Senator Ron Wyden is a one-man defense for preventing horrible bills from moving forward in the Senate. Last month, he stopped Josh Hawley from moving a very problematic STOP CSAM bill from moving forward, and now he’s had to do it again.
A (bipartisan) group of senators traipsed to the Senate floor Wednesday evening. They tried to skip the line and quickly move some bad bills forward by asking for unanimous consent. Unless someone’s there to object, it effectively moves the bill forward, ending committee debate about it. Traditionally, this process is used for moving non-controversial bills, but lately it’s been used to grandstand about stupid bills.
Senator Lindsey Graham announced his intention to pull this kind of stunt on bills that he pretends are about “protecting the children” but which do no such thing in reality. Instead of it being just him, he rounded up a bunch of senators and they all pulled out the usual moral panic lines about two terrible bills: EARN IT and STOP CSAM. Both bills are designed to make it sound like good ideas and about protecting children, but the devil is very much in the detail, as both bills undermine end-to-end encryption while assuming that if you just put liability on websites, they’ll magically make child predators disappear.
And while both bills pretend not to attack encryption — and include some language about how they’re not intended to do so — both of them leave open the possibility that the use of end-to-end encryption will be used as evidence against websites for bad things done on those websites.
But, of course, as is the standard for the group of grandstanding senators, they present these bills as (1) perfect and (2) necessary to “protect the children.” The problem is that the bills are actually (1) ridiculously problematic and (2) will actually help bad people online in making end-to-end encryption a liability.
The bit of political theater kicked off with Graham having Senators Grassley, Cornyn, Durbin, Klobuchar, and Hawley talk on and on about the poor kids online. Notably, none of them really talked about how their bills worked (because that would reveal how the bills don’t really do what they pretend they do). Durbin whined about Section 230, misleadingly and mistakenly blaming it for the fact that bad people exist. Hawley did the thing that he loves doing, in which he does his mock “I’m a big bad Senator taking on those evil tech companies” schtick, while flat out lying about reality.
But Graham closed it out with the most misleading bit of all:
In 2024, here’s the state of play: the largest companies in America — social media outlets that make hundreds of billions of dollars a year — you can’t sue if they do damage to your family by using their product because of Section 230
This is a lie. It’s a flat out lie and Senator Graham and his staffers know this. All Section 230 says is that if there is content on these sites that violate the law, the liability goes after whoever created the content. If the features of the site itself “do damage,” then you can absolutely sue the company. But no one is actually complaining about the features. They’re complaining about content. And the liability on the content has to go to who created it.
The problem here is that Graham and all the other senators want to hold companies liable for the speech of users. And that is a very, very bad idea.
Now these platforms enrich our lives, but they destroy our lives.
These platforms are being used to bully children to death.
They’re being used to take sexual images and voluntarily and voluntarily obtain and sending them to the entire world. And there’s not a damn thing you can do about it. We had a lady come before the committee, a mother saying that her daughter was on a social media site that had an anti-bullying provisions. They complained three times about what was happening to her daughter. She killed herself. They went to court. They got kicked out by section 230.
I don’t know the details of this particular case, but first off, the platforms didn’t bully anyone. Other people did. Put the blame on the people actually causing the harm. Separately, and importantly, you can’t blame someone’s suicide on someone else when no one knows the real reasons. Otherwise, you actually encourage increased suicides, as it gives people an ultimate way to “get back” at someone.
Senator Wyden got up and, as he did last month, made it quite clear that we need to stop child sexual abuse and predators. He talked about his bill, which would actually help on these issues by giving law enforcement the resources it needs to go after the criminals, rather than the idea of the bills being pushed that simply blame social media companies for not magically making bad people disappear.
We’re talking about criminal issues, and Senator Wyden is looking to handle it by empowering law enforcement to deal with the criminals. Senators Graham, Durbin, Grassley, Cornyn, Klobuchar, and Hawley are looking to sue tech companies for not magically stopping criminals. One of those approaches makes sense for dealing with criminal activity. And yet it’s the other one that a bunch of senators have lined up behind.
And, of course, beyond the dangerous approach of EARN IT, it inherently undermines encryption, which makes kids (and everyone) less safe, as Wyden also pointed out.
Now, the specific reason I oppose EARN It is it will weaken the single strongest technology that protects children and families online. Something known as strong encryption.
It’s going to make it easier to punish sites that use encryption to secure private conversations and personal devices. This bill is designed to pressure communications and technology companies to scan users messages.
I, for one, don’t find that a particularly comforting idea.
