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> I'm surprised, and honestly disappointed, that the author seems to still play nice, instead of releasing the whitepaper. I'm the author. I've worked with di

> I'm surprised, and honestly disappointed, that the author seems to still play nice, instead of releasing the whitepaper. I'm the author. I've worked with different parts of NCMEC for years. (I built the initial FotoForensics service in a few days. Before I wrote the first line of code, I was in phone calls with NCMEC about my reporting requirements.) Over time, this relationship grew. Some years, I was in face-to-face development discussions, other times it have been remote communications. To me, there are different independent parts working inside NCMEC. The CyberTipline and their internal case staff are absolutely incredible. They see the worst of people in the media and reports that they process. They deal with victims and families. And they remain the kindest and most sincere people I've ever encountered. When possible, I will do anything needed to make their job easier. The IT group has gone through different iterations, but they are always friendly and responsive. When I can help them, I help them. When I interact with their legal staff, they are very polite. But I rarely interact with them directly. On occasion, they have also given me some very bad advice. (It might be good for them. But, as my own attorney pointed out, it is generally over-reaching in the requested scope.) The upper management that I have interacted with are a pain in the ass. If it wasn't for the CyberTipline, related investigators, and the IT staff, I would have walked away (or minimized my interactions) long ago. Why haven't I made my whitepaper about PhotoDNA public? In my view, who would it help? It would help bad guys avoid detection and it will help malcontents manufacture false-positives. The paper won't help NCMEC, ICACs, or related law enforcement. It won't help victims. About this time, someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact. There is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who deal in CP and people who abuse children. And they rarely victimize just one child. Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused before the age of 18.

