1. United States
2. Md.
3. Letter

The Take it Down Act may be written with good intentions, but it should not be passed in its current state. Instead of being a tool to protect women and children online, under Trump this law would be turned into a mandate for mass surveillance and censorship of dissenters of his regime. By requiring private communications and cloud storage providers to comply with the law as written, such platforms would be required to store all data unencrypted, with a wide-open backdoor for bad actors to swoop in and steal as much data as they please. In fact, the current legislation would do more to expose people's private messages than it would to protect individuals from harm. While the core idea of the law is sound, it needs to be taken back and re-tooled in order to ensure that it does not function as a tool of censorship against First Amendment protected speech, and that it does not violate the privacy of anyone it claims to protect.