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>Now the school has committed child pornography by copying these photos from the student's device... This is where the law gets kids in way more trouble than i

>Now the school has committed child pornography by copying these photos from the student's device... This is where the law gets kids in way more trouble than is really necessary. There's a little known provision in most child porn laws that exempts people reporting child porn from charges. But think about it, to get that protection, you must report. So they surreptitiously lift the pics from a kid's phone, and then the alerts go to the police chief, kid's counselor, administrators, etc etc. From there it can make its way to public prosecutors really quickly if calmer heads don't prevail among the adults who got the initial alerts. And calmer heads rarely prevail in my experience. (To be fair, I think most police chiefs may have an actual obligation to let prosecutors know about it? Not sure?)

CWuestefeld 7y ago
There's a little known provision in most child porn laws that exempts people reporting child porn from charges. That doesn't fix the problem. If they're bulk downloading photos from a phone, then most of the photos are going to sit there unexamined. Later on, looking for something else, somebody will stumble upon those photos and discover that they've been sitting there for months or years. But the school hadn't been reporting the crime.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  I don't think you're quite getting how a lot of these monitoring systems work. They actually have AI's, (more like expert systems), reading your messages and viewing your images in as close to real-time as possible. These alerts are automated. There is rarely a common sense applying human in the loop... and that's the problem. Humans are not even engaged in the process until the alerts have gone out. That's not cool. I mean, sure, they get around the problem you bring up, every image is going to get looked at super quickly, but the solution is worse for society than the problem. (At least it is in my opinion.) So those photos would never sit on the service provider's servers for that long without being examined.
protomyth 7y ago
To be fair, I think most police chiefs may have an actual obligation to let prosecutors know about it? There are groups of people that have a “must report” obligation listed in the law. I cannot remember if it’s state or federal law.

CWuestefeld 7y ago

There's a little known provision in most child porn laws that exempts people reporting child porn from charges. That doesn't fix the problem. If they're bulk downloading photos from a phone, then most of the photos are going to sit there unexamined. Later on, looking for something else, somebody will stumble upon those photos and discover that they've been sitting there for months or years. But the school hadn't been reporting the crime.

bilbo0s 7y ago
I don't think you're quite getting how a lot of these monitoring systems work. They actually have AI's, (more like expert systems), reading your messages and viewing your images in as close to real-time as possible. These alerts are automated. There is rarely a common sense applying human in the loop... and that's the problem. Humans are not even engaged in the process until the alerts have gone out. That's not cool. I mean, sure, they get around the problem you bring up, every image is going to get looked at super quickly, but the solution is worse for society than the problem. (At least it is in my opinion.) So those photos would never sit on the service provider's servers for that long without being examined.

protomyth 7y ago

To be fair, I think most police chiefs may have an actual obligation to let prosecutors know about it? There are groups of people that have a “must report” obligation listed in the law. I cannot remember if it’s state or federal law.