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Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

"...when the companies have “actual knowledge” that illicit drugs are being distributed on their platforms"

chat providers could also pivot to a pfs model with deniability that effectively removes them from ever knowing about chat at all.

Frankly I think providers are in a bind. Federal agencies using this regulation could tank the product through repeated action against the public interest (like disclosing an abortion for example.). The compliance overhead is also nontrivial.

Then again it could force the hand of companies like signal into a supreme court showdown.

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FTA:

> it includes particularly controversial language holding companies accountable for conduct they don’t report if they “deliberately blind” themselves to the violations.

So it sounds like the "actual knowledge" is false advertising that doesn't reflect the actual dynamic of the bill.

"Deliberately blind" implies the use of encryption (by a platform or provider).

One solution I think is to provide a user side toggle or option to enable encryption. Then it is not deliberate from the provider's perspective, but a user choice/preference. And it is not unreasonable for the user to expect privacy (encryption), ergo this choice defaults to encrypted.

At worst the provider is intentionally blinded by the user, and not deliberately blind.

But do we move the argument back to whether including (the choice of) encryption to mean deliberately blind?

I think that is putting an awful lot of faith in a few legal hypotheticals. If this draconian bill passes, companies mitigate the damage this way, and things shake out that way in the courts, then great. I just think before the bill even passes, it's much better to focus on nipping it in the bud. The reason we have the first amendment is because by the time government is trying to police speech based on its results, things have gone horribly wrong and it's better to make them to address those root causes rather than go even further down the rabbit hole of authoritarianism.

AFAIK in law "deliberately blind" would mean if they see some drug sales and then pretend they didn't. It doesn't mean if they deliberately hide message content, or at least, it doesn't mean that by itself.

Signal, which is deliberately E2EE, would not be considered deliberately blind to drug sales, as that isn't its main use. Tor might be in hot water and might be required to block specific .onion addresses. Of course new ones will pop up, but the Tor project will be accidentally blind to those, not deliberately.

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