shkkmo 5y ago
> Why haven't I made my whitepaper about PhotoDNA public? In my view, who would it help? Would it help activists push for more accurate technology and better management for NCMEC? Would it help technologists come up with better algorithms? I see all kinds of benefits to more openess and accountability here.
slg 5y ago
>About this time, someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact. There is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who deal in CP and people who abuse children. And they rarely victimize just one child. Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused before the age of 18. I think we have seen "think of the kids" used as an excuse for so many things over the years that the pendulum has now swung so far that some of the tech community has begun to think we should do absolutely nothing about this problem. I have even seen people on HN in the last week that are so upset by the privacy implications of this that they start arguing that these images of abuse should be legal since trying to crack down is used as a motive to invade people's privacy. I don't know what the way forward is here, but we really shouldn't lose sight that there are real kids being hurt in all this. That is incredibly motivating for a lot of people. Too often the tech community's response is that the intangible concept of privacy is more important than the tangible issue of child abuse. That isn't going to be a winning argument among mainstream audiences. We need something better or it is only a matter of time until these type of systems are implemented everywhere.
- zug_zug 5y ago
  > Too often the tech community's response is that the intangible concept of privacy is more important than the tangible issue of child abuse. Is it intangible? 18% of the world lives in China alone. That's more people than the "1/10 who are victims of child abuse*", and I'm sure that 18% will only grow as other authoritarian countries get more technologically advanced. I think "Think of the kids" applies very well to the CREATORS of pornography. Per wikipedia, there isn't any conclusive causal relationship between viewing CP and assaulting children. * Per a google search "A Bureau of Justice Statistics report shows 1.6 % (sixteen out of one thousand) of children between the ages of 12-17 were victims of rape/sexual assault" which is a lot less than 10% figure you're citing. Non-sexual abuse wouldn't really have any bearing here, right?
  - slg 5y ago
    >Is it intangible? 18% of the world lives in China alone. That's more people than the "1/10 who are victims of child abuse*", and I'm sure that 18% will only grow as other authoritarian countries get more technologically advanced. You didn't mention any tangible results here. How would this system by Apple make my life worse? Can you answer that without a slippery slope argument? >I think "Think of the kids" applies very well to the CREATORS of pornography. Per wikipedia, there isn't any conclusive causal relationship between viewing CP and assaulting children. Why does the causality matter? A correlation is enough that cracking down on this content will result in less abusers on the streets. >* Per a google search "A Bureau of Justice Statistics report shows 1.6 % (sixteen out of one thousand) of children between the ages of 12-17 were victims of rape/sexual assault" which is a lot less than 10% figure you're citing. Non-sexual abuse wouldn't really have any bearing here, right? I wasn't the one citing that, but you are also citing an incomplete number since it excludes younger children.
zug_zug 5y ago
>> There is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who deal in CP and people who abuse children Can you give a source for this please? Also by "deal in" do you mean create or view?
tux3 5y ago
I'd lament that using 'thinking of the children' as an excuse for genuine overreach, when that's what it is, puts us in a worse situation. There is incredible second-order harm in overreach, because the reaction to it hurts the original cause, too. If you try to overcorrect, people will overcorrect in response. The sort of zeal that leads to thoughts like "screeching minority", I think shows carelessness and shortsightedness in the face of very important decisions. I have no informed opinion on Apple's CSAM tool, beyond deferring to the FotoForensics expert.
brailsafe 5y ago
> I built the initial FotoForensics service in a few days. Why did you specify "In a few days"?
- sk5t 5y ago
  It does make one wonder--careless work, trivial problem, reuse of existing projects, writer portrays self as extremely productive, or some combination?
  - brailsafe 5y ago
    Ya, it's hard to interpret it differently, so was curious. Don't know why I'm being downvoted for a question about rhetorical intention.
    - bigyikes 5y ago
      I didn’t downvote, but it comes across as a nitpick on a thoughtful and reasonable piece.
  - loves_mangoes 5y ago
    I think you're assuming bad faith from someone who has proven very competent, technical, and coherent. It might simply be truthful. And if the author is proud of that, it is both irrelevant and perfectly okay. Let's focus on the facts and arguments relevant to the article, not personal attacks.
    - sk5t 5y ago
      None of the options I proffered are in the "bad faith" category.
- coryrc 5y ago
  My guess is to establish the approximate amount of collaboration. He didn't work there full time for years, that collaboration has been small and limited.
hnuser123456 5y ago
Half of baby boys in the US are sexually assaulted and disfigured right after being born. We need a lot more people fighting against this, it shouldn't be so hard to stop.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
nixnax 5y ago
>Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused before the age of 18. That explains the rise in LGBT
- nappy 5y ago
  No - but this comment is abhorrent.
2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
> someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact. What you are saying here kind of sidetracks the actual problem those critics have though, doesn't it? The problem is not the acknowledgement of how bad child abuse is. The problem is whether we can trust the people who claim that everything they do, they do it for the children. The problem is damaged trust. And I think your last paragraph illustrates why child abuse is such an effective excuse, if someone criticizes your plan, just avoid and go into how bad child abuse really is. I'm not accusing you of anything here by the way, I like the article and your insight. I just see a huge danger in the critics and those who actually want to help with this problem being pitted against each other by people who see the topic of child abuse as nothing but a convenient carrier for their goals, the ones that have actually heavily damaged a lot of trust.
- ChrisKnott 5y ago
  What are the main instances where these claims were made fraudulently?
  - dijit 5y ago
    Snoopers Charter in the UK springs to mind.
    - ChrisKnott 5y ago
      The snoopers charter was always fairly broad though. It was never about child abuse, it covers collecting phone records etc which is used in most police investigations. Unless you are referring to some particular aspect of it I'm not aware of? I understand very broad stuff might be sold as "helping to fight child abuse" while avoiding talking about the full scope, but that isn't what Apple/NCMEC are doing here. They are making quite explicit claims about the scope. That's why I'm wondering if there is precedent for claims about "we will ONLY use this for CSAM" which were later backtracked.
  - 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
eftychis 5y ago
> Why haven't I made my whitepaper about PhotoDNA public? In my view, who would it help? It would help bad guys avoid detection and it will help malcontents manufacture false-positives. The paper won't help NCMEC, ICACs, or related law enforcement. It won't help victims. I have to respectfully disagree with that statement and the train of thought unfortunately. However, you should seek legal counsel before proceeding with anything related: the advice from a stranger on the web. a) You are not in the possession of a mystical secret for some magical curve or lattice. The "bad guys" if they have enough incentive to reverse a compression algorithm (effectively what this is) they will easily do that, if the money is good enough. b) If we followed the same mentality in the cryptography community we would still be using DES or have a broken AES. It is clear from your post that the area requires some serious boost from the community in terms of algorithms and implementations and architectural solutions. By hiding the laundry we are never going to advance. Right now this area is not taken seriously enough as it should by the research community -- one of the reasons also being the huge privacy, and illegal search and seizure concerns and disregard of other areas of law most of my peers have. Material such as yours can help attract attention necessary to the problem and showcase how without the help of the community we end up with problematic and harmful measures such as what you imply. c) I guess you have, but just in the slightest of cases: From what I have read so far and from the implications of the marketing material, I have to advise you to seek legal counsel if you come to the possession of this PhotoDNA material they promised or about your written work. [https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-federal-law-child-pornography https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-fede...] Similarly for any trained ML model -- although here it is a disaster in progress still.
- loves_mangoes 5y ago
  I would have agreed with this on principle, assuming motivated actors who are willing to read technical papers on PhotoDNA, keeping it unpublished is only delaying these actors. Although there can be real value in delayed release, secrecy, and obfuscation, that is especially useful if the author can credibly convince NCMEC and other relevant parties to make use of the whitepaper while it is private. If delaying gains little, secrecy is less helpful. Sunlight tends to be the best disinfectant. As it stands, it is hard to judge how much progress is being made behind closed doors to improve PhotoDNA.
adrian_b 5y ago
I have no idea whether this statistic is true or not, but "nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused" is an incredibly high number. I have no doubt that some cases of sexually abused children must have also existed in the environment where I have grown up as a child, in Europe, but I am quite certain that such cases could not have been significantly more than 1 per thousand children. If the numbers would be really so high in USA, then something should definitely be done to change this, but spying on all people is certainly not the right solution.
- edmundsauto 5y ago
  What makes you quite certain about your 1-1000 number? It’s really easy to mistake our experience for something generalizable.
  - RealityVoid 5y ago
    It's hard to say without data, but the number is so astonishingly high that, really, the first reaction is to call it into question. It also seems to be the kind of thing that is hard to measure.
    - edmundsauto 5y ago
