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> The government, and prominent child protection charities have long argued that encryption hinders efforts to combat online child abuse - which they say is a g

> The government, and prominent child protection charities have long argued that encryption hinders efforts to combat online child abuse - which they say is a growing problem. So take using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. What they should be doing, is rather then increase the risk of for the majority who use encryption for valid reasons (privacy, not nefarious), is invest in services to allow individuals to gain help, in a manner where they won't be ostracised and at risk, all from trying to come forward and get help to amend their behavior. I am father myself, and like a majority (being a parent is a moot point really) am appalled and disgusted by CP, but me being that way won't stop individuals from succumbing to obtaining CP. Some of them do this even though they know it could trash their seemingly normal life (they often have their own families who are totally unaware). This to me suggests there is some sort of psychological disorder at play, and these people need professional help and intervention. Trying to snoop on everyone, to seek these people out won't achieve anything. They are willing to offend even with extreme risks already in place (being labelled as a pedophile for the rest of your life). Them being snooped on won't stop it all, the same vicious cycle will continue to play out, but now with all of us lacking a basic right to privacy.

cnity 4y ago
Make no mistake: the Online Safety Bill has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children. End-to-end encryption is the first line of defence against government approved mass surveillance. If it falls, the rest will follow. It will only be a short period until the operation is expanded under the guise of additional "protections" against the citizens.
- sph 4y ago
  The "children" excuse + most of the population saying "I don't need privacy, I have nothing to hide" is a double whammy against any form of encryption and it's just a matter of time before our Internet privacy rights are completely stripped away. A huge educational campaign is necessary to convince people and the average politician that being pro-encryption doesn't mean being criminals or pedophiles. So it's a lost battle already, and the intelligence services everywhere know it's just a matter of time. Eventually a pro-privacy activist will be found with child pornography and everybody will cheer and applaud any form of privacy-stripping law. The children angle is insidious, and where the discussion keep devolving even in tech-savvy forums like this one, instead if seeing it's convenient and very effective marketing to hide anti-privacy goals.
  - ta1243 4y ago
    Easy to frame a headline against it. "New bill to allow Jeremy Corbyn to read your secret messages and Tories WONT FIGHT IT"
    - d3nj4l 4y ago
      The poor man’s not even in labour anymore, let him rest!
      - vaccarium 4y ago
        Nitpick: he is a Labour member but not a member of the Parliamentary Labour Party, so he sits in the Commons as an independent.
        toyg 4y ago
        He'll stand as independent at the next election, hence getting automatically expelled from the party.
  - roenxi 4y ago
    > The children angle is insidious... The entire rhetorical position is difficult. One of the (somewhat implicit) rules of public discourse seems to be "assume good faith". To make the argument that people should have freedom from government requires an acknowledgement that government officials regularly do more harm than good. It is insanely challenging to carry that position in a debate. Keep your eye out for the handful of people who manage to do it without being tarred as crazy. That rhetorical imbalance makes it safe and straightforward for power politicians and police to argue that they should get to read everyone's emails. It is tricky to understand why centralised power is a terrible thing that will lead to corruption and injustice. Implementing a system that tolerates privacy requires the bureaucracy to not grasp power. We've always been lucky in a sense that a critical mass of people learned they need to fight to protect freedom as an ideal, even if they can't exactly explain why or if the details seem to lead to bad outcomes (see also "fight for your right to say it"). It may be the only defence against a Stalinist- or Maoist-style collapse.
- jojobas 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - sbuk 4y ago
    I’m sorry, but if that’s your idea of freedom, you can fucking keep it. Our police, though not saints, don’t shoot unarmed people. At least in Britain we are free from being shot in school.
    - jojobas 4y ago
      Americans kill more people by non-gun means than say Australians total (per year per 100k). Whatever their problem is it's not guns.
      - Nextgrid 4y ago
        Guns are definitely a major problem - a lot of people who shouldn't have access to guns do and use them. I'm not talking about intentional, targeted murders or settling gang disputes - those will happen anyway regardless of the law. However, easy access to guns mean that people in an unstable mental state might use one to commit (mass?) murder in an act of folly that they would otherwise not do (or at the very least significantly reduce the amount of victims if they had to use a knife instead of a ranged weapon).
