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Okay, that's a nice soundbite. Now let's steelman it. I believe the following to be true: 1. Children are sexually abused. This abuse is far more widespread t

Okay, that's a nice soundbite. Now let's steelman it. I believe the following to be true: 1. Children are sexually abused. This abuse is far more widespread than we as a society want. 2. Images of this abuse is called CSAM (child sexual abuse material). CSAM is easily distributed over the Internet. 3. People who intentionally download CSAM are criminals who deserve to be punished. 4. Services that scan for CSAM (using hashes provided by the NCMEC, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and similar bodies) identify these criminals, who are in turn prosecuted by the police. In fact, hundreds of thousands of CSAM are reported by cloud services every year. This, along with the fear of being caught, reduces the demand for CSAM. 5. Some of those caught are found to be creating as well as consuming CSAM. Catching them reduces the creation of CSAM as well as the demand for it. 6. Reducing demand and creation of CSAM protects children. 7. Scanning files for CSAM catches criminals that would not otherwise be caught. Therefore, "combing through personal data" protects children that would not otherwise be protected. When you agreed with "children can be protected without companies combing through personal data," did you mean that my sequence of reasoning is wrong? If so, how? Or were you expressing a personal philosophy that's closer to "I think the benefits to privacy (from not scanning) are more important than the benefits to children (from scanning)?" If so, why do you believe it?

lzaaz 4y ago
lupire 4y ago
#1 is 99% of the problem, and #2-#7 is 1%.
- athrowaway12 4y ago
  I always thought starting with CSAM was just a convenient pretext for slowly introducing surveillance tech in the U.S. #1-#7 are all bad. I don't think saying "some aspects of [bad thing] aren't so bad" is an effective argument against surveillance tech. Better just to call bullshit on the surveillance tech itself.
falcolas 4y ago
> Reducing demand and creation of CSAM protects children. You're thinking of this as if CSAM production follows a rational supply/demand relationship (such as with food, or furniture). But is there really evidence to back up the idea that CSAM production follows the same rational relationship? Child abuse is not rational, and an abuser provides their own demand for the CSAM they create; a child will not be saved from abuse even if there's nobody for their abuser to share the photos with.
- XorNot 4y ago
  The existence of international trading networks of CSAM material speaks otherwise to this, as well as the frequency with which participants in trading but not active producers are usually an ingress point into compromising them. Even if the currency is barter - i.e. "more unique content" - that means the incentive is for people operating unchecked to feed their thirst for it have a market for the creation of it. Temporarily cornering the market with new content no one's seen before means you can trade for huge amounts of other content successfully. After all, everyone involved is taking a huge risk by even being a participant.
nonbirithm 4y ago
It scared me when this story first broke that there was almost no focus on the real harms being addressed. It was all about calling out the flawed methodology about the scanning, not the overarching reason why anyone needed to talk about scanning images at all. I think the litmus test for if a service perfectly respects privacy is if a pedophile can conduct their entire operation using the service without their private data being exposed to prying eyes. By that metric, there ought to be no perfectly private services on the clearnet. To many it is a matter of compromise and "thinking of the children." Those who really want a higher level of privacy don't need to be beholden to a publicly traded company, subject to legal requirements, to provide it to them.
schaefer 4y ago
The practice of "Steelman"ing is presenting the strongest possible argument. So please answer me this question. -- The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution reads: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. -- Before you take step 4 above, please explain to me how you established probable cause for each and every scan that takes place. Both those scans that were positive and found CSAM, and those that were negative and found nothing. In the US, there is a long history of Dragnets being deemed unconstitutional. -- And I personally understand that this Amendment protects us from actions by the US Government. Not Apple. But here Apple is conducting the scans and forwarding the results onto the Government for the purposes of law enforcement. In my personal opinion, when apple began these scans, they effectively became an agent of the state. -- In any event, I am glad the scans have stopped.
- jdlshore 4y ago
  It took me a moment to parse your argument here. To summarize, I think you're saying that my reasoning is wrong because it's illegal in the US for private services to conduct mass scanning for CSAM and notify the government. That's an... interesting take. It doesn't pass the sniff test, sorry. First, if it was illegal, I wouldn't have expected it to make it past the corporate counsel at Google, Facebook, and Microsoft (all who do CSAM scanning in the cloud). Second, I would have expected it to have been brought up by the defense in a trial and stopped as a result. That it still happens is a strong indicator that it is, in fact, not illegal. Frankly, it sounds like the same nonsense "sovereign citizens" get up to.
  - yyyk 4y ago
    The argument rests on the comparison of a user's local device to a private residence. Google, Facebook and Microsoft do scanning in their cloud and it's fine because it's in their servers. Apple's original suggestion was to do client-side scanning in the user's device and this is compared to a search of a residence.
zinodaur 4y ago
I think the biggest way to convince people on this is Point 1 in your argument. The prevalence of this activity is much more widespread than I have seen publicly acknowledged anywhere. I worked at a large cloud company (smaller than iCloud) that scanned for CSAM and in some cases notified law enforcement - the number of yearly occurrences ended all internal arguments about the "morality" of scanning immediately. As an engineer, knowing that the code I wrote was handling this kind of data every day, thousands of times per day, involving tens of thousands of individuals per year changed my opinion from "we should protect the privacy of the user" to "F** YOU stop using my product". Short of products that offer full end to end encryption, any that does not scan for this kind of thing should look for an afternoon at what their servers are doing, then see how they feel. The marketing department will absolutely not resist the temptation to poke through unencrypted data.
lamontcg 4y ago
5a. Some of those caught will likely be non-technological false positives: images of their own children[1] or CSAM images uploaded by hostile actors attempting to frame the person[2]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil... [2] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wife-framed-husband-child-sexual-abuse-phone_n_627fd3f6e4b0c2dce6508b3f https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wife-framed-husband-child-sex... The second one is particularly worrisome. In that case the wife was utterly and totally stupid and was therefore caught. How many times has that happened already and the person who did it wasn't caught?
mynameisash 4y ago
What is an acceptable murder rate for society? I think quite obviously, no one actually wants murders to occur. We all want there to be zero murders, but that's not realistic. In a modern society, murder will happen, so we have to decide what are the trade-offs societally. We can make and enforce laws, then make and enforce more, and so on. Ultimately, a society with a 0% murder rate isn't utopia; it's a police state where no one is free. On the balance, I think that society is worse off than one with an otherwise "acceptable" murder rate. This is the calculus of those arguing against CSAM scanning. We all agree that we don't want CSAM, but is the cure worse than the disease?
ashton314 4y ago
Of course I believe it's important to protect children, and people consuming and producing CSAM deserve pure unadulterated justice. I think we should do everything reasonable to catch and punish such loathsome persons. However, we have other means at our disposal to catch makers and consumers of CSAM that don't require blanket trawling of personal data. I am afraid to surrender privacy in the name of even something very good because surveillance is easy to abuse. I doubt you'd advocate for the extreme of e.g. the police knocking on everyone's door and performing a full search of their house/flat/whatever every so often to search for CSAM on computers or in magazines etc. That would be sure to catch more criminals and protect more children, but the societal cost would be astronomical. No one wants to live in a police state. And I hope you don't understand me as advocating for the complete opposite of that, where no searches are ever performed in the name of personal privacy. That's too dangerous. There's some room between the two extremes. I get nervous about mechanisms that can easily be used to compromise privacy of people who never were under any sort of suspicion. Maybe I'm wrong about where to draw the line. Some of my family lived in East Germany under the Stasi, and what a dark time that was. Perhaps that's part of the source of my aversion to mechanisms like mass digital surveillance.

