6 ms·

I think their concern is paedophile rings using large group E2EE for live child abuse with completely anonymous accounts.

calvinmorrison 6y ago
Only 4 comments in and we hit one of the four boogymen of the civil rights apocalypse. How many comments until we get to domestic terrorism or illegal drugs?
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > one of the four boogymen of the civil rights apocalypse The public is willing trade away privacy in exchange for protection from certain categories of risk. Instead of denying that, one can lean into it by ensuring strict definitions and enforcement options within those categories while preserving full privacy for those without. Arguing pedophile rings and terrorism are a cost of a privacy policy is a good way to sink that policy.
  - aspenmayer 6y ago
    I would make a cogent argument to rebuff your straw man, but it's not worth my time if you don't share a priori assumptions with me about E2EE being uncrackable. It's just math. I don't see why the talk of trade-offs even is relevant to the discussion. People will use secure tools with E2EE or they will suffer the consequences of not doing so. Doing illegal things is already illegal. Banning or watering down E2EE so that it becomes no long E2EE is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
    - samatman 6y ago
      Your mistake is bringing a technical argument to a political question. My personal political answer to "how to have end-to-end encryption and prevent its use for child rape" would be to tax the companies which profit from E2EE, and use that money to fund death squads, which livestream dragging child rapists out of their home, anywhere in the world, and beating them to death with truncheons. I'm joking, of course (or am I?) but I do consider this the general shape of a viable solution. E2EE is essential for a modern life which isn't a hellish surveillance dystopia, and the detection and prosecution of child rape is criminally underfunded.
      - neiman 6y ago
        > E2EE is essential for a modern life which isn't a hellish surveillance dystopia, and the detection and prosecution of child rape is criminally underfunded. Yup. This.
      - suizi 6y ago
        This is creeping a little close to populist rhetoric. The crimes you've described are obviously awful but angry politics will only lead to knee-jerk solutions. In which ways do you think it is underfunded?
        aspenmayer 6y ago
        It's clearly underfunded in relation to the difficulty in prosecuting these cases. Banning E2EE is a way of lowering the bar of difficulty in prosecuting these cases. The crime is reprehensible, and worthy of enforcement due to the heinous nature of abuse. Curtailing abuse via violating human right to encrypt is not the way to end abuse. Thus, more funding is likely justified, if it leads to an end to abuse. This social benefit of reduction and elimination of abuse should not come at the expense of human rights and E2EE.
        suizi 6y ago
        I see, so your main concern here is prosecution. It is indeed true that prosecution is understaffed and underfunded. I feel there are other problems at play too. CPS should be able to spot children in abusive homes and respond to reports of unusual activity. They should be able to spot clearly unstable caretakers. Counsellors and teachers should be able to spot unusual behaviour from children. Mental health services can help someone escape falling into such a situation in the first place by keeping them from falling into depression which leads them to rely on such a person. Local police shouldn't dismiss leads so readily. This is the it is impossible for him or her to do such a thing mindset which prevails so frequently. Parents shouldn't trust their relatives so readily and should keep an eye out. 90% of cases happen at home. If they stopped showing off their crimes online, would the entire system come to a crawl? I'm worried by how much of a reliance there is on divining crimes off the internet.
  - suizi 6y ago
    What if the only practical way to 100% stop all crime is to shutdown the internet? Now, I'm not saying there is nothing that can be done to reduce it. I very much hope there can be, especially if counsellors can find warning signs and we can better figure out how to spot the danger signs, both online and off. Facebook took a good step forward by putting warnings up to minors when someone outside of their social circles has contacted many others, although there are other things which could be done. Should they be allowed to contact them through onion routing during such situations? Where do you draw the line of when such technologies can be used? Is it better not to open this can of worms and risk a slippery descent? What are the chances of false positives, will it unfairly impact relatives? Will it give a black mark to privacy technologies and civil liberties to be associated with automatic blocks? What if minors want to engage in activism, should this be limited? At what point does pushing and pushing start the lie about your age shenanigans again? This is about Facebook here but it ties back to arguments about doing this or that for the greater good. Is a more grounded approach better? Ensure minors are well-educated of the risks and dangers online? Invest in mental health services to avoid minors falling into depressive slumps where they might be susceptible to such criminals? In the rare event they drag anyone back home, whether they think they're of a similar age or not, they bring them before the parents first?
- strbean 6y ago
  Next thing you know, people will be using E2EE to stream gasp copyrighted material!
fossuser 6y ago
Yeah - I'm pretty sure this is the real concern and verifying a phone number is reasonable trade-off. I know this argument is often quickly dismissed on HN since people see child abuse or 'going dark' as an easy excuse for the government to leverage to get more control (and it has been used for this), but that doesn't mean the problem isn't serious or doesn't exist. See this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-abuse.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-... The resources fighting this are relatively small in comparison the scale of the problem: https://www.freethink.com/videos/child-exploitation https://www.freethink.com/videos/child-exploitation The people carrying out the abuse are sophisticated. I have a friend that works at WhatsApp and their entire team is focused on trying to remove groups that exist to share child abuse imagery (via metadata since content is encrypted). I fall on the side that secure encryption is critical for all of the reasons that technical people normally argue that it's critical and breaking it doesn't work/is a bad idea, but I also understand and empathize with the difficulty encryption by default causes for the organizations fighting this abuse. That said, I have serious disagreements with Zoom unrelated to this particular e2ee issue (https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/13/zoom-in-china.html https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/13/zoom-in-china.html), I think they don't actually care about protecting the speech of their users or securing content from authoritarian governments. It's still good to avoid them for that reason alone.
- Nextgrid 6y ago
  > The people carrying out the abuse are sophisticated. In this case wouldn't they build their own solutions (potentially based on existing open-source solutions like Asterisk + Linphone or Jitsi Meet) or they might've built them already? Phone numbers are also very easy to obtain anonymously, so I am not sure SMS verification would help track down abusers when it'll lead to a prepaid SIM or some innocent user's phone that happened to be compromised by malware.
  - fossuser 6y ago
    Yes, some would - but not all. I agree that these reasons are why it's not a good idea to break or outlaw encryption since bad actors can still use it and good people that need it are blocked, but this doesn't mean that making it the default doesn't enable more abusers to get away with it that might be caught otherwise. There's a spectrum of sophistication, if it's harder more of them will make more mistakes that make them easier to catch.
screye 6y ago
I highly doubt paedophiles are watching child abuse streams on zoom.
baybal2 6y ago
Please, don't derail the discussion with something as silly as this.