      I dunno, seems reasonable to me. Crimes of this nature are underreported, so I tend to assume I’m only aware of a very small percentage of these situations. I’m not saying you’re wrong - just that I had the reaction that it seemed within the general ballpark. For example, most of the apparently normal women I have known well have shared stories of abuse and trauma. What makes you say it’s hard to measure? The definitions are pretty clear cut.
- tonyhb 5y ago
  Of my female friends, I know at least 5 who are victims. Victims make up the majority of my closer female circle. It is way more commonplace than you would like to think.
Aeolun 5y ago
Not that I particularly care one way or the other, but doesn’t writing a ‘whitepaper’ (or calling your notes such) indicate an intention to release it?
seaofmars 5y ago
>Why haven't I made my whitepaper about PhotoDNA public? In my view, who would it help? It would help bad guys avoid detection and it will help malcontents manufacture false-positives. I would suggest that the people NCMEC are most enthusiastic to catch know better than to post CSAM in places using PhotoDNA, particularly in a manner that may implicate them. Perhaps I overestimate them.
dcow 5y ago
> Why haven't I made my whitepaper about PhotoDNA public? In my view, who would it help? It would help bad guys avoid detection and it will help malcontents manufacture false-positives. The paper won't help NCMEC, ICACs, or related law enforcement. It won't help victims. Making it public would allow the public to scrutinize it, attack it, if you will, so that we can get to the bottom of how bad this technology is. Ultimately my sincere guess is that we’d end up with better technology to do this not some crap system that essentially matches on blurry images. Our government is supposed to be open source, there’s really no reason we can’t as a society figure this out better than some anti CP cabal with outdated crufty image tech.
- pvarangot 5y ago
  PhotoDNA is a very simple algorithm. Reproducing what OP did to "reverse engineer" is not hard. If you really have the guts to try this go ahead and you'll be surprised. I'm living in the US with a greencard so I'm not touching the problem even with a laser pointer. The techno-legal framework is worse than just "reversing the hashes is possible". You could brute force creation of matching images using a cloud service or online chat as an "oracle".
atq2119 5y ago
> someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." Yes, let's think about the kids, please. I certainly don't want my children to grow up in an authoritarian surveillance state...
- zionic 5y ago
  Exactly, we can’t save the children by giving them a dystopia to grow up in.
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
> someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact. This is making it worse : because people with an agenda use CP as an excuse to force immoral behavior into us, now child suffering is always associated with bullshit. Those action are hurting the children by supressong the social will to take it seriously. Stop hurting the children!
jes 5y ago
> Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused before the age of 18. If you include non-therapeutic infant circumcision, which many believe to be medical battery and (infant) male genital mutilation, this number would be much higher.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> About this time, someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact. The problem is people use this perfectly legitimate problem to justify anything. They think it's okay to surveil the entire world because children are suffering. There are no limits they won't exceed, no lines they won't cross in the name of protecting children. If you take issue, you're a "screeching minority" that's in their way and should be silenced. It's extremely tiresome seeing "children, terrorists, drug dealers" mentioned every single time the government wants to erode some fundamental human right. They are the bogeymen of the 21st century. Children in particular are the perfect political weapon to let you get away with anything. Anyone questions you, just destroy their reputation by calling them a pedophile.
- eecc 5y ago
  Yeah, and none of these assholes (pardon the language) is willing to spend a penny to provide for millions of children suffering of poverty: free education, food, health, parental support. Nothing, zero, zilch. And these millions are suffering right now, this second, with life-long physical and psychological traumas that will perpetuate this poverty spiral forever.
  - ace_of_spades 5y ago
    Thank you! This is a really important observation about anything controversial „child“ related. Be it abortion or abuse you can tell what people‘s real priorities are by looking at how much they are willing to spend on the welfare of kids outside their immediate point of concern. All of these types of problems are likely better solved in some other ways. Why not have general mental health coaching in schools freely available to increase the chance of early detection of abusive behaviors? Why not improve the financial situation of parents so that the child is not perceived to be another burden in a brutal life? Why not offer low-friction free mental health coaching to all individuals? The way the world is organized now is ABSURD to the highest degrees! We pretend to care about a thing but only look at issues narrowly without considering the big picture. In the end, politics and the way power is distributed is broken. There are too many entrenched interests looking out for their narrow self-interest. There seems to be not enough vision to unite enough power for substantial change. Even the SDGs don‘t seem to inspire the developed nations as something to mobilize for. We need the fervor of war efforts for positive change. Doing the right thing and doing things right needs to become the very essence of what we as individuals stand for. Not consuming goods or furthering the idealogical agenda of a select few. Each and every one of us should look into themselves and look into the world and work to build a monument of this collective existence. We were here. Let us explain to all following us how we tried our best to do the right things in the right way and where we fell short of our ambitions and hope that others might improve upon our work. Sorry, I think this turned into a rant but it comes from the heart.
eecc 5y ago
How feasible is it to change the algorithm to flag police uniforms? The Tank Man?
- SXX 5y ago
  No need to change anything. It's supported by design.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
raxxorrax 5y ago
Information is power and you can dethrone anyone with access to their communication. Just a quote out of context is enough, especially with many people out for blood to handle their doubts and fears. A lot of people allegedly knew about Epstein and he was completely untouched while connected to high ranking politicians. You wouldn't have needed surveillance to identify child abuse and if it had turned up anything, I doubt something had happened. Even with that surveillance implemented, evidence would only be used if politically convenient. If you are against child abuse, you should add funding to child care. People there will notice more abuse cases when they have the support and funding they need because that means more eyes on a potential problem. An image algorithm is no help.
ace_of_spades 5y ago
Hey, first of all kudos to you for all your hard work and having the heart in the right place. I don’t really want to take any specific position on this issue as I don’t have enough context to make a fair assessment of the situation. However, I do want to point out one thing: By supporting a specific approach to solve a problem, you generally remove some incentives to solve the problem in some other way. Minted to this situation, I think it would be interesting to ask what are other potential solutions to the problem of child abuse and how effective may they be compared to things like PhotoDNA? Is it the biggest net benefit you could habe or maybe even a net cost to work on this to solve the problem of child abuse? I don’t have the answer but I think it‘s important to look at the really big picture once in a while. What is it that you want to achieve and is what you are doing really the most effective way of getting that or just something that is „convenient“ or „familiar“ given a set of predefined talking points you didn’t really question? All the best to you :)
mlindner 5y ago
> Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused before the age of 18. Please lets not invent distorted statistics or quote mouthpieces who has it in their own interest to scare people as much as possible into rash actions just like Apple has done.
weinzierl 5y ago
Thanks for the write-up and putting all the work into this important issue. > "There is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who deal in CP and people who abuse children. And they rarely victimize just one child. Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused before the age of 18." One thing I wondered and have not seen brought up in the discussion so far is this: As far as I understand the perceptual hash solutions work based on existing corpora of abuse material. So, if we improve our detection ability of this existing content, doesn't that increase the pressure on the abusers to produce new content and in consequence hurt even more children? If so, an AI solution that also flags previously unknown abuse material and a lot of human review are probably our only chance. What is your take on this?
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > doesn't that increase the pressure on the abusers to produce new content and in consequence hurt even more children? Not really. Two points: 1) Many / all CP boards these days ask applicants to provide CSAM (as police in almost all jurisdictions except for IIRC US and Australia are banned from bringing CSAM into circulation). And to keep police where allowed from simply re-uploading stuff, they (as well as the "client base") demand new, yet-unseen stuff, and so no matter what the police is doing there will always be pressure for new content. 2) The CSAM detection on popular sites only hits people dumb enough to upload CSAM to Instagram, Facebook and the likes. Granted, the consumer masses are dumb and incompetent at basic data security, but ... uhh, for lack of a better word, experienced CSAM consumers know after decades of busts that they need to keep their stashes secure - aka encrypted disks. > If so, an AI solution that also flags previously unknown abuse material and a lot of human review are probably our only chance. What is your take on this? There are other chances to prevent CSA that don't risk damaging privacy, and all of them aim at the early stages - preventing abuse from happening: 1) teach children already in early school years about their body and about consent. This one is crucial - children who haven't learned that it is not normal that Uncle Billy touches their willy won't report it! - but unfortunately, conservatives and religious fundamentalists tend to blast any such efforts as "early sexualization", "gay propaganda" and whatnot. 2) provide resources for (potential) committers of abuse. In Germany, we have the "Kein Täter werden" network that provides help, but many other countries don't have anything even remotely similar. 3) Screening of staff and volunteers in trust / authority positions dealing with children (priests and other clergy, school and pre-school/kindergarten teachers, sports club trainers) against CSA convictions. Unfortunately, this is ... not followed thoroughly very often and in some cases (cough Catholic Church) the institutions actively attempt to cover up CSA cases, protect perps and simply shuffle staff around the country or in some cases across the world.
Arathorn 5y ago
Hey - thanks for writing the OP. I may be missing something obvious, but how does fotoforensics actually identify all the CSAM content it reports to NCMEC?
Siira 5y ago
1. Your claims about CP and child abuse need substantial evidence. 2. Assuming all that as true, opaque surveillance and the destruction of free, general computing is much worse than child abuse.
kortilla 5y ago
> The paper won't help NCMEC, ICACs, or related law enforcement. It won't help victims. But it will help all of society by preventing a backdoor from gaining a foothold. If the technology is shown to be ineffective it will help pressure Apple to remove this super dangerous tool. Once a technical capability is there, governments will force Apple to use it for compliance. It won’t be long before pictures of Winnie the Pooh will be flagged in China.
- zionic 5y ago
  OP knows that, and is acting accordingly. They enjoy being “unquestionable”/above being audited.
sascha_sl 5y ago
Thank you for those insights. I've long held a grudge against Microsoft and NCMEC for not providing this technology, because I live in a country where reporting CSAM is ill-advised if you're not a commercial entity and law enforcement seizes first and asks questions later (_months_ later), so you end up just closing down a service if it turns out to be a problem. This puts it into perspective. PhotoDNA seems fundamentally broken as a hashing technology, but it works just well enough with a huge NDA to keep people from looking too closely at it. NCMEC needs a new technology partner. It's a shame they picked Apple, who are likely not going to open up this tech. Without it, it's only a matter of time until small indie web services (think of the Fediverse) just can't exist in a lot of places anymore.
- d110af5ccf 5y ago
  > it's only a matter of time until small indie web services (think of the Fediverse) just can't exist in a lot of places anymore I expect they will simply become P2P E2EE darknets eventually, meaning there won't really be a "service" anymore. Matrix already has E2EE and is actively working towards P2P.
xunn0026 5y ago
> Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused before the age of 18. This can only be hyperbole. How are you defining sexual abuse?
FeepingCreature 5y ago
> About this time, someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact. There is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who deal in CP and people who abuse children. And they rarely victimize just one child. Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused before the age of 18. Maybe it's the fact that I don't have kids, or that I spend most of my life online with various devices and services. But I would much rather drop the NCMEC, drop any requirement to monitor private messages or photos, reinstate strong privacy guarantees, and instead massively step up monitoring requirements for families. This argument seems like we're using CSAM as a crutch to get at child abusers. If the relationship is really nearly 1:1, it seems more efficient to more closely monitor the groups most likely to be abusers instead. It even seems to me that going after a database of existing CSAM is counterproductive. With that material, the damage is already done. In a perverse sense, we want as many pedos as possible to buy old CSAM, since this reduces the market for new abuse. It seems to me that initiatives like this do the opposite. I am not defending CSAM here. But CSAM and child abuse are connected problems, and istm child abuse is the immensely greater one. We should confront child abuse as the first priority, even at the expense of CSAM enforcement, even at the expense of familial privacy. With a rate of 1 in 10, I don't see how not doing so can be ethically defended.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  "and instead massively step up monitoring requirements for families" Pls have a family first and then see if you ask for more state governence into your life? It is true, most abuse happens in the family, but there is also schools, churches, sports clubs, ... But the thing is, if the schools for example would have the stuff, with enough time (and empathy) to care about the actual children and talk with them and interact with them (and not mainly the paperwork about them) - then you could easily spot abuse everywhere and take action. But they usually don't, so you have traumatized children coming into another hostile and cold environment called public school, where they just stonewall again and learn to hide their wounds and scars. Child abuse is a complex problem, with no simple solution. But I prefer a more human focused solution amd not just another surveillance stepup. Child abuseres also do not fall from the sky. If you pay more attention to them while they are young - you can spot it and help them, while they need help, before they turn into creepy monsters.
deleted 5y ago
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zionic 5y ago
> There is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who deal in CP and people who abuse children. And they rarely victimize just one child. Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused before the age of 18. These are clearly propaganda statistics. There is absolutely no way 10% of the US child population is molested. The fact that you not only believe this, but repeat it publicly calls into question your judgement and gullibility. You’ve been recruited to undermine the privacy and security of hundreds of millions (billions?) of people and indoctrinated with utterly ridiculous statistics. Your argument is essentially “the ends justify the means”, and it could not be any more ethically hollow.
Kalium 5y ago
> About this time, someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact. The exploitation of children is a real and heartbreaking ongoing tragedy that forever harms millions of those we most owe protection. It's because this is so tragic that we in the world of privacy have grown skeptical. The Four Horsemen, invoked consistently around the world to mount assaults against privacy, are child abuse, terrorism, drugs, and money laundering. Once privacy is defeated, none of those real, compelling, pressing problems get better (well, except money laundering). Lives are not improved. People are not rescued. Well-meaning advocates just move on to the next thing the foes of privacy point them at. Surely it will work this time! Your heart is in the right place. You have devoted no small part of your time and energy to a deep and genuine blooming of compassion and empathy. It's just perhaps worth considering that others of us might have good reason to be skeptical.
loriverkutya 5y ago
> Why haven't I made my whitepaper about PhotoDNA public? In my view, who would it help? It would help bad guys avoid detection and it will help malcontents manufacture false-positives. The paper won't help NCMEC, ICACs, or related law enforcement. It won't help victims. It would help those victims who are falsely accused of having child porn on the phone because of a bug. It would also help those people who is going to be detained because PhotoDNA will be used by dictatorial states to find incriminating material on their phone just as they used Pegasus to spy on journalists, political opponents, etc.
howaboutnope 5y ago
> About this time, someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact. I'd say it's the other way around. If freedom dies this time, it might die for good, followed by an "eternity" of totalitarianism. All violence that occured in human history so far combined is nothing compared to what is at stake. > Free thought requires free media. Free media requires free technology. We require ethical treatment when we go to read, to write, to listen and to watch. Those are the hallmarks of our politics. We need to keep those politics until we die. Because if we don’t, something else will die. Something so precious that many, many of our fathers and mothers gave their life for it. Something so precious, that we understood it to define what it meant to be human; it will die. -- Eben Moglen
michaelt 5y ago
It's somewhat off-topic for the article, but I'm curious as to why you retain images uploaded for analysis after the analysis is completed? After all, surely 99% of uploaders don't hold the copyright for the image they're uploading, so retaining them is on shaky legal grounds to begin with, if you're the kind of person who wants to be in strict compliance with the law - and at the same time, it forces you and your moderators to handle child porn several times a day (not a job I'd envy) and you say you risk a felony conviction. Wouldn't it be far simpler, and less legally risky, if you didn't retain the images?
Grustaf 5y ago
You ask how they can know that their false positive rate is 1 in a trillion, without testing trillions of images. Simple, they require more than on hit. If each hit has a false positive rate of 1 in 100, which is very testable, you can simply require six hits.
still_grokking 5y ago
It doesn't matter how "nice" the people on the lower levels are. An organization is determined to act like the management wants. If management consists of jerks the organization they lead will always behave accordingly. A fish rots from the head down…
logicalmonster 5y ago
> About this time, someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact. There is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who deal in CP and people who abuse children. And they rarely victimize just one child. Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused before the age of 18. Does CP being available create victims? I'd say that virtually everybody who suddenly saw CP would not have the inclination to abuse a child. I don't believe that availability of CP is the causal factor to child abuse. But putting aside that and other extremely important slippery slope arguments for a minute about this issue: have you considered that this project may create economic incentives that are inverse of the ostensible goal of protecting more children from becoming victims? Consider the following. If it becomes en vogue for cloud data operators to scan their customers' photos for known illegal CP images, then the economic incentives created heavily promote the creation of new, custom CP that isn't present in any database. Like many well-intentioned activists, there's a possibility that you may be contributing more to the problem you care about than actually solving it.
stjohnswarts 5y ago
I'm glad that you at least were transparent about the shortcomings of these types of systems. Maybe some academics in forensic image analysis can take up the torch and shed light on how much of a failure this whole system is, especially when they're putting spyware on our personal devices. Anyway, I like your writings, keep up the good fight.

shkkmo 5y ago

> Why haven't I made my whitepaper about PhotoDNA public? In my view, who would it help? Would it help activists push for more accurate technology and better management for NCMEC? Would it help technologists come up with better algorithms? I see all kinds of benefits to more openess and accountability here.

slg 5y ago

>About this time, someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact. There is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who deal in CP and people who abuse children. And they rarely victimize just one child. Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused before the age of 18. I think we have seen "think of the kids" used as an excuse for so many things over the years that the pendulum has now swung so far that some of the tech community has begun to think we should do absolutely nothing about this problem. I have even seen people on HN in the last week that are so upset by the privacy implications of this that they start arguing that these images of abuse should be legal since trying to crack down is used as a motive to invade people's privacy. I don't know what the way forward is here, but we really shouldn't lose sight that there are real kids being hurt in all this. That is incredibly motivating for a lot of people. Too often the tech community's response is that the intangible concept of privacy is more important than the tangible issue of child abuse. That isn't going to be a winning argument among mainstream audiences. We need something better or it is only a matter of time until these type of systems are implemented everywhere.

zug_zug 5y ago
> Too often the tech community's response is that the intangible concept of privacy is more important than the tangible issue of child abuse. Is it intangible? 18% of the world lives in China alone. That's more people than the "1/10 who are victims of child abuse*", and I'm sure that 18% will only grow as other authoritarian countries get more technologically advanced. I think "Think of the kids" applies very well to the CREATORS of pornography. Per wikipedia, there isn't any conclusive causal relationship between viewing CP and assaulting children. * Per a google search "A Bureau of Justice Statistics report shows 1.6 % (sixteen out of one thousand) of children between the ages of 12-17 were victims of rape/sexual assault" which is a lot less than 10% figure you're citing. Non-sexual abuse wouldn't really have any bearing here, right?
- slg 5y ago
  >Is it intangible? 18% of the world lives in China alone. That's more people than the "1/10 who are victims of child abuse*", and I'm sure that 18% will only grow as other authoritarian countries get more technologically advanced. You didn't mention any tangible results here. How would this system by Apple make my life worse? Can you answer that without a slippery slope argument? >I think "Think of the kids" applies very well to the CREATORS of pornography. Per wikipedia, there isn't any conclusive causal relationship between viewing CP and assaulting children. Why does the causality matter? A correlation is enough that cracking down on this content will result in less abusers on the streets. >* Per a google search "A Bureau of Justice Statistics report shows 1.6 % (sixteen out of one thousand) of children between the ages of 12-17 were victims of rape/sexual assault" which is a lot less than 10% figure you're citing. Non-sexual abuse wouldn't really have any bearing here, right? I wasn't the one citing that, but you are also citing an incomplete number since it excludes younger children.

zug_zug 5y ago

>> There is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who deal in CP and people who abuse children Can you give a source for this please? Also by "deal in" do you mean create or view?

tux3 5y ago

I'd lament that using 'thinking of the children' as an excuse for genuine overreach, when that's what it is, puts us in a worse situation. There is incredible second-order harm in overreach, because the reaction to it hurts the original cause, too. If you try to overcorrect, people will overcorrect in response. The sort of zeal that leads to thoughts like "screeching minority", I think shows carelessness and shortsightedness in the face of very important decisions. I have no informed opinion on Apple's CSAM tool, beyond deferring to the FotoForensics expert.

brailsafe 5y ago

> I built the initial FotoForensics service in a few days. Why did you specify "In a few days"?

sk5t 5y ago
It does make one wonder--careless work, trivial problem, reuse of existing projects, writer portrays self as extremely productive, or some combination?
- brailsafe 5y ago
  Ya, it's hard to interpret it differently, so was curious. Don't know why I'm being downvoted for a question about rhetorical intention.
  - bigyikes 5y ago
    I didn’t downvote, but it comes across as a nitpick on a thoughtful and reasonable piece.
- loves_mangoes 5y ago
  I think you're assuming bad faith from someone who has proven very competent, technical, and coherent. It might simply be truthful. And if the author is proud of that, it is both irrelevant and perfectly okay. Let's focus on the facts and arguments relevant to the article, not personal attacks.
  - sk5t 5y ago
    None of the options I proffered are in the "bad faith" category.
coryrc 5y ago
My guess is to establish the approximate amount of collaboration. He didn't work there full time for years, that collaboration has been small and limited.

hnuser123456 5y ago

Half of baby boys in the US are sexually assaulted and disfigured right after being born. We need a lot more people fighting against this, it shouldn't be so hard to stop.

deleted 5y ago
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nixnax 5y ago

>Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused before the age of 18. That explains the rise in LGBT

nappy 5y ago
No - but this comment is abhorrent.

2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago

> someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact. What you are saying here kind of sidetracks the actual problem those critics have though, doesn't it? The problem is not the acknowledgement of how bad child abuse is. The problem is whether we can trust the people who claim that everything they do, they do it for the children. The problem is damaged trust. And I think your last paragraph illustrates why child abuse is such an effective excuse, if someone criticizes your plan, just avoid and go into how bad child abuse really is. I'm not accusing you of anything here by the way, I like the article and your insight. I just see a huge danger in the critics and those who actually want to help with this problem being pitted against each other by people who see the topic of child abuse as nothing but a convenient carrier for their goals, the ones that have actually heavily damaged a lot of trust.

