Tell Congress: Protect Our Online Privacy and Expression

Right now, Congress is considering a pair of bills that threaten our basic rights to express ourselves online and communicate privately.

These bills — the EARN IT and STOP CSAM Acts — may sound well-intentioned, as they claim to protect children from sexual exploitation, but their impact on free expression and online privacy would be devastating. Let’s be clear: These bills would create a clear avenue to remove important, protected speech from the internet, and our ability to communicate without the government seeing.

Send a message to your senator now and urge them to vote NO on these dangerous bills.

Encryption ensures that we have the ability to express ourselves online privately and securely. We rely on encryption to protect our most sensitive communications – like exchanges between healthcare providers and patients, journalists and their sources. Targets of state governments, like those seeking reproductive care, and LGBTQ+ persons are especially at risk, as encryption allows us to communicate without fear of others eavesdropping.

These bills also create an outsized risk that any user-posted speech with even vague ties to sex and sexuality, including speech on reproductive, sex worker, and LGBTQ+ rights will be removed.

It’s time to deliver a clear message to Congress: Protect free speech and expression online – vote NO on any bill that targets our ability to communicate freely and privately online.

Send Message

Senator,

I urge you to protect our online expression and privacy and vote NO on the EARN IT Act and the STOP CSAM Act.

Every day, tens of millions of Americans rely on the protection that encryption provides to be safe and secure online. Encryption is the foundation for a robust and secure internet: allowing people around the world to communicate free of state and corporate surveillance, protecting critical infrastructure like our power grid and financial system, and keeping our data safe from malicious actors like hackers.

While we all share the goal of protecting children from harm, these bills create a clear path for the government to require platforms to break their encryption, removing the possibility for us to communicate online free of eavesdropping by those who are not the intended recipient of our communication. Today, law enforcement has a variety of tools to investigate and prosecute sexual crimes involving children–including the ability to get a warrant to access an individual’s device. Ending our ability to communicate privately and securely is not the solution.

Without end-to-end encryption, law enforcement can go to platforms and demand they turnover the contents of our communications if they have probable cause to believe we may have committed a crime–that means that police could gain access to our private communications online with friends and family without ever having to access our device and without our knowledge. A woman’s discussion of her reproductive healthcare, or  a  journalist’s communication with a source, would all be accessible to law enforcement with a subpoena to the platform on which the communications took place.

These bills also create an outsized risk that any user-posted speech with even vague ties to sex and sexuality, including speech on reproductive, sex worker and LGBTQ+ rights will be removed.

We all share the goal of addressing these serious issues. The EARN IT Act and STOP CSAM Act, however, will make us all less safe and secure online. Please vote to protect our expression and  privacy online and oppose these dangerous bills.

Sincerely,

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