calvinmorrison 6y ago

Only 4 comments in and we hit one of the four boogymen of the civil rights apocalypse. How many comments until we get to domestic terrorism or illegal drugs?

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> one of the four boogymen of the civil rights apocalypse The public is willing trade away privacy in exchange for protection from certain categories of risk. Instead of denying that, one can lean into it by ensuring strict definitions and enforcement options within those categories while preserving full privacy for those without. Arguing pedophile rings and terrorism are a cost of a privacy policy is a good way to sink that policy.
- aspenmayer 6y ago
  I would make a cogent argument to rebuff your straw man, but it's not worth my time if you don't share a priori assumptions with me about E2EE being uncrackable. It's just math. I don't see why the talk of trade-offs even is relevant to the discussion. People will use secure tools with E2EE or they will suffer the consequences of not doing so. Doing illegal things is already illegal. Banning or watering down E2EE so that it becomes no long E2EE is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
  - samatman 6y ago
    Your mistake is bringing a technical argument to a political question. My personal political answer to "how to have end-to-end encryption and prevent its use for child rape" would be to tax the companies which profit from E2EE, and use that money to fund death squads, which livestream dragging child rapists out of their home, anywhere in the world, and beating them to death with truncheons. I'm joking, of course (or am I?) but I do consider this the general shape of a viable solution. E2EE is essential for a modern life which isn't a hellish surveillance dystopia, and the detection and prosecution of child rape is criminally underfunded.
    - neiman 6y ago
      > E2EE is essential for a modern life which isn't a hellish surveillance dystopia, and the detection and prosecution of child rape is criminally underfunded. Yup. This.
    - suizi 6y ago
      This is creeping a little close to populist rhetoric. The crimes you've described are obviously awful but angry politics will only lead to knee-jerk solutions. In which ways do you think it is underfunded?
      - aspenmayer 6y ago
        It's clearly underfunded in relation to the difficulty in prosecuting these cases. Banning E2EE is a way of lowering the bar of difficulty in prosecuting these cases. The crime is reprehensible, and worthy of enforcement due to the heinous nature of abuse. Curtailing abuse via violating human right to encrypt is not the way to end abuse. Thus, more funding is likely justified, if it leads to an end to abuse. This social benefit of reduction and elimination of abuse should not come at the expense of human rights and E2EE.
        suizi 6y ago
        I see, so your main concern here is prosecution. It is indeed true that prosecution is understaffed and underfunded. I feel there are other problems at play too. CPS should be able to spot children in abusive homes and respond to reports of unusual activity. They should be able to spot clearly unstable caretakers. Counsellors and teachers should be able to spot unusual behaviour from children. Mental health services can help someone escape falling into such a situation in the first place by keeping them from falling into depression which leads them to rely on such a person. Local police shouldn't dismiss leads so readily. This is the it is impossible for him or her to do such a thing mindset which prevails so frequently. Parents shouldn't trust their relatives so readily and should keep an eye out. 90% of cases happen at home. If they stopped showing off their crimes online, would the entire system come to a crawl? I'm worried by how much of a reliance there is on divining crimes off the internet.
- suizi 6y ago
  What if the only practical way to 100% stop all crime is to shutdown the internet? Now, I'm not saying there is nothing that can be done to reduce it. I very much hope there can be, especially if counsellors can find warning signs and we can better figure out how to spot the danger signs, both online and off. Facebook took a good step forward by putting warnings up to minors when someone outside of their social circles has contacted many others, although there are other things which could be done. Should they be allowed to contact them through onion routing during such situations? Where do you draw the line of when such technologies can be used? Is it better not to open this can of worms and risk a slippery descent? What are the chances of false positives, will it unfairly impact relatives? Will it give a black mark to privacy technologies and civil liberties to be associated with automatic blocks? What if minors want to engage in activism, should this be limited? At what point does pushing and pushing start the lie about your age shenanigans again? This is about Facebook here but it ties back to arguments about doing this or that for the greater good. Is a more grounded approach better? Ensure minors are well-educated of the risks and dangers online? Invest in mental health services to avoid minors falling into depressive slumps where they might be susceptible to such criminals? In the rare event they drag anyone back home, whether they think they're of a similar age or not, they bring them before the parents first?
strbean 6y ago
Next thing you know, people will be using E2EE to stream gasp copyrighted material!

fossuser 6y ago

Yeah - I'm pretty sure this is the real concern and verifying a phone number is reasonable trade-off. I know this argument is often quickly dismissed on HN since people see child abuse or 'going dark' as an easy excuse for the government to leverage to get more control (and it has been used for this), but that doesn't mean the problem isn't serious or doesn't exist. See this: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-abuse.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/28/us/child-sex-... The resources fighting this are relatively small in comparison the scale of the problem: https://www.freethink.com/videos/child-exploitation https://www.freethink.com/videos/child-exploitation The people carrying out the abuse are sophisticated. I have a friend that works at WhatsApp and their entire team is focused on trying to remove groups that exist to share child abuse imagery (via metadata since content is encrypted). I fall on the side that secure encryption is critical for all of the reasons that technical people normally argue that it's critical and breaking it doesn't work/is a bad idea, but I also understand and empathize with the difficulty encryption by default causes for the organizations fighting this abuse. That said, I have serious disagreements with Zoom unrelated to this particular e2ee issue (https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/13/zoom-in-china.html https://zalberico.com/essay/2020/06/13/zoom-in-china.html), I think they don't actually care about protecting the speech of their users or securing content from authoritarian governments. It's still good to avoid them for that reason alone.

Nextgrid 6y ago
> The people carrying out the abuse are sophisticated. In this case wouldn't they build their own solutions (potentially based on existing open-source solutions like Asterisk + Linphone or Jitsi Meet) or they might've built them already? Phone numbers are also very easy to obtain anonymously, so I am not sure SMS verification would help track down abusers when it'll lead to a prepaid SIM or some innocent user's phone that happened to be compromised by malware.
- fossuser 6y ago
  Yes, some would - but not all. I agree that these reasons are why it's not a good idea to break or outlaw encryption since bad actors can still use it and good people that need it are blocked, but this doesn't mean that making it the default doesn't enable more abusers to get away with it that might be caught otherwise. There's a spectrum of sophistication, if it's harder more of them will make more mistakes that make them easier to catch.

screye 6y ago

I highly doubt paedophiles are watching child abuse streams on zoom.

baybal2 6y ago

Please, don't derail the discussion with something as silly as this.