal drugs. Now, we catch the vast majority of these in the spam filter, and they never reach the site. And, I don’t think a mere spam comment alone would reach the level of knowledge necessary to trigger this law, but the point is that there’s potential that our lawyers would warn us that to protect ourselves from potentially ruinous liability for failing to report these spam messages to the DEA, they’d recommend we basically flood the DEA with a bunch of the spam messages we received just to avoid the risk of liability.
Stop CSAM Act: Neues Gesetz in den USA könnte Verschlüsselung schwächen
Hinzu kommt laut der Bürgerrechtsorganisation auch ein neuer zivilrechtlicher Anspruch, der Privatklagen gegen Internetunternehmen und App-Stores wegen der „Förderung oder Erleichterung“ der Ausbeutung von Kindern, des „Hostings oder Speicherns von Kinderpornografie“ oder des „Zugänglichmachens von Kinderpornografie für jedermann“ ermöglichen soll. Dies geschehe alles auf der Grundlage eines sehr niedrigen Fahrlässigkeitsstandards, so die EFF.
Außerdem wird ein Benachrichtigungs- und Löschsystem geschaffen, das von einem neu geschaffenen Ausschuss für den Schutz von Kindern im Internet beaufsichtigt wird und von den Anbietern verlangt, Inhalte auf Anfrage zu entfernen oder zu deaktivieren, noch bevor eine administrative oder gerichtliche Entscheidung vorliegt, dass es sich bei den Inhalten tatsächlich um CSAM handelt.
Damit geht das geplante Gesetz lange nicht so weit wie die europäische Chatkontrolle oder der britische Online Safety Act, welche derzeit von den Anbietern verlangen, die Kommunikationsinhalte und gespeicherte Dateien vor der Verschlüsselung zu durchsuchen. Dennoch sieht die EFF in den Formulierungen des Gesetzes große Fallstricke:
Senator Durbin’s ‘STOP CSAM Act’ Has Some Good Ideas… Mixed In With Some Very Bad Ideas That Will Do More Harm Than Good
(18.04.2023)
It’s “protect the children” season in Congress with the return of KOSA and EARN IT, two terrible bills that attack the internet, and rely on people’s ignorance of how things actually work to pretend they’re making the internet safer, when they’re not. Added to this is Senator Dick Durbin’s STOP CSAM Act, which he’s been touting since February, but only now has officially put out a press release announcing the bill (though, he hasn’t released the actual language of the bill, because that would actually be helpful to people analyzing it). (…)
Notice what’s not talked about? It’s not mentioned how much law enforcement has done to actually track down, arrest, and prosecute the perpetrators. That’s the stat that matters. But it’s missing.
Congress Trying To Sneak Through Internet Link Tax To Funnel Cash To Private Equity Firms That Are Destroying Local Journalism
Congress has a bad habit. They have stopped passing substantive legislation through normal procedure, debate and votes. The legislative process as designed by our Founders is not happening. Instead, Congress is saving most of its actual policy-making legislation for large end-of-the-year bills that can combine hundreds of separate pieces of legislation. And if reports are accurate, we could be shaping up for the granddaddy of them all this December. This process must change, particularly for bills as highly controversial and constitutionally concerning as the misleadingly named Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA).