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Sure, but then we're not talking about the vast majority of digital transgressions are we? That is, the simple (re)distribution of child pornography — ghastly e

Sure, but then we're not talking about the vast majority of digital transgressions are we? That is, the simple (re)distribution of child pornography — ghastly enough as that is — not the few who actively seek out and order new abusive material from those who actually produce the stuff. This debate is about proportionality. How many children can live a marginally better live by giving up strong encryption and privacy worldwide? Because with the exception of the few cases in countries with a strong and well-functioning legal system, the abuse doesn't stop when the on-line orders stop coming in. How many activists and oppressed minorities will lose out (livelihoods and/or lives) by doing this? And even then, you're not addressing the real problem with this anti-encryption stance: how are you going to prevent the bad guys from using encryption? Encryption is here, right now, and it exists as a mathematical fact. Introduce a government (incidentally, which?) backdoor in WhatsApp or whichever major platform, and you catch some low-hanging fruit, until they wise up and use the vetted tools without a backdoor that already exist to hide their activities. This significantly impacts the proportionality balance. If you want to prevent child abuse, investing in education, welfare, economic equality, respect for basic human rights, and boots-on-the-ground police capacity will net you a vastly better return on investment.

jacquesm 7y ago
I'm not at all trying to pull this into the 'think of the children' domain, I'm just pointing out that what you think is going on is probably not nearly as bad as what is really going on. It goes a lot further than just child pornography, think snuff movies involving children made to order and other 'creative' idiocy. I'm all for people having access to encryption, I'm also for stamping out these criminals. The two are not mutually exclusive.
- Freak_NL 7y ago
  I have no doubts that whatever depravity a child can be submitted to that I can think up has or will have happened, and worse. There is certainly no god that prevents it, there is only us humans, and there are a handful of very sick individuals among the seven billion — that's just a statistical surety. > The two are not mutually exclusive. There we agree. But politicians worldwide do keep turning this into a 'think-of-the-children' fight. Only this month the Dutch minister of justice and security came up with exactly that argument for forcing Facebook to include a backdoor in WhatsApp — a plea indubitably neatly prompted by his colleagues in the US (cf. attorney general Barr's position on this topic).
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    > and there are a handful of very sick individuals among the seven billion This is where you're wrong. Child porn is a substantial market, estimated to be in the billions of $ per year. It's a disproportionate amount compared to 'regular' porn because of the criminal element and the risks involved, just like illegal drugs are far more expensive than legal ones (in most parts of the world, anyway). Politicians abusing this to push their own agenda's are effectively also abusing these children... it's a fucked up world, that's for sure.
    - zozbot234 7y ago
      Billions of dollars per year? On a world basis, that's quite insubstantial. And child abuse has always been around, unfortunately. Much of it probably goes unrecorded. Indeed, we only became aware of how bad the problem really was in the 1980s, due to the very fact that media of it was now being created and exchanged.
      - jacquesm 7y ago
        I aspire to one day reach your level of cynicism but for now I will have to disagree with you that that is insubstantial, even on a world basis. Especially so because it is concentrated in only a very few countries where children have a very high chance of being exploited in this way. Have a read. https://www.rappler.com/nation/191219-philippines-top-global-source-child-pornography-unicef https://www.rappler.com/nation/191219-philippines-top-global...
        zozbot234 7y ago
        > Especially so because it is concentrated in only a very few countries The meaningful question to ask is what's going on in those countries, that makes abuse so much more likely to occur there? It can't just be weak government, the Philippines aren't generally known for having weak or ineffective government.
        miracle2k 7y ago
malka 7y ago
It's easy. Someone uses encryption? Jail him regardless of the content. You can't hide the existence of the message.
- aplacelikethis 7y ago
  What about /dev/random? You're gonna ban PRNG's while we're at it? And HTTPS?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > Someone uses encryption? Jail him regardless of the content. Right, so by using Hacker News you're falling afoul of your own rules. > You can't hide the existence of the message. You totally can: properly encrypted data is indistinguishable from random noise.
  - malka 7y ago
    These are not my rules. The parent poster said that the government CANNOT ban encryption. It can. No message can be totally hiden from a motivated enough opponent. The random noise IS the point. you cannot hide its very existence, and a government agent might not want to believe you if you said that it's just random data.
- salawat 7y ago
  Great. Might as well just jack up the consequences to the point that perpetrators realize they have everything to lose and guarantee there is no low-hanging fruit, and that whatever you do end up having to infiltrate will have a "like-your-life-depends-on-it" security posture. This is how cures become worse than the disease. Life isn't black and white, nor do things tend to be doable without gratuitous unintended consequences. Encryption is not, nor has it ever been the be all end all to child predation. Effective investigation techniques have been the issue, and awareness have been the problem, because of the ephemerality of any distribution system once its existence is outed to hostiles in the non-pedophilia community at large. If you want to take these people down, you have to map the logistics. If you want to map the logistics, you have to consume content; once you have the content, you need to analyze the crap out of it for every possible clue you can about how and where it was made in order to try to make some reasonable guesses about how the production industry works, then you have to double down and go deep to figure out what these production rings look like, whether they know each other, and how do they work. I'm talking picking apart the audio for environmental noise that might clue you in, or developing profiles of certain quirks of equipment. Analyzing the medium of exchange to see if you can exploit the financial traceability aspect, etc... All of which can also be sanitized once the opponent knows you look for it by the way. Proper OPSEC on their part will leave as few breadcrumbs as possible for you to find, and the closer you get to the heart of the op, the more heinous the infiltration will likely get. All of that has zilch to do with e2e encryption. That's all meatspace work. Ugly work, but work that'll need to happen nevertheless.
CryptoPunk 7y ago
Anti-encryption stances will also concentrate power, and thereby make for less stable societies. That in turn will harm the rate of economic development, which is what brings children out of poverty where they are most vulnerable to child trafficking rings.