ChrisKnott 5y ago
What are the main instances where these claims were made fraudulently?
- dijit 5y ago
  Snoopers Charter in the UK springs to mind.
  - ChrisKnott 5y ago
    The snoopers charter was always fairly broad though. It was never about child abuse, it covers collecting phone records etc which is used in most police investigations. Unless you are referring to some particular aspect of it I'm not aware of? I understand very broad stuff might be sold as "helping to fight child abuse" while avoiding talking about the full scope, but that isn't what Apple/NCMEC are doing here. They are making quite explicit claims about the scope. That's why I'm wondering if there is precedent for claims about "we will ONLY use this for CSAM" which were later backtracked.
- 2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago

eftychis 5y ago

> Why haven't I made my whitepaper about PhotoDNA public? In my view, who would it help? It would help bad guys avoid detection and it will help malcontents manufacture false-positives. The paper won't help NCMEC, ICACs, or related law enforcement. It won't help victims. I have to respectfully disagree with that statement and the train of thought unfortunately. However, you should seek legal counsel before proceeding with anything related: the advice from a stranger on the web. a) You are not in the possession of a mystical secret for some magical curve or lattice. The "bad guys" if they have enough incentive to reverse a compression algorithm (effectively what this is) they will easily do that, if the money is good enough. b) If we followed the same mentality in the cryptography community we would still be using DES or have a broken AES. It is clear from your post that the area requires some serious boost from the community in terms of algorithms and implementations and architectural solutions. By hiding the laundry we are never going to advance. Right now this area is not taken seriously enough as it should by the research community -- one of the reasons also being the huge privacy, and illegal search and seizure concerns and disregard of other areas of law most of my peers have. Material such as yours can help attract attention necessary to the problem and showcase how without the help of the community we end up with problematic and harmful measures such as what you imply. c) I guess you have, but just in the slightest of cases: From what I have read so far and from the implications of the marketing material, I have to advise you to seek legal counsel if you come to the possession of this PhotoDNA material they promised or about your written work. [https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-federal-law-child-pornography https://www.justice.gov/criminal-ceos/citizens-guide-us-fede...] Similarly for any trained ML model -- although here it is a disaster in progress still.

loves_mangoes 5y ago
I would have agreed with this on principle, assuming motivated actors who are willing to read technical papers on PhotoDNA, keeping it unpublished is only delaying these actors. Although there can be real value in delayed release, secrecy, and obfuscation, that is especially useful if the author can credibly convince NCMEC and other relevant parties to make use of the whitepaper while it is private. If delaying gains little, secrecy is less helpful. Sunlight tends to be the best disinfectant. As it stands, it is hard to judge how much progress is being made behind closed doors to improve PhotoDNA.

adrian_b 5y ago

I have no idea whether this statistic is true or not, but "nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused" is an incredibly high number. I have no doubt that some cases of sexually abused children must have also existed in the environment where I have grown up as a child, in Europe, but I am quite certain that such cases could not have been significantly more than 1 per thousand children. If the numbers would be really so high in USA, then something should definitely be done to change this, but spying on all people is certainly not the right solution.

edmundsauto 5y ago
What makes you quite certain about your 1-1000 number? It’s really easy to mistake our experience for something generalizable.
- RealityVoid 5y ago
  It's hard to say without data, but the number is so astonishingly high that, really, the first reaction is to call it into question. It also seems to be the kind of thing that is hard to measure.
  - edmundsauto 5y ago
    I dunno, seems reasonable to me. Crimes of this nature are underreported, so I tend to assume I’m only aware of a very small percentage of these situations. I’m not saying you’re wrong - just that I had the reaction that it seemed within the general ballpark. For example, most of the apparently normal women I have known well have shared stories of abuse and trauma. What makes you say it’s hard to measure? The definitions are pretty clear cut.
tonyhb 5y ago
Of my female friends, I know at least 5 who are victims. Victims make up the majority of my closer female circle. It is way more commonplace than you would like to think.

Aeolun 5y ago

Not that I particularly care one way or the other, but doesn’t writing a ‘whitepaper’ (or calling your notes such) indicate an intention to release it?

seaofmars 5y ago

>Why haven't I made my whitepaper about PhotoDNA public? In my view, who would it help? It would help bad guys avoid detection and it will help malcontents manufacture false-positives. I would suggest that the people NCMEC are most enthusiastic to catch know better than to post CSAM in places using PhotoDNA, particularly in a manner that may implicate them. Perhaps I overestimate them.

dcow 5y ago

pvarangot 5y ago
PhotoDNA is a very simple algorithm. Reproducing what OP did to "reverse engineer" is not hard. If you really have the guts to try this go ahead and you'll be surprised. I'm living in the US with a greencard so I'm not touching the problem even with a laser pointer. The techno-legal framework is worse than just "reversing the hashes is possible". You could brute force creation of matching images using a cloud service or online chat as an "oracle".

atq2119 5y ago

> someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." Yes, let's think about the kids, please. I certainly don't want my children to grow up in an authoritarian surveillance state...

zionic 5y ago
Exactly, we can’t save the children by giving them a dystopia to grow up in.

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

> someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact. This is making it worse : because people with an agenda use CP as an excuse to force immoral behavior into us, now child suffering is always associated with bullshit. Those action are hurting the children by supressong the social will to take it seriously. Stop hurting the children!

jes 5y ago

> Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused before the age of 18. If you include non-therapeutic infant circumcision, which many believe to be medical battery and (infant) male genital mutilation, this number would be much higher.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> About this time, someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact. The problem is people use this perfectly legitimate problem to justify anything. They think it's okay to surveil the entire world because children are suffering. There are no limits they won't exceed, no lines they won't cross in the name of protecting children. If you take issue, you're a "screeching minority" that's in their way and should be silenced. It's extremely tiresome seeing "children, terrorists, drug dealers" mentioned every single time the government wants to erode some fundamental human right. They are the bogeymen of the 21st century. Children in particular are the perfect political weapon to let you get away with anything. Anyone questions you, just destroy their reputation by calling them a pedophile.

