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On August 7, I had the pleasure of doing a "fireside chat" with my friend and Section 230 expert Cathy Gellis at this year's virtual DEF CON Crypto & Privacy Village. Cathy gave a primer on Section 230, and then we had a discussion about the EARN IT Act bill, the LAED Act bill, and the threats they pose to online speech, privacy, security, and encryption. You can watch the video here. Read more about EARN IT Act Talk at the DEF CON Crypto & Privacy Village

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has rebuffed my attempt to unseal information about the Department of Justice's unsuccessful secret effort to force Facebook to change the encryption of its Messenger app so that it could wiretap criminal suspects' voice calls. Read more about We Won't Find Out How the DOJ Tried to Force Facebook to Change Its Encryption

On July 2, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a full-committee hearing at which it made significant changes to the pending EARN IT Act bill, S.3398, about which I’ve written extensively on the CIS blog. Read more about The EARN IT Act Threatens Our Online Freedoms. New Amendments Don’t Fix It.

In a previous post, I described the growing calls for what I called a “systemic duty of care” (SDOC) in platform regulation. I suggested that SDOC requirements would create difficult questions in ordinary intermediary liability litigation. By encouraging or requiring platforms to review user content or exercise more control over it, SDOC laws would change courts’ reasoning in cases about YouTube’s liability for a defamatory video, for example. Read more about Broad Consequences of a Systemic Duty of Care for Platforms