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Comment by Kon-Peki | Hacker News Reader

Link to the actual bill [1]. The worry is that it has some vague language that would make social media companies drop E2E encryption.

I’m definitely not a legal expert, but the proposed law specifically says:

g) Protection Of Privacy.—Nothing in this section shall be construed to require a provider to—

“(1) monitor any user, subscriber, or customer of that provider;

“(2) monitor the content of any communication of any person described in paragraph (1); or

“(3) affirmatively search, screen, or scan for facts or circumstances described in subsections (b) and (c).

It seems like the goal is to make it so that when people complain to websites about specific instances of illegal conduct, the website is not allowed to ignore the complaint.

[1] https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/108...

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Of course you're not "required to monitor", you're just also required not to be "deliberately blind". The combination of these is that you are required to maintain the capability to surveil users upon request (ie, no scary encryption) - and once that capability is in place, the next step is pseudo KYC and SAR functionality.

The words “deliberately blind” aren’t in the text I linked to.

I see a paragraph that says you can’t knowingly and willingly fail to make a report or you get fined. But the very next paragraph says this doesn’t mean you have to monitor anyone or screen or scan anything people write.

I’m just not seeing it. What I do see is that a bunch of internet companies really don’t like the idea of being fined a lot of money every time their customer service AI makes a mistake when categorizing a complaint about drugs, because they know their customer service AI is garbage.

It's possible it's a versioning discrepancy - the language being referred to is here. Your version is "as introduced". During the committee process I believe it is possible for language to be altered before an actual vote without a formal "amendment".

https://twitter.com/JakeLaperruque/status/167888722551627776...

Fair enough.

By the way, is there any reason to believe that governments are going to do anything with these reports?

Best case scenario, they don’t.

Worst case scenario, they can arbitrarily ruin people’s lives.

Hoping for the best, but planning for the worst in this case means fighting it tooth and nail.

The bill left the committee with a substitute as amendment. In other words a different version was introduced in committee and that is what was reported out of committee. The text of the version reported out of committee can be found at https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23876061-ell23484-ma...

The words "deliberately blind" can be found in this version.

Hmm, very interesting - your link to the bill's text is specifically missing the section about being "deliberately blind" to misuse (it's the 4th bullet point from this tweet, https://twitter.com/JakeLaperruque/status/167888722551627776...), and that's what people are so concerned about.

Perhaps the bill has already been updated? Or maybe the offending 4th bullet point was added later?

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