        Bloating 4y ago
        Only in California, where they cause cancer
        jojobas 4y ago
        Those who want to kill a lot of people just rent a truck and wait for a big public gathering. What you describe is a definition of a nanny state.
        staringback 4y ago
        > I'm not talking about intentional, targeted murders or settling gang disputes Once you exclude these.... > commit (mass?) murder in an act of folly that they would otherwise not do These become so rare that they are effectively non existent when compared to literally any other cause of death.
- Ntrails 4y ago
  > the Online Safety Bill has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children. I wish people would acknowledge both sides of the coin instead of simply pretending the other side doesn't exist. Yes society uses surveillance to identify and prosecute criminals (of various ilks, including those who abuse children). If you render that surveillance impossible by construction then people who might previously have been caught will not be. Instead you pretend that the only goal here is am authoritarian state straight from 1984. The risk of the second is one reason not to do it. IMO it's easier to think what happens when you make it easier for people to be blackmailed, manipulated, impersonated, defrauded. But again, that's just an opinion.
  - cm2187 4y ago
    I remember the UK using its anti-terrorist laws to freeze Icelandic banks assets during the financial crisis. There is a probability 1.00 that this will be used for purposes that have absolutely nothing to do with the pretext used to pass the bill. So it's a pointless exercise to debate about that pretext. The only thing that matters is what right does that give the government?
  - roenxi 4y ago
    Do you think pervasive spying would have made it more or less likely that the Jeffrey Epstein case made it to the public eye? Running a paedophile ring is not some small thing that is easy to hide. In all the cases I've taken note of (in churches, schools, local clubs, etc) the problem is almost never that the crime is unknown, it is that the perpetrators have too many tools to shield themselves from consequences and discredit the victims. In the future, maybe tools like going through people's internet history or planting fake evidence using their online accounts. Society shouldn't use surveillance to identify criminals. We'd look back at dragnets to catch runaway slaves or hunt down the homosexuals with horror (as, indeed, we generally do in states that successfully institute mass surveillance to catch criminals). As recently as a few years ago, 'criminals' were people found outside their own homes and places like China were successfully catching them much to the net loss for everyone. There is a strong - indeed, overwhelming - link between places with good privacy, good protection of freedoms and citizens living happy prosperous lives. The people pushing mass surveillance know all this. It has been bought up every time some bright spark comes up with the idea of rolling out mass surveillance. These people understand the societal consequences that they are ushering in. Too many of them understand what they are doing to pretend they have pure motives. This is empowering the worst of the authoritarians.
- daveoc64 4y ago
  >Make no mistake: the Online Safety Bill has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children. I don't think that's entirely true. I am sure many MPs, charities, and campaigners do only see this as an issue of child (and more generally, public) safety. I think the difficulty has always been explaining to laypeople that allowing any kind of monitoring or surveillance significantly weakens the security of encrypted messaging.
  - stephen_g 4y ago
    I think of it another way. The bill itself isn’t anything to do with protecting children - but lots of people (MPs, charities, campaigners) have been misled into supporting it. It’s what makes “think of the children” the best way to pass bad legislation. Not only does it make it very hard to object to a bill that won’t actually help children, but you get lots of free support from well-meaning people who don’t understand the implications of the bad legislation they’ve been conned into fighting for!
- tolstoshev 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jFqhjaGh30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jFqhjaGh30
- moremetadata 4y ago
  >Make no mistake: the Online Safety Bill has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children Exactly, they could start teaching law in a concept understandable manner from primary school age, concentrating on what can cause the damage mentally and physically, like the spread of germs from a young age. But they dont, so kids cant even protect themselves in an offline world and the state gets to maintain its air of pseudo respectability whilst most people dont understand how the state is causing lifelong trouble.
raxxorraxor 4y ago
> So take using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It is worse. Encryption does protect children instead of endangering them. So these "charities" aren't even doing their job.
- cnity 4y ago
  Indeed: it is worthwhile to note the nefarious absence of the role of privacy in the laid out "risk assessment" of children's usage of a service, in part 3, chapter 2, point (6) of the bill. https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/49376/documents/2822 https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/49376/documents/282...
- thallium205 4y ago
  These “charities” are all funded by government grants anyway. You can safely claim they are both the same entity: the government.
