Security News > 2020 > July > You may be distracted by the pandemic but FYI: US Senate panel OK's backdoors-by-the-backdoor EARN IT Act

An amended version of America's controversial proposed EARN IT Act has been unanimously approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee - a key step in its journey to becoming law.

Concerns over the law being used to force tech companies to introduce encryption backdoors led to an amendment [PDF], put forward by Senator Patrick Leahy, that stated online platforms won't face civil or criminal liability if they are unable to break end-to-end encryption in their own services.

While the revised version steps away from creating a federal standard that will apply across the country, the revised EARN IT Act will instead empower individual states to introduce their own rules.

"The manager's amendment would effectively make the EARN IT Act into an entirely different bill," it noted, adding: "Most worrisome, the new language would amend Section 230 to exclude state civil and criminal laws from its protection If a state law makes it illegal to negligently or recklessly transport CSAM, interactive computer services will likely be unable to host user-generated content at all."

It asked the committee to "Postpone the markup so that interested parties can examine the proposed amendments in more detail, and work with the Committee to address potential concerns." But the Senate committee didn't heed the request, and OK'd the revised bill instead, sending it to the Senate as a whole for review.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/07/06/revised_earn_it_act/