Congress is considering the TAKE IT DOWN Act (S.146), a bill that seeks to address "nonconsensual intimate imagery" ("NII"), or having intimate images of yourself spreading online without your consent. There is a need for a law that protects people better, and S.146 has good intentions. However, as currently drafted, it would severely damage the availability of encrypted services, without protecting people any better.

Here's the problem. Hundreds of millions of Americans rely on private messaging apps, private electronic storage, and other end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) services, like Signal and WhatsApp. These services, by design, cannot access or view user content. But the TAKE IT DOWN Act mandates a "notice and takedown system" for most online platforms, requiring them to make a "reasonable effort" to identify NII, and remove it within 48 hours, on pain of being sued. E2EE services can't take down what they aren't designed to see, so they can't comply and protect themselves from being sued, without weakening or abandoning encryption for all of their users. The result would be heavy monitoring of millions of once-private conversations. What's more, removing NII within 48 hours in practice would require automated content monitoring and filtering, even on non-E2EE services. Content filtering and hash matching technologies on direct messaging services or cloud platforms will lead to unfair takedowns of content and create security vulnerabilities that could put the privacy of the very group of people that rely on encrypted services to communicate safely - survivors of image-based sexual abuse - at risk.

We need you to write to your representative, a Republican serving on the House Rules Committee, to urge them to include an amendment that adds encrypted services to the TAKE IT DOWN Act's list of exceptions, which already excludes email services and broadband service providers. The TAKE IT DOWN Act will work only if it is restricted to content that is published publicly, and excludes encrypted services.

PLEASE Urge your lawmakers to support these fixes!