- clnq 4y ago
  Yes. I don't want to live in a world where my kid sends someone a picture of immigrants on a boat and gets a criminal record. It's just a step between abolishing encryption and this. And the next step is wide scope censorship like that instituted by the CCP. The ideas that we should censor politically inconvenient truths like the migrant crisis are already in the UK.
isodev 4y ago
Really hard to imagine a sane and rational policy maker naming encryption as something that compromises safety. If anything, it facilitates it. But then again, this isn’t about policy, it’s about control and surveillance.
nhchris 4y ago
> encryption hinders efforts to combat online child abuse So do opaque walls and the absence of surveillance cameras in cars and homes. Oh don't worry - the recordings will be securely stored, and only available with a court order, only issued for "serious" crime! It's strange that as surveillance proliferates, the shrinking scraps of privacy we have left are deemed a growing problem, not a vanishing one.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  I don't think breaking encryption is a good idea, but I will say that until recently law enforcement could tap phones, rip open envelopes, and get a court order to break into your house and search it. There was never the level of privacy against law enforcement that encryption offers.
  - Nextgrid 4y ago
    > rip open envelopes, and get a court order to break into your house and search it One limiting factor was that this wasn't scalable - so a lot of people would be comfortable with it because there is little potential for widespread abuse - there just aren't enough resources to search & monitor everyone's mail and houses at all times. There are no such limitations online, so better protections such as encryption are required to counterbalance it.
    - robertlagrant 4y ago
      I agree, but that still isn't a net loss in privacy. We can still communicate the way we could, except now we also would like an unbreakable way of communicating online. I understand of course that scale is an issue online, but that doesn't affect the idea that encryption gives us basically unbreakable communication over a distance, and removing it is not eroding our last vestiges of privacy.
      - Nextgrid 4y ago
        The fact that most communication has moved online means that there's significantly less physical mail traffic than back in the day, so maybe physical mail is not secure either if total capacity is now below what the government can monitor?
sgjohnson 4y ago
> So take using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It's less of a sledgehammer and more of a ballistic missile. With nuclear payload.
dfxm12 4y ago
"Think of the children" is one of the 4 horsemen of the infocalypse. It was never about stopping CP. It's about justifying laws that take away privacy, no matter how flimsily. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
wonderwonder 4y ago
I agree. Next step. Majority of CP is filmed in homes where children live. To protect the children every home must have a government monitored camera in it so that the safety of the children can be insured. You don't have anything to hide do you? No criminal activity going on? There is no way this doesn't quickly turn into full government monitoring of everything being sent over technology. Before that even, I assume the search for CP will be done via image hashes provided by a government database. Whats to stop the government from simply putting a hash of information it does not want public? The snowden files or something similar. Quickly identify and remove leakers. Its a very slippery slope.

cnity 4y ago

Make no mistake: the Online Safety Bill has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children. End-to-end encryption is the first line of defence against government approved mass surveillance. If it falls, the rest will follow. It will only be a short period until the operation is expanded under the guise of additional "protections" against the citizens.

sph 4y ago
The "children" excuse + most of the population saying "I don't need privacy, I have nothing to hide" is a double whammy against any form of encryption and it's just a matter of time before our Internet privacy rights are completely stripped away. A huge educational campaign is necessary to convince people and the average politician that being pro-encryption doesn't mean being criminals or pedophiles. So it's a lost battle already, and the intelligence services everywhere know it's just a matter of time. Eventually a pro-privacy activist will be found with child pornography and everybody will cheer and applaud any form of privacy-stripping law. The children angle is insidious, and where the discussion keep devolving even in tech-savvy forums like this one, instead if seeing it's convenient and very effective marketing to hide anti-privacy goals.
- ta1243 4y ago
  Easy to frame a headline against it. "New bill to allow Jeremy Corbyn to read your secret messages and Tories WONT FIGHT IT"
  - d3nj4l 4y ago
    The poor man’s not even in labour anymore, let him rest!
    - vaccarium 4y ago
      Nitpick: he is a Labour member but not a member of the Parliamentary Labour Party, so he sits in the Commons as an independent.
      - toyg 4y ago
        He'll stand as independent at the next election, hence getting automatically expelled from the party.
