Proposals to Amend Section 230 Share a Similar Goal: Damage Online Users’ Speech

Re:Proposals to Amend Section 230 Share a Similar Goal: Dama... by matheusmoreira on Friday June 19, 2020 @04:00PM (#23578325)

Under this law, a host will be immune from liability only if they "assist government authorities to obtain content (i.e., evidence) in a comprehensible, readable, and usable format". A host that uses end-to-end encryption would not meet this requirement and would therefore not be immune from liability.

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Re:Proposals to Amend Section 230 Share a Similar Goal: Dama... by carapace on Friday June 19, 2020 @04:40PM (#23578668)

If I encrypt an email and send it over the internet would my ISP become liable?

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Re:Proposals to Amend Section 230 Share a Similar Goal: Dama... by matheusmoreira on Friday June 19, 2020 @09:17PM (#23580655)

The host is required only to "assist" the authorities so I don't think they'd be liable for that. The encryption process was under your control and short of disabling your internet access or cracking your machine there's nothing they can do about it. If they encrypted your email themselves on your behalf and threw the key away so that authorities couldn't get to it, they might be liable.

Now that I think about it, sending malicious updates to a router might be one way they could be required to assist the authorities in their quest for lawful access...

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Re:Proposals to Amend Section 230 Share a Similar Goal: Dama... by carapace on Saturday June 20, 2020 @01:35PM (#23585200)

Cheers!

I use a web-hosted email provider that offers e2e encryption (done client-side with a Java app I think.) I don't actually encrypt any emails in practice. But it would be defeating the entire purpose if a service like this could read my encrypted emails (for the authorities or anyone else).

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

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