eecc 5y ago
Yeah, and none of these assholes (pardon the language) is willing to spend a penny to provide for millions of children suffering of poverty: free education, food, health, parental support. Nothing, zero, zilch. And these millions are suffering right now, this second, with life-long physical and psychological traumas that will perpetuate this poverty spiral forever.
- ace_of_spades 5y ago
  Thank you! This is a really important observation about anything controversial „child“ related. Be it abortion or abuse you can tell what people‘s real priorities are by looking at how much they are willing to spend on the welfare of kids outside their immediate point of concern. All of these types of problems are likely better solved in some other ways. Why not have general mental health coaching in schools freely available to increase the chance of early detection of abusive behaviors? Why not improve the financial situation of parents so that the child is not perceived to be another burden in a brutal life? Why not offer low-friction free mental health coaching to all individuals? The way the world is organized now is ABSURD to the highest degrees! We pretend to care about a thing but only look at issues narrowly without considering the big picture. In the end, politics and the way power is distributed is broken. There are too many entrenched interests looking out for their narrow self-interest. There seems to be not enough vision to unite enough power for substantial change. Even the SDGs don‘t seem to inspire the developed nations as something to mobilize for. We need the fervor of war efforts for positive change. Doing the right thing and doing things right needs to become the very essence of what we as individuals stand for. Not consuming goods or furthering the idealogical agenda of a select few. Each and every one of us should look into themselves and look into the world and work to build a monument of this collective existence. We were here. Let us explain to all following us how we tried our best to do the right things in the right way and where we fell short of our ambitions and hope that others might improve upon our work. Sorry, I think this turned into a rant but it comes from the heart.

eecc 5y ago

How feasible is it to change the algorithm to flag police uniforms? The Tank Man?

SXX 5y ago
No need to change anything. It's supported by design.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

raxxorrax 5y ago

Information is power and you can dethrone anyone with access to their communication. Just a quote out of context is enough, especially with many people out for blood to handle their doubts and fears. A lot of people allegedly knew about Epstein and he was completely untouched while connected to high ranking politicians. You wouldn't have needed surveillance to identify child abuse and if it had turned up anything, I doubt something had happened. Even with that surveillance implemented, evidence would only be used if politically convenient. If you are against child abuse, you should add funding to child care. People there will notice more abuse cases when they have the support and funding they need because that means more eyes on a potential problem. An image algorithm is no help.

ace_of_spades 5y ago

Hey, first of all kudos to you for all your hard work and having the heart in the right place. I don’t really want to take any specific position on this issue as I don’t have enough context to make a fair assessment of the situation. However, I do want to point out one thing: By supporting a specific approach to solve a problem, you generally remove some incentives to solve the problem in some other way. Minted to this situation, I think it would be interesting to ask what are other potential solutions to the problem of child abuse and how effective may they be compared to things like PhotoDNA? Is it the biggest net benefit you could habe or maybe even a net cost to work on this to solve the problem of child abuse? I don’t have the answer but I think it‘s important to look at the really big picture once in a while. What is it that you want to achieve and is what you are doing really the most effective way of getting that or just something that is „convenient“ or „familiar“ given a set of predefined talking points you didn’t really question? All the best to you :)

mlindner 5y ago

> Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused before the age of 18. Please lets not invent distorted statistics or quote mouthpieces who has it in their own interest to scare people as much as possible into rash actions just like Apple has done.

weinzierl 5y ago

Thanks for the write-up and putting all the work into this important issue. > "There is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who deal in CP and people who abuse children. And they rarely victimize just one child. Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused before the age of 18." One thing I wondered and have not seen brought up in the discussion so far is this: As far as I understand the perceptual hash solutions work based on existing corpora of abuse material. So, if we improve our detection ability of this existing content, doesn't that increase the pressure on the abusers to produce new content and in consequence hurt even more children? If so, an AI solution that also flags previously unknown abuse material and a lot of human review are probably our only chance. What is your take on this?

mschuster91 5y ago
> doesn't that increase the pressure on the abusers to produce new content and in consequence hurt even more children? Not really. Two points: 1) Many / all CP boards these days ask applicants to provide CSAM (as police in almost all jurisdictions except for IIRC US and Australia are banned from bringing CSAM into circulation). And to keep police where allowed from simply re-uploading stuff, they (as well as the "client base") demand new, yet-unseen stuff, and so no matter what the police is doing there will always be pressure for new content. 2) The CSAM detection on popular sites only hits people dumb enough to upload CSAM to Instagram, Facebook and the likes. Granted, the consumer masses are dumb and incompetent at basic data security, but ... uhh, for lack of a better word, experienced CSAM consumers know after decades of busts that they need to keep their stashes secure - aka encrypted disks. > If so, an AI solution that also flags previously unknown abuse material and a lot of human review are probably our only chance. What is your take on this? There are other chances to prevent CSA that don't risk damaging privacy, and all of them aim at the early stages - preventing abuse from happening: 1) teach children already in early school years about their body and about consent. This one is crucial - children who haven't learned that it is not normal that Uncle Billy touches their willy won't report it! - but unfortunately, conservatives and religious fundamentalists tend to blast any such efforts as "early sexualization", "gay propaganda" and whatnot. 2) provide resources for (potential) committers of abuse. In Germany, we have the "Kein Täter werden" network that provides help, but many other countries don't have anything even remotely similar. 3) Screening of staff and volunteers in trust / authority positions dealing with children (priests and other clergy, school and pre-school/kindergarten teachers, sports club trainers) against CSA convictions. Unfortunately, this is ... not followed thoroughly very often and in some cases (cough Catholic Church) the institutions actively attempt to cover up CSA cases, protect perps and simply shuffle staff around the country or in some cases across the world.

Arathorn 5y ago

Hey - thanks for writing the OP. I may be missing something obvious, but how does fotoforensics actually identify all the CSAM content it reports to NCMEC?

Siira 5y ago

1. Your claims about CP and child abuse need substantial evidence. 2. Assuming all that as true, opaque surveillance and the destruction of free, general computing is much worse than child abuse.

kortilla 5y ago

> The paper won't help NCMEC, ICACs, or related law enforcement. It won't help victims. But it will help all of society by preventing a backdoor from gaining a foothold. If the technology is shown to be ineffective it will help pressure Apple to remove this super dangerous tool. Once a technical capability is there, governments will force Apple to use it for compliance. It won’t be long before pictures of Winnie the Pooh will be flagged in China.

zionic 5y ago
OP knows that, and is acting accordingly. They enjoy being “unquestionable”/above being audited.

sascha_sl 5y ago

Thank you for those insights. I've long held a grudge against Microsoft and NCMEC for not providing this technology, because I live in a country where reporting CSAM is ill-advised if you're not a commercial entity and law enforcement seizes first and asks questions later (_months_ later), so you end up just closing down a service if it turns out to be a problem. This puts it into perspective. PhotoDNA seems fundamentally broken as a hashing technology, but it works just well enough with a huge NDA to keep people from looking too closely at it. NCMEC needs a new technology partner. It's a shame they picked Apple, who are likely not going to open up this tech. Without it, it's only a matter of time until small indie web services (think of the Fediverse) just can't exist in a lot of places anymore.

d110af5ccf 5y ago
> it's only a matter of time until small indie web services (think of the Fediverse) just can't exist in a lot of places anymore I expect they will simply become P2P E2EE darknets eventually, meaning there won't really be a "service" anymore. Matrix already has E2EE and is actively working towards P2P.

xunn0026 5y ago

> Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused before the age of 18. This can only be hyperbole. How are you defining sexual abuse?

