Every week at All Saints Church we put our faith into action. This week our focus is protecting privacy and secure communications on the internet.

Congress has revived the EARN IT Act (Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act), and it’s even clearer than before what the nefarious purpose of this proposal is. The bill enables every U.S. state and territory to pass laws that put companies who offer encrypted services at the risk of criminal prosecution or civil suit. The goal: put in place universal message scanning with government-approved software.

Under the guise of fighting child abuse, the sponsors of the EARN IT Act want to coerce private companies to scan every message, photo, and website on the Internet. Then those scans will be checked against U.S. law enforcement databases.

End-to-end encryption is vital to our privacy, security, and freedom of speech. But it will be completely undermined by the kind of universal scanning that these Senators are promoting.

We’ve never let state legislatures regulate the internet, and we shouldn’t start now. EARN IT will create a race to the bottom, as every internet service—small or large—will have to figure out how to comply with the most restrictive state law, or risk prosecution and endless lawsuits.

We urgently need to kill the EARN IT Act before it gets any further in Congress. This disastrous bill was originally proposed two years ago, and disappeared after significant pushback from the public when we told our representatives to oppose the bill. We stopped this bill once, and we can do it again.

TELL CONGRESS TO REJECT THE EARN IT ACT

Options to Take Action:

1. 1. Sign a letter at the Action Table.
   2. Download a PDF copy of the Action Letter, sign it and mail it to Congress.
      (Action Letter for outside California)
   3. You can also adapt the letter to use in their email systems.

   There are links below to help find your members of Congress.

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If you ever need to look up your member of the U.S. House of Representatives or your U.S. Senators check here: www.house.gov and www.senate.gov.

To find contact information for your California State Senator or California State Assemblyperson check here: www.senate.ca.gov and www.assembly.ca.gov.