jacquesm 7y ago

I'm not at all trying to pull this into the 'think of the children' domain, I'm just pointing out that what you think is going on is probably not nearly as bad as what is really going on. It goes a lot further than just child pornography, think snuff movies involving children made to order and other 'creative' idiocy. I'm all for people having access to encryption, I'm also for stamping out these criminals. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Freak_NL 7y ago
I have no doubts that whatever depravity a child can be submitted to that I can think up has or will have happened, and worse. There is certainly no god that prevents it, there is only us humans, and there are a handful of very sick individuals among the seven billion — that's just a statistical surety. > The two are not mutually exclusive. There we agree. But politicians worldwide do keep turning this into a 'think-of-the-children' fight. Only this month the Dutch minister of justice and security came up with exactly that argument for forcing Facebook to include a backdoor in WhatsApp — a plea indubitably neatly prompted by his colleagues in the US (cf. attorney general Barr's position on this topic).
- jacquesm 7y ago
  > and there are a handful of very sick individuals among the seven billion This is where you're wrong. Child porn is a substantial market, estimated to be in the billions of $ per year. It's a disproportionate amount compared to 'regular' porn because of the criminal element and the risks involved, just like illegal drugs are far more expensive than legal ones (in most parts of the world, anyway). Politicians abusing this to push their own agenda's are effectively also abusing these children... it's a fucked up world, that's for sure.
  - zozbot234 7y ago
    Billions of dollars per year? On a world basis, that's quite insubstantial. And child abuse has always been around, unfortunately. Much of it probably goes unrecorded. Indeed, we only became aware of how bad the problem really was in the 1980s, due to the very fact that media of it was now being created and exchanged.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      I aspire to one day reach your level of cynicism but for now I will have to disagree with you that that is insubstantial, even on a world basis. Especially so because it is concentrated in only a very few countries where children have a very high chance of being exploited in this way. Have a read. https://www.rappler.com/nation/191219-philippines-top-global-source-child-pornography-unicef https://www.rappler.com/nation/191219-philippines-top-global...
      - zozbot234 7y ago
        > Especially so because it is concentrated in only a very few countries The meaningful question to ask is what's going on in those countries, that makes abuse so much more likely to occur there? It can't just be weak government, the Philippines aren't generally known for having weak or ineffective government.
      - miracle2k 7y ago

malka 7y ago

It's easy. Someone uses encryption? Jail him regardless of the content. You can't hide the existence of the message.

aplacelikethis 7y ago
What about /dev/random? You're gonna ban PRNG's while we're at it? And HTTPS?
saagarjha 7y ago
> Someone uses encryption? Jail him regardless of the content. Right, so by using Hacker News you're falling afoul of your own rules. > You can't hide the existence of the message. You totally can: properly encrypted data is indistinguishable from random noise.
- malka 7y ago
  These are not my rules. The parent poster said that the government CANNOT ban encryption. It can. No message can be totally hiden from a motivated enough opponent. The random noise IS the point. you cannot hide its very existence, and a government agent might not want to believe you if you said that it's just random data.
salawat 7y ago
Great. Might as well just jack up the consequences to the point that perpetrators realize they have everything to lose and guarantee there is no low-hanging fruit, and that whatever you do end up having to infiltrate will have a "like-your-life-depends-on-it" security posture. This is how cures become worse than the disease. Life isn't black and white, nor do things tend to be doable without gratuitous unintended consequences. Encryption is not, nor has it ever been the be all end all to child predation. Effective investigation techniques have been the issue, and awareness have been the problem, because of the ephemerality of any distribution system once its existence is outed to hostiles in the non-pedophilia community at large. If you want to take these people down, you have to map the logistics. If you want to map the logistics, you have to consume content; once you have the content, you need to analyze the crap out of it for every possible clue you can about how and where it was made in order to try to make some reasonable guesses about how the production industry works, then you have to double down and go deep to figure out what these production rings look like, whether they know each other, and how do they work. I'm talking picking apart the audio for environmental noise that might clue you in, or developing profiles of certain quirks of equipment. Analyzing the medium of exchange to see if you can exploit the financial traceability aspect, etc... All of which can also be sanitized once the opponent knows you look for it by the way. Proper OPSEC on their part will leave as few breadcrumbs as possible for you to find, and the closer you get to the heart of the op, the more heinous the infiltration will likely get. All of that has zilch to do with e2e encryption. That's all meatspace work. Ugly work, but work that'll need to happen nevertheless.

CryptoPunk 7y ago

Anti-encryption stances will also concentrate power, and thereby make for less stable societies. That in turn will harm the rate of economic development, which is what brings children out of poverty where they are most vulnerable to child trafficking rings.