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Digital Rights Groups Launch Week of Action Against 'Bad Internet Bills'
The coalition is "demanding that Congress focus on passing badly needed comprehensive privacy legislation to actually protect us from the harms of Big Tech companies and data brokers."
Jul 20, 2023
A coalition of digital rights groups is sounding the alarm as U.S. lawmakers try "to push through a swarm of harmful internet bills that would severely impact human rights, expand surveillance, and enable censorship" online by launching a week of action Thursday to demand Congress pass comprehensive data privacy legislation instead.
Groups including Fight for the Future, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the ACLU kicked off the weeklong campaign against #BadInternetBills with a call to action for activists and a vow to "get loud about our opposition" to five bills and "demanding that Congress focus on passing badly needed comprehensive privacy legislation to actually protect us from the harms of Big Tech companies and data brokers, instead of pushing through misguided legislation before August congressional recess."
During the week of action, participants will "drive emails and phone calls to legislators and urge influencers and online communities to speak out against misguided legislation," including:
- The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which gives state attorneys general the power to censor speech related to LGBTQ+ issues and abortion rights;
- The Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT) Act which threatens the availability of end-to-end encryption, and opens the doors to widespread censorship;
- Strengthening Transparency and Obligation to Protect Children Suffering from Abuse and Mistreatment (STOP CSAM) Act, which fails to address the scourge of online child exploitation, while threatening encryption, much like the EARN IT Act would;
- The Cooper Davis Act, which would punish communications providers that encrypt your communications and co-opts those companies for increased government surveillance of marginalized communities; and
- The Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats that Risk Information and Communications Technology (RESTRICT) Act, a measure to grant the government extraordinary power to censor apps.
Fight for the Future President Evan Greer argued on Twitter that "KOSA will lead to MORE harm online, not less," adding that the proposed legislation "should be permanently shelved so that Congress can focus on actual solutions to Big Tech's harms, like passing data privacy and antitrust legislation, algorithmic transparency, studying the failure of SESTA/FOSTA, etc."
Opponents say the 2018 law known as SESTA/FOSTA has forced sex workers—both voluntary and trafficked—"offline and into harm's way," according to a May plea from more than 100 groups warning of the privacy and other risks of the EARN IT Act.
Congress is under pressure to pass these bill by some children’s rights and health groups. The ACLU warned on its website that the "EARN IT and STOP CSAM Acts may sound well-intentioned, as they claim to protect children from sexual exploitation, but their impact on free expression and online privacy would be devastating."
"Let's be clear: These bills would create a clear avenue to remove important, protected speech from the internet, and our ability to communicate without the government seeing," the group stressed.
"These bills also create an outsized risk that any user-posted speech with even vague ties to sex and sexuality, including speech on reproductive, sex worker, and LGBTQ+ rights will be removed," the ACLU added.
EFF argued: "The Cooper Davis Act would turn some of the most popular online platforms into Drug Enforcement Administration informants. The content-scanning tools that would likely be used have large error rates, and would sweep up innocent conversations, including discussions about past drug use or treatment."
"This bill contains no warrant requirement, no required notice, and limited user protections, and deserves to be defeated on the Senate floor," the organization added.
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'An Unmistakable Voice': Remembering Daniel Ellsberg
The world will never see another Dan Ellsberg, but the legacy he leaves is bigger than his family and friends.
Jun 18, 2023
The world lost an unmistakable voice this week, as Daniel Ellsberg passed away at 92.
Dan will be remembered for many things, of course most prominently providing the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971. Although he hated being called one, he was rightly a hero to anyone who believes that we must be in a position to evaluate our governments and cast our votes based upon truth rather than lies.
The biggest lesson Dan taught me was to see the dangers arising from governmental secrecy from the position of those keeping the secrets. Dan talked about how the government was too often driven by what he called “smart dumb” people. He talked about how governmental officials' proximity to power and insider knowledge led them to do stupid things—like continuing a war that was clearly lost, or lying about weapons of mass destruction—and how these kinds of terrible misjudgments and mistakes are as inevitable as they are insidious. Dan was as steadfast in debunking the myths surrounding governmental secrecy as he was in giving unwavering public support to others who took courageous steps to tell the truth about illegal, immoral, and improper governmental actions, especially around matters of national security.
The biggest lesson Dan taught me was to see the dangers arising from governmental secrecy from the position of those keeping the secrets.
I first met Dan when I was helping with the creation of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. FPF was started in 2012 by Trevor Timm with help from Rainey Reitman and Micah Lee, who were all EFF staffers at the time, along with Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and a few others. One of EFF's founders and Board members, John Perry Barlow, was also a driving force for the creation of FPF. I believe it was Barlow who brought Dan into the founding conversations. EFF served as legal counsel for the fledgling organization, and we still advise it at times.
I’ll never forget one of the first organizing meetings we held at EFF’s brick Mission District offices. Upon seeing Dan unceremoniously walk in to our little conference room, I was both tongue-tied and star-struck. But he didn’t seem to notice. He sat down and quickly helped us think through what the organization should be and how it should function. He was steadfast that the organization should stand up unapologetically for Wikileaks and Julian Assange, which had just published evidence of war crimes by the U.S. government in Iraq provided by Chelsea Manning. Wikileaks was subject to a financial blockade in which no payment processor would handle contributions to it. Dan went on to stand up for—and attend the trial of—Chelsea Manning, and much later he stood firm in support of Ed Snowden. Dan’s certainty and conviction were contagious, as was his courage.
EFF later held a public event in Berkeley discussing NSA spying, where Dan spoke. He explained how those who are charged with keeping secrets become convinced that they are smarter and more capable than those who don’t have that information. He discussed how secrecy creates a feedback loop in which officials inside a secrecy bubble start to believe that they are invincible. They become subject to groupthink and so are increasingly unwilling to recognize legitimate criticism or concerns from those outside the bubble. He made clear the dangerous and corrosive power of governmental secrecy, something he had experienced, and then rejected, in himself.