- roenxi 4y ago
  > The children angle is insidious... The entire rhetorical position is difficult. One of the (somewhat implicit) rules of public discourse seems to be "assume good faith". To make the argument that people should have freedom from government requires an acknowledgement that government officials regularly do more harm than good. It is insanely challenging to carry that position in a debate. Keep your eye out for the handful of people who manage to do it without being tarred as crazy. That rhetorical imbalance makes it safe and straightforward for power politicians and police to argue that they should get to read everyone's emails. It is tricky to understand why centralised power is a terrible thing that will lead to corruption and injustice. Implementing a system that tolerates privacy requires the bureaucracy to not grasp power. We've always been lucky in a sense that a critical mass of people learned they need to fight to protect freedom as an ideal, even if they can't exactly explain why or if the details seem to lead to bad outcomes (see also "fight for your right to say it"). It may be the only defence against a Stalinist- or Maoist-style collapse.
jojobas 4y ago
[flagged]
- sbuk 4y ago
  I’m sorry, but if that’s your idea of freedom, you can fucking keep it. Our police, though not saints, don’t shoot unarmed people. At least in Britain we are free from being shot in school.
  - jojobas 4y ago
    Americans kill more people by non-gun means than say Australians total (per year per 100k). Whatever their problem is it's not guns.
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      Guns are definitely a major problem - a lot of people who shouldn't have access to guns do and use them. I'm not talking about intentional, targeted murders or settling gang disputes - those will happen anyway regardless of the law. However, easy access to guns mean that people in an unstable mental state might use one to commit (mass?) murder in an act of folly that they would otherwise not do (or at the very least significantly reduce the amount of victims if they had to use a knife instead of a ranged weapon).
      - Bloating 4y ago
        Only in California, where they cause cancer
      - jojobas 4y ago
        Those who want to kill a lot of people just rent a truck and wait for a big public gathering. What you describe is a definition of a nanny state.
      - staringback 4y ago
        > I'm not talking about intentional, targeted murders or settling gang disputes Once you exclude these.... > commit (mass?) murder in an act of folly that they would otherwise not do These become so rare that they are effectively non existent when compared to literally any other cause of death.
Ntrails 4y ago
> the Online Safety Bill has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children. I wish people would acknowledge both sides of the coin instead of simply pretending the other side doesn't exist. Yes society uses surveillance to identify and prosecute criminals (of various ilks, including those who abuse children). If you render that surveillance impossible by construction then people who might previously have been caught will not be. Instead you pretend that the only goal here is am authoritarian state straight from 1984. The risk of the second is one reason not to do it. IMO it's easier to think what happens when you make it easier for people to be blackmailed, manipulated, impersonated, defrauded. But again, that's just an opinion.
- cm2187 4y ago
  I remember the UK using its anti-terrorist laws to freeze Icelandic banks assets during the financial crisis. There is a probability 1.00 that this will be used for purposes that have absolutely nothing to do with the pretext used to pass the bill. So it's a pointless exercise to debate about that pretext. The only thing that matters is what right does that give the government?
- roenxi 4y ago
  Do you think pervasive spying would have made it more or less likely that the Jeffrey Epstein case made it to the public eye? Running a paedophile ring is not some small thing that is easy to hide. In all the cases I've taken note of (in churches, schools, local clubs, etc) the problem is almost never that the crime is unknown, it is that the perpetrators have too many tools to shield themselves from consequences and discredit the victims. In the future, maybe tools like going through people's internet history or planting fake evidence using their online accounts. Society shouldn't use surveillance to identify criminals. We'd look back at dragnets to catch runaway slaves or hunt down the homosexuals with horror (as, indeed, we generally do in states that successfully institute mass surveillance to catch criminals). As recently as a few years ago, 'criminals' were people found outside their own homes and places like China were successfully catching them much to the net loss for everyone. There is a strong - indeed, overwhelming - link between places with good privacy, good protection of freedoms and citizens living happy prosperous lives. The people pushing mass surveillance know all this. It has been bought up every time some bright spark comes up with the idea of rolling out mass surveillance. These people understand the societal consequences that they are ushering in. Too many of them understand what they are doing to pretend they have pure motives. This is empowering the worst of the authