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In addition to the defense of the need for real encryption I’d like to see EFF and others go on a more proactive offense as well proposing solutions for the bog

In addition to the defense of the need for real encryption I’d like to see EFF and others go on a more proactive offense as well proposing solutions for the bogeymen that governments keep raising — especially around child exploitation.

Canada 7y ago
Why should the burden of solving that be placed on the defenders of privacy? The people calling for the power to spy on everyone have not offered any explanation of how backdooring everyone's communication reduces sexual abuse of children. Of course, they don't really care about child exploitation. They are cynically using the issue as a pretext to preserve and normalize a massive expansion of their power. The DOD budget is $617B[1]. The entire DOJ budget is $6B, with about half of that allocated to law enforcement[2]. I'm not sure precisely how much of that is spent investigating child exploitation, but the DOJ doesn't view it as a high enough high priority to even mention it in the budget. A couple of highlights: - $295 to fight the opioid crisis. How successful was the drug war with the ability to tap phones again? - $486M for violence against women programs and $45M for victims of human trafficking. Maybe next they will tell us that reading our messages and snooping our video calls will make women safer. [Edit: Also interesting, the FBI's nearly $10B budget request[3]. The budget request doesn't break down the spending, but it does include a section on crimes against children almost at the very end. They highlight their recent investigations have led to about 1000 arrests. The FBI's stated top priorities[4] do not include crimes against children.] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_... [2] https://www.justice.gov/jmd/page/file/1033086/download https://www.justice.gov/jmd/page/file/1033086/download [3] https://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/fbi-budget-request-for-fiscal-year-2019 https://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/fbi-budget-request-for-fi... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation#Budget,_mission,_and_priorities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Bureau_of_Investigatio...
- jonnybgood 7y ago
  Looking at priorities is not a good metric. Federal law enforcement priorities will be different than a state’s law enforcement priorities. It may be the law enforcement of the states who see it as priority and pushing it up to the federal government to do something to make their job easier.
  - Canada 7y ago
    According to this NYT article law enforcement at all levels have done very little even in the years before encryption was widespread. Apparently the vast majority of intel on this stuff comes from Facebook auto generating reports. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-abuse.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  Please explain to me how giving producers, traffickers and consumers of child pornography would not benefit from easy and hurdle-less end-to-end encryption. I'm not saying that this is a good reason to stop Facebook from implementing this. But there is no question that it is going to make the lifes of a lot of criminals a whole lot easier. We may imagine criminals, especially the semi-organized ones, to be experts in cryptography or at the very least covert communications. They really aren't. If they can just use their usual facebook accounts, they'd really appreciate that.
  - Canada 7y ago
    Yes, apparently something like 8000 incidents of attempted solicitation of children on Facebook last year. I'm not saying E2E and encryption of data at rest doesn't benefit these scumbags. It does, no doubt, and that's exactly why the tech savvy ones use them. I'm saying that inexpensive computers, digital cameras, and broadband internet also benefit them, but these things are also an enormous benefit to us all. I'm not willing to give these things up because some bad guys use them. It's fair to ask if the trade off is reasonable. Assume those 8000 incidents are all different children and different predators and none of them are iffy/false positives. (not likely) Assume 1 billion people used FB to send a message during that time. (a low estimate) Is it weakening the security of 125,000 people for each one of these bad guys? Why should 999,992,000 people have to go without for the sake of 8000? To those who think that the many should have to suffer for the few, I ask: Where does it stop? For example, Should all digital cameras be required to upload photos to the police before allowing the user to see them? That would certainly help the police, wouldn't it?
    - bayesian_horse 7y ago
      The problem is that your "1 Billion" have virtually no reduction in their security, because the government doesn't have a warrant for their data, whereas the 8000 incidents may each have severe consequences. And "attempted solicitation" is by far not the only crime that is routinely prosecuted with evidence from Facebook or other types of surveillance. The slippery slope arguments are as stupid here as they are in gun debates. Not making encryption the default for text messaging, thereby leaving a chance of court-ordered disclosure, is not remotely comparable to total surveillance. But I guess that's not the kind of distinctions the audience here is going to appreciate, is it?
chillacy 7y ago
From what I understand a large segment of child exploitation happens in the living room, and involves family. It's horrible but I don't think the solution is to put a government backdoor into a mandatory listening device in every household.
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  That is a strawman argument and nobody actually proposed that. Human trafficking and the distribution of child pornography is a valid concern and distinct from familiar abuse. Just that you can only fight one of these issues through technological means does not mean you shouldn't.
buboard 7y ago
The children argument is an emotional argument, not a technology one. For thousands of years people watched over their children, now they want to outsource this to the govt because they are too busy. The EFF could only respond with an emotional counterargument, about how self-censorship stunts children's mental development or sth.
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  That argument seems to stem from a profound lack of understanding about how child abuse, trafficking and pornography works. These children don't have relatives who can or want to protect them, and that's the whole deal. Either the government enforces their rights, or they don't have any. This is really not a hill limited-government activists should try to defend....
  - buboard 7y ago
    Sure, we aren't reverting to small scale communities. The police can go after predators in many ways, and asking to technically remove privacy from society should not be one of them. It's the lazy way and the police is addicted to it. We need the police to do better, and we also need absolute, unbreakable privacy, just like we can have in the physical world.
concordDance 7y ago
It really annoys me that people think child abuse is a consequence of the internet. It's existed at a huge scale for hundreds of years, child porn production soesn't noticeably bump the needle.
bayesian_horse 7y ago
You don't need child exploitation as bogeyman. There is also plenty of organized and disorganized crime and terrorism that is routinely disrupted by surveillance.
- infinitezest 7y ago
  Is this disruption verifiable?
  - bayesian_horse 7y ago
    Are you saying you never heard of criminal organizations being unraveled by court ordered surveillance?