FeepingCreature 5y ago

> About this time, someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact. There is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who deal in CP and people who abuse children. And they rarely victimize just one child. Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused before the age of 18. Maybe it's the fact that I don't have kids, or that I spend most of my life online with various devices and services. But I would much rather drop the NCMEC, drop any requirement to monitor private messages or photos, reinstate strong privacy guarantees, and instead massively step up monitoring requirements for families. This argument seems like we're using CSAM as a crutch to get at child abusers. If the relationship is really nearly 1:1, it seems more efficient to more closely monitor the groups most likely to be abusers instead. It even seems to me that going after a database of existing CSAM is counterproductive. With that material, the damage is already done. In a perverse sense, we want as many pedos as possible to buy old CSAM, since this reduces the market for new abuse. It seems to me that initiatives like this do the opposite. I am not defending CSAM here. But CSAM and child abuse are connected problems, and istm child abuse is the immensely greater one. We should confront child abuse as the first priority, even at the expense of CSAM enforcement, even at the expense of familial privacy. With a rate of 1 in 10, I don't see how not doing so can be ethically defended.

hutzlibu 5y ago
"and instead massively step up monitoring requirements for families" Pls have a family first and then see if you ask for more state governence into your life? It is true, most abuse happens in the family, but there is also schools, churches, sports clubs, ... But the thing is, if the schools for example would have the stuff, with enough time (and empathy) to care about the actual children and talk with them and interact with them (and not mainly the paperwork about them) - then you could easily spot abuse everywhere and take action. But they usually don't, so you have traumatized children coming into another hostile and cold environment called public school, where they just stonewall again and learn to hide their wounds and scars. Child abuse is a complex problem, with no simple solution. But I prefer a more human focused solution amd not just another surveillance stepup. Child abuseres also do not fall from the sky. If you pay more attention to them while they are young - you can spot it and help them, while they need help, before they turn into creepy monsters.

deleted 5y ago

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zionic 5y ago

> There is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who deal in CP and people who abuse children. And they rarely victimize just one child. Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused before the age of 18. These are clearly propaganda statistics. There is absolutely no way 10% of the US child population is molested. The fact that you not only believe this, but repeat it publicly calls into question your judgement and gullibility. You’ve been recruited to undermine the privacy and security of hundreds of millions (billions?) of people and indoctrinated with utterly ridiculous statistics. Your argument is essentially “the ends justify the means”, and it could not be any more ethically hollow.

Kalium 5y ago

> About this time, someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact. The exploitation of children is a real and heartbreaking ongoing tragedy that forever harms millions of those we most owe protection. It's because this is so tragic that we in the world of privacy have grown skeptical. The Four Horsemen, invoked consistently around the world to mount assaults against privacy, are child abuse, terrorism, drugs, and money laundering. Once privacy is defeated, none of those real, compelling, pressing problems get better (well, except money laundering). Lives are not improved. People are not rescued. Well-meaning advocates just move on to the next thing the foes of privacy point them at. Surely it will work this time! Your heart is in the right place. You have devoted no small part of your time and energy to a deep and genuine blooming of compassion and empathy. It's just perhaps worth considering that others of us might have good reason to be skeptical.

loriverkutya 5y ago

howaboutnope 5y ago

> About this time, someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact. I'd say it's the other way around. If freedom dies this time, it might die for good, followed by an "eternity" of totalitarianism. All violence that occured in human history so far combined is nothing compared to what is at stake. > Free thought requires free media. Free media requires free technology. We require ethical treatment when we go to read, to write, to listen and to watch. Those are the hallmarks of our politics. We need to keep those politics until we die. Because if we don’t, something else will die. Something so precious that many, many of our fathers and mothers gave their life for it. Something so precious, that we understood it to define what it meant to be human; it will die. -- Eben Moglen

michaelt 5y ago

It's somewhat off-topic for the article, but I'm curious as to why you retain images uploaded for analysis after the analysis is completed? After all, surely 99% of uploaders don't hold the copyright for the image they're uploading, so retaining them is on shaky legal grounds to begin with, if you're the kind of person who wants to be in strict compliance with the law - and at the same time, it forces you and your moderators to handle child porn several times a day (not a job I'd envy) and you say you risk a felony conviction. Wouldn't it be far simpler, and less legally risky, if you didn't retain the images?

Grustaf 5y ago

You ask how they can know that their false positive rate is 1 in a trillion, without testing trillions of images. Simple, they require more than on hit. If each hit has a false positive rate of 1 in 100, which is very testable, you can simply require six hits.

still_grokking 5y ago

It doesn't matter how "nice" the people on the lower levels are. An organization is determined to act like the management wants. If management consists of jerks the organization they lead will always behave accordingly. A fish rots from the head down…

logicalmonster 5y ago

> About this time, someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact. There is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who deal in CP and people who abuse children. And they rarely victimize just one child. Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused before the age of 18. Does CP being available create victims? I'd say that virtually everybody who suddenly saw CP would not have the inclination to abuse a child. I don't believe that availability of CP is the causal factor to child abuse. But putting aside that and other extremely important slippery slope arguments for a minute about this issue: have you considered that this project may create economic incentives that are inverse of the ostensible goal of protecting more children from becoming victims? Consider the following. If it becomes en vogue for cloud data operators to scan their customers' photos for known illegal CP images, then the economic incentives created heavily promote the creation of new, custom CP that isn't present in any database. Like many well-intentioned activists, there's a possibility that you may be contributing more to the problem you care about than actually solving it.

stjohnswarts 5y ago

I'm glad that you at least were transparent about the shortcomings of these types of systems. Maybe some academics in forensic image analysis can take up the torch and shed light on how much of a failure this whole system is, especially when they're putting spyware on our personal devices. Anyway, I like your writings, keep up the good fight.