Security News > 2020 > April > Signal: We’ll be eaten alive by EARN IT Act’s anti-encryption wolves
Understandably, the end-to-end encrypted messaging app Signal has been signing up new users at "Unprecedented" rates and flipping the switch on servers "Faster than we ever anticipated," Signal's Joshua Lund said last week.
At a high level, what the bill proposes is a system where companies have to earn Section 230 protection by following a set of designed-by-committee 'best practices' that are extraordinarily unlikely to allow end-to-end encryption.
The bill's backers claim that they're not targeting encryption.
Pfefferkorn has also pointed out that the bill would give unprecedented power to Attorney General William Barr, a vocal critic of end-to-end encryption, who would become the arbiter of any recommendations from the "Best practices" commission that the EARN IT bill would create.
The EARN IT Act is only the latest of many attempts to inject an encryption backdoor that the US government and law enforcement agencies have been trying to inflict for years.