lzaaz 4y ago

lupire 4y ago

#1 is 99% of the problem, and #2-#7 is 1%.

athrowaway12 4y ago
I always thought starting with CSAM was just a convenient pretext for slowly introducing surveillance tech in the U.S. #1-#7 are all bad. I don't think saying "some aspects of [bad thing] aren't so bad" is an effective argument against surveillance tech. Better just to call bullshit on the surveillance tech itself.

falcolas 4y ago

> Reducing demand and creation of CSAM protects children. You're thinking of this as if CSAM production follows a rational supply/demand relationship (such as with food, or furniture). But is there really evidence to back up the idea that CSAM production follows the same rational relationship? Child abuse is not rational, and an abuser provides their own demand for the CSAM they create; a child will not be saved from abuse even if there's nobody for their abuser to share the photos with.

XorNot 4y ago
The existence of international trading networks of CSAM material speaks otherwise to this, as well as the frequency with which participants in trading but not active producers are usually an ingress point into compromising them. Even if the currency is barter - i.e. "more unique content" - that means the incentive is for people operating unchecked to feed their thirst for it have a market for the creation of it. Temporarily cornering the market with new content no one's seen before means you can trade for huge amounts of other content successfully. After all, everyone involved is taking a huge risk by even being a participant.

nonbirithm 4y ago

It scared me when this story first broke that there was almost no focus on the real harms being addressed. It was all about calling out the flawed methodology about the scanning, not the overarching reason why anyone needed to talk about scanning images at all. I think the litmus test for if a service perfectly respects privacy is if a pedophile can conduct their entire operation using the service without their private data being exposed to prying eyes. By that metric, there ought to be no perfectly private services on the clearnet. To many it is a matter of compromise and "thinking of the children." Those who really want a higher level of privacy don't need to be beholden to a publicly traded company, subject to legal requirements, to provide it to them.