Now, the sponsors of the bill have argued — and Senator Graham’s right, we’ve been talking about this a while — that their bills don’t harm encryption. And yet the bills allow courts to punish companies that offer strong encryption.
In fact, while it includes some they language about protecting encryption, it explicitly allows encryption to be used as evidence for various forms of liability. Prosecutors are going to be quick to argue that deploying encryption was evidence of a company’s negligence preventing the distribution of CSAM, for example.
The bill is also designed to encourage scanning of content on users phones or computers before information is sent over the Internet which has the same consequences as breaking encryption. That’s why a hundred civil society groups including the American Library Association — people then I think all of us have worked for — Human Rights Campaign, the list goes… Restore the Fourth. All of them oppose this bill because of its impact on essential security.
Weakening encryption is the single biggest gift you can give to these predators and these god-awful people who want to stalk and spy on kids. Sexual predators are gonna have a far easier time stealing photographs of kids, tracking their phones, and spying on their private messages once encryption is breached. It is very ironic that a bill that’s supposed to make kids safer would have the effect of threatening the privacy and security of all law-abiding Americans.
My alternative — and I want to be clear about this because I think Senator Graham has been sincere about saying that this is a horrible problem involving kids. We have a disagreement on the remedy. That’s what is at issue.
And what I want us to do is to focus our energy on giving law enforcement officials the tools they need to find and prosecute these monstrous criminals responsible for exploiting kids and spreading vile abuse materials online.
That can help prevent kids from becoming victims in the first place. So I have introduced to do this: the Invest in Child Safety Act to direct five billion dollars to do three specific things to deal with this very urgent problem.
Graham then gets up to respond and lies through his teeth:
There’s nothing in this bill about encryption. We say that this is not an encryption bill. The bill as written explicitly prohibits courts from treating encryption as an independent basis for liability.
We’re agnostic about that.
That’s not true. As Wyden said, the bill has some hand-wavey language about not treating encryption as an independent basis for liability, but it does explicitly allow for encryption to be one of the factors that can be used to show negligence by a platform, as long as you combine it with other factors.
Section (7)(A) is the hand-wavey bit saying you can’t use encryption as “an independent basis” to determine liability, but (7)(B) effectively wipes that out by saying nothing in that section about encryption “shall be construed to prohibit a court from considering evidence of actions or circumstances described in that subparagraph.” In other words, you just have to add a bit more, and then can say “and also, look, they use encryption!”
And another author of the bill, Senator Blumenthal, has flat out said that EARN IT is deliberately written to target encryption. He falsely claims that companies would “use encryption… as a ‘get out of jail free’ card.” So, Graham is lying when he says encryption isn’t a target of the bill. One of his co-authors on the bill admits otherwise.
Graham went on:
What we’re trying to do is hold these companies accountable by making sure they engage in best business practices. The EARN IT acts simply says for you to have liability protections, you have to prove that you’ve tried to protect children. You have to earn it. You’re just not given to you. You have to have the best business practices in place that voluntary commissions that lay out what would be the best way to harden these sites against sexually exploitation. If you do those things you get liability, it’s just not given to you forever. So this is not about encryption.
As to your idea. I’d love to talk to you about it. Let’s vote on both, but the bottom line here is there’s always a reason not to do anything that holds these people liable. That’s the bottom line. They’ll never agree to any bill that allows you to get them in court ever. If you’re waiting on these companies to give this body permission for the average person to sue you. It ain’t never going to happen.
So… all of that is wrong. First of all, the very original version of the EARN IT Act did have provisions to make company’s “earn” 230 protections by following best practices, but that’s been out of the bill for ages. The current version has no such thing.
The bill does set up a commission to create best practices, but (unlike the earlier versions of the bill) those best practice recommendations have no legal force or requirements. And there’s nothing in the bill that says if you follow them you get 230 protections, and if you don’t, you don’t.
Does Senator Graham even know which version of the bill he’s talking about?
Instead, the bill outright modifies Section 230 (before the Commission even researches best practices) and says that people can sue tech companies for the distribution of CSAM. This includes using the offering of encryption as evidence to support the claims that CSAM distribution was done because of “reckless” behavior by a platform.
Either Senator Graham doesn’t know what bill he’s talking about (even though it’s his own bill) or he doesn’t remember that he changed the bill to do something different than it used to try to do.
It’s ridiculous that Senator Wyden remains the only senator who sees this issue clearly and is willing to stand up and say so. He’s the only one who seems willing to block the bad bills while at the same time offering a bill that actually targets the criminals.
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