Dan also was unflinching in asserting that most governmental secrecy is not necessary. “Most secrecy is not directed at keeping secrets from external nations, enemies, allies, or otherwise. It’s to keep secrets from Americans, Congress, and public courts. They’re the ones that have the votes and write the budgets,” he said at a Harvard Law School Human Rights Clinic event in 2011. “They’re the ones whose blame is to be feared.”
I'm also happy that EFF helped facilitate the first meeting between Dan and Chelsea Manning, at our November 2018 Pioneer Awards ceremony. Dan was lit up and exuberant that night: “I waited 39 years for her to appear in this world,” he said before detailing the significance of the documents Manning had leaked. He praised both her and Edward Snowden, saying, “I have often said that I identify more with them as 'revelationaries' than with any other people in the world."
The world will never see another Dan Ellsberg, but the legacy he leaves is bigger than his family and friends. His legacy is in all of the other whistleblowers and truth tellers out there today, and in those who will bravely step forward in the years ahead. May his memory be a blessing to us all.
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Digital Rights Groups Applaud US Supreme Court for Protecting Free Speech Online
"Today's decisions should be commended for recognizing that the rules we apply to the internet should foster free expression, not suppress it," said the deputy director of ACLU's National Security Project.
May 18, 2023
Civil liberties advocates on Thursday praised the U.S. Supreme Court for a pair of unanimous rulings that they say uphold the right to free speech on online platforms.
The high court's decisions in Twitter v. Taamneh and Gonzalez v. Google represent "a win for free expression on the internet," the ACLU tweeted.
Alongside its partners, the ACLU "filed amicus briefs in both cases urging the court to ensure online platforms are free to promote, demote, and recommend content without legal risk in order to protect political discourse, cultural development, and intellectual activity," the group noted in a statement.
"Free speech online lives to fight another day," said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of ACLU's National Security Project. "Twitter and other apps are home to an immense amount of protected speech, and it would be devastating if those platforms resorted to censorship to avoid a deluge of lawsuits over their users' posts. Today's decisions should be commended for recognizing that the rules we apply to the internet should foster free expression, not suppress it."
According to ACLU's statement:
In Twitter v. Taamneh, the plaintiffs claimed that Twitter was liable for allegedly "aiding and abetting" an attack in Istanbul by ISIS because Twitter failed to adequately block or remove content promoting terrorism — even though it had no specific knowledge that any particular post furthered a terrorist act. The court held that hosting, displaying, and recommending videos, without more, is not aiding and abetting terrorism.
As the ACLU's amicus brief in Twitter v. Taamneh explained, if the Supreme Court allowed the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' startlingly broad interpretation of the Anti-Terrorism Act to stand, online intermediaries—like internet service providers, social media platforms, publishers, and other content distributors—would be forced to suppress the First Amendment-protected speech of many of their users. The brief explained that, given the vast scale of speech occurring on platforms like Twitter every day, online intermediaries would be compelled to use blunt content moderation tools that over-restrict speech by barring certain topics, speakers, or types of content in order to avoid claims that they went too far in making that information available to an interested audience. Even today, platforms frequently take down content mistakenly identified as offensive or forbidden, for example, by confusing a post about a landmark mosque with one about a terrorist group.
In Gonzalez v. Google, the court noted that in light of its decision in Twitter v. Taamneh, "little if any" of the plaintiffs' case remained viable. It was therefore unnecessary to address the question of whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act immunized the platform's recommendation algorithms. The court remanded the case to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to determine whether any part of the plaintiffs' argument could move forward in light of the Twitter ruling.
David Greene, director of civil liberties at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), also welcomed the court's rulings in both cases.
EFF is "pleased that the court found that an online service cannot be liable for terrorist attacks merely because their services are generally used by terrorist organizations the same way they are used by millions of organizations around the globe," Greene said in a statement.
He added that EFF is "pleased that the court did not address or weaken Section 230, which remains an essential part of the architecture of the modern internet and will continue to enable user access to online platforms."
Section 230 is a federal liability shield that generally prevents social media and other websites from facing defamation lawsuits or being held accountable for third-party content generated by users or paid advertisers. The immunity provision has come under increased scrutiny from many members of Congress in both major parties.
One countervailing opinion about the court's decision to not reexamine Section 230 came from the Real Facebook Oversight Board, a coalition of researchers and advocates who seek to counter the harms associated with the profit-maximizing algorithms used by Facebook and Instagram, both of which are now owned by Meta.
"Meta wasn't on trial today in the Supreme Court, but their rapacious business model was," the group said in a statement. "In no surprise, the extremist U.S. Supreme Court chose profit over privacy and safety. More than ever, U.S. lawmakers must act to pass sweeping, meaningful regulation of Big Tech—before more users are harmed or worse by hate speech that platforms won't and can't stop."
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), however, echoed the assessment shared by the ACLU and EFF, calling the court's decision to leave Section 230 untouched "good news."
"Despite being unfairly scapegoated for everything wrong with the internet, Section 230 remains vitally important to protecting online speech," argued Wyden, who co-wrote the 1996 statute with former Rep. Chris Cox (R-Calif.). "My focus remains helping end abusive practices by tech companies while protecting freedom of information online."
According to Politico, the high court's decisions "mark a major win for the tech industry, which has argued that narrowing Section 230 could be disastrous for the internet if platforms could be sued over content-moderation decisions. But the resolution leaves the door open to future showdowns—potentially in Congress—over the breadth of the legal protection the internet firms enjoy."
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