schaefer 4y ago

The practice of "Steelman"ing is presenting the strongest possible argument. So please answer me this question. -- The Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution reads: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. -- Before you take step 4 above, please explain to me how you established probable cause for each and every scan that takes place. Both those scans that were positive and found CSAM, and those that were negative and found nothing. In the US, there is a long history of Dragnets being deemed unconstitutional. -- And I personally understand that this Amendment protects us from actions by the US Government. Not Apple. But here Apple is conducting the scans and forwarding the results onto the Government for the purposes of law enforcement. In my personal opinion, when apple began these scans, they effectively became an agent of the state. -- In any event, I am glad the scans have stopped.

jdlshore 4y ago
It took me a moment to parse your argument here. To summarize, I think you're saying that my reasoning is wrong because it's illegal in the US for private services to conduct mass scanning for CSAM and notify the government. That's an... interesting take. It doesn't pass the sniff test, sorry. First, if it was illegal, I wouldn't have expected it to make it past the corporate counsel at Google, Facebook, and Microsoft (all who do CSAM scanning in the cloud). Second, I would have expected it to have been brought up by the defense in a trial and stopped as a result. That it still happens is a strong indicator that it is, in fact, not illegal. Frankly, it sounds like the same nonsense "sovereign citizens" get up to.
- yyyk 4y ago
  The argument rests on the comparison of a user's local device to a private residence. Google, Facebook and Microsoft do scanning in their cloud and it's fine because it's in their servers. Apple's original suggestion was to do client-side scanning in the user's device and this is compared to a search of a residence.

zinodaur 4y ago

I think the biggest way to convince people on this is Point 1 in your argument. The prevalence of this activity is much more widespread than I have seen publicly acknowledged anywhere. I worked at a large cloud company (smaller than iCloud) that scanned for CSAM and in some cases notified law enforcement - the number of yearly occurrences ended all internal arguments about the "morality" of scanning immediately. As an engineer, knowing that the code I wrote was handling this kind of data every day, thousands of times per day, involving tens of thousands of individuals per year changed my opinion from "we should protect the privacy of the user" to "F** YOU stop using my product". Short of products that offer full end to end encryption, any that does not scan for this kind of thing should look for an afternoon at what their servers are doing, then see how they feel. The marketing department will absolutely not resist the temptation to poke through unencrypted data.

lamontcg 4y ago

5a. Some of those caught will likely be non-technological false positives: images of their own children[1] or CSAM images uploaded by hostile actors attempting to frame the person[2]. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil... [2] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wife-framed-husband-child-sexual-abuse-phone_n_627fd3f6e4b0c2dce6508b3f https://www.huffpost.com/entry/wife-framed-husband-child-sex... The second one is particularly worrisome. In that case the wife was utterly and totally stupid and was therefore caught. How many times has that happened already and the person who did it wasn't caught?

mynameisash 4y ago

What is an acceptable murder rate for society? I think quite obviously, no one actually wants murders to occur. We all want there to be zero murders, but that's not realistic. In a modern society, murder will happen, so we have to decide what are the trade-offs societally. We can make and enforce laws, then make and enforce more, and so on. Ultimately, a society with a 0% murder rate isn't utopia; it's a police state where no one is free. On the balance, I think that society is worse off than one with an otherwise "acceptable" murder rate. This is the calculus of those arguing against CSAM scanning. We all agree that we don't want CSAM, but is the cure worse than the disease?

ashton314 4y ago

Of course I believe it's important to protect children, and people consuming and producing CSAM deserve pure unadulterated justice. I think we should do everything reasonable to catch and punish such loathsome persons. However, we have other means at our disposal to catch makers and consumers of CSAM that don't require blanket trawling of personal data. I am afraid to surrender privacy in the name of even something very good because surveillance is easy to abuse. I doubt you'd advocate for the extreme of e.g. the police knocking on everyone's door and performing a full search of their house/flat/whatever every so often to search for CSAM on computers or in magazines etc. That would be sure to catch more criminals and protect more children, but the societal cost would be astronomical. No one wants to live in a police state. And I hope you don't understand me as advocating for the complete opposite of that, where no searches are ever performed in the name of personal privacy. That's too dangerous. There's some room between the two extremes. I get nervous about mechanisms that can easily be used to compromise privacy of people who never were under any sort of suspicion. Maybe I'm wrong about where to draw the line. Some of my family lived in East Germany under the Stasi, and what a dark time that was. Perhaps that's part of the source of my aversion to mechanisms like mass digital surveillance.