Canada 7y ago

Why should the burden of solving that be placed on the defenders of privacy? The people calling for the power to spy on everyone have not offered any explanation of how backdooring everyone's communication reduces sexual abuse of children. Of course, they don't really care about child exploitation. They are cynically using the issue as a pretext to preserve and normalize a massive expansion of their power. The DOD budget is $617B[1]. The entire DOJ budget is $6B, with about half of that allocated to law enforcement[2]. I'm not sure precisely how much of that is spent investigating child exploitation, but the DOJ doesn't view it as a high enough high priority to even mention it in the budget. A couple of highlights: - $295 to fight the opioid crisis. How successful was the drug war with the ability to tap phones again? - $486M for violence against women programs and $45M for victims of human trafficking. Maybe next they will tell us that reading our messages and snooping our video calls will make women safer. [Edit: Also interesting, the FBI's nearly $10B budget request[3]. The budget request doesn't break down the spending, but it does include a section on crimes against children almost at the very end. They highlight their recent investigations have led to about 1000 arrests. The FBI's stated top priorities[4] do not include crimes against children.] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_... [2] https://www.justice.gov/jmd/page/file/1033086/download https://www.justice.gov/jmd/page/file/1033086/download [3] https://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/fbi-budget-request-for-fiscal-year-2019 https://www.fbi.gov/news/testimony/fbi-budget-request-for-fi... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Bureau_of_Investigation#Budget,_mission,_and_priorities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Bureau_of_Investigatio...

jonnybgood 7y ago
Looking at priorities is not a good metric. Federal law enforcement priorities will be different than a state’s law enforcement priorities. It may be the law enforcement of the states who see it as priority and pushing it up to the federal government to do something to make their job easier.
- Canada 7y ago
  According to this NYT article law enforcement at all levels have done very little even in the years before encryption was widespread. Apparently the vast majority of intel on this stuff comes from Facebook auto generating reports. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-abuse.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-...
bayesian_horse 7y ago
Please explain to me how giving producers, traffickers and consumers of child pornography would not benefit from easy and hurdle-less end-to-end encryption. I'm not saying that this is a good reason to stop Facebook from implementing this. But there is no question that it is going to make the lifes of a lot of criminals a whole lot easier. We may imagine criminals, especially the semi-organized ones, to be experts in cryptography or at the very least covert communications. They really aren't. If they can just use their usual facebook accounts, they'd really appreciate that.
- Canada 7y ago
  Yes, apparently something like 8000 incidents of attempted solicitation of children on Facebook last year. I'm not saying E2E and encryption of data at rest doesn't benefit these scumbags. It does, no doubt, and that's exactly why the tech savvy ones use them. I'm saying that inexpensive computers, digital cameras, and broadband internet also benefit them, but these things are also an enormous benefit to us all. I'm not willing to give these things up because some bad guys use them. It's fair to ask if the trade off is reasonable. Assume those 8000 incidents are all different children and different predators and none of them are iffy/false positives. (not likely) Assume 1 billion people used FB to send a message during that time. (a low estimate) Is it weakening the security of 125,000 people for each one of these bad guys? Why should 999,992,000 people have to go without for the sake of 8000? To those who think that the many should have to suffer for the few, I ask: Where does it stop? For example, Should all digital cameras be required to upload photos to the police before allowing the user to see them? That would certainly help the police, wouldn't it?
  - bayesian_horse 7y ago
    The problem is that your "1 Billion" have virtually no reduction in their security, because the government doesn't have a warrant for their data, whereas the 8000 incidents may each have severe consequences. And "attempted solicitation" is by far not the only crime that is routinely prosecuted with evidence from Facebook or other types of surveillance. The slippery slope arguments are as stupid here as they are in gun debates. Not making encryption the default for text messaging, thereby leaving a chance of court-ordered disclosure, is not remotely comparable to total surveillance. But I guess that's not the kind of distinctions the audience here is going to appreciate, is it?

chillacy 7y ago

From what I understand a large segment of child exploitation happens in the living room, and involves family. It's horrible but I don't think the solution is to put a government backdoor into a mandatory listening device in every household.

bayesian_horse 7y ago
That is a strawman argument and nobody actually proposed that. Human trafficking and the distribution of child pornography is a valid concern and distinct from familiar abuse. Just that you can only fight one of these issues through technological means does not mean you shouldn't.

buboard 7y ago

The children argument is an emotional argument, not a technology one. For thousands of years people watched over their children, now they want to outsource this to the govt because they are too busy. The EFF could only respond with an emotional counterargument, about how self-censorship stunts children's mental development or sth.

bayesian_horse 7y ago
That argument seems to stem from a profound lack of understanding about how child abuse, trafficking and pornography works. These children don't have relatives who can or want to protect them, and that's the whole deal. Either the government enforces their rights, or they don't have any. This is really not a hill limited-government activists should try to defend....
- buboard 7y ago
  Sure, we aren't reverting to small scale communities. The police can go after predators in many ways, and asking to technically remove privacy from society should not be one of them. It's the lazy way and the police is addicted to it. We need the police to do better, and we also need absolute, unbreakable privacy, just like we can have in the physical world.

concordDance 7y ago

It really annoys me that people think child abuse is a consequence of the internet. It's existed at a huge scale for hundreds of years, child porn production soesn't noticeably bump the needle.

bayesian_horse 7y ago

You don't need child exploitation as bogeyman. There is also plenty of organized and disorganized crime and terrorism that is routinely disrupted by surveillance.

infinitezest 7y ago
Is this disruption verifiable?
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  Are you saying you never heard of criminal organizations being unraveled by court ordered surveillance?