Encryption Keeps Us All Safe. But Not If It’s Broken. 

Three bills before the United States Congress threaten encryption, the strongest tool we have for keeping every user of the Internet safe. Policymakers want to curb the online spread of illegal content and protect children by pressuring platforms to remove end-to-end encryption. Everyone, including children, deserves protection from exploitation online. But breaking encryption is misguided and will only leave us more vulnerable. 

Three Ways Encryption Safeguards Kids

1. It keeps private family photos stored on encrypted cloud accounts safe and secure.
2. It prevents strangers from listening in or seeing messages sent by a child to their friends on messaging apps.
3. It keeps message content private so it can’t be scanned for ad profiling and targeted with inappropriate content. 

Take Action Now

If these bills are successful, they’ll spell disaster for online safety—for children and for all of us. Let’s act fast to #SaveUSEncryption.

Join forces with the Internet Society to oppose ‘breaking’ encryption: sign our petition and we’ll share important updates and notify you when it’s time for all of us to act.

Meanwhile, please find some resources to support your advocacy efforts: click here to download the Internet Society's #SaveUSEncryption toolkit!

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What You Need To Know

The EARN It Act: The act threatens the use of end-to-end encryption by expanding the liability risks of communications platforms.

It would allow U.S. states to impose criminal liability when the judiciary believes platforms aren’t doing enough to keep child sexual abuse material off their platforms. The liability risk will force platforms to scan and filter their users’ content. The ramifications will hurt us:

• Most families have harmless photos of their children in the bath stored on a cloud account. Without encryption, these photos could be more easily stolen and shared as child sexual abuse material on the Internet. 
• Domestic violence hotlines often use WhatsApp, which is end-to-end encrypted. Without encryption, messages to people who need help may not be private from abusers. 
• Without encryption, LGBTQ+ people could have their private conversations exposed and used against them—opening them up to blackmail, violence, and suicide. 
• When end-to-end encrypted communications are undermined, it puts our national security at greater risk. 
• Companies rely on end-to-end encryption to protect trade secrets. Without it, they’ll be vulnerable to corporate espionage, including from competitors overseas.

STOP CSAM Act of 2023: The act introduces sweeping potential civil liability to any company, non-profit, or individual who’s involved in operating any significant aspect of the Internet or distributing software used in Internet communications. 

• It would give power to courts to consider the use of encryption as proof of liability for facilitating or promoting cases of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) distribution on a platform. 
• Companies, non-profits, and people would only be required to meet a “reckless” standard to be found civilly liable. As a result, most of the Internet could be construed as open to civil liability for CSAM transmitted over the Internet.
• Faced with this new potential civil liability, companies, non-profits, and people will take drastic actions to attempt to demonstrate they are not reckless towards CSAM. 
• Platforms and network operators may break encryption on their services to enable content filtering, which makes everyone less safe online.

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA): The act imposes a new legal duty on platforms to prevent specific harms against children by stopping them from encountering harmful content. 

The definition of harmful content is broad and includes “the promotion of self-harm, suicide, eating disorders, substance abuse, and other matters that pose a risk to physical and mental health of a minor.” The act is concerning because:

• It may compel platforms to provide data to researchers, a disaster for online privacy.
• It’s possible that in an attempt to comply with their duty to minor kids’ communications, end-to-end encrypted messaging platforms (such as iMessage and WhatsApp) will simply break encryption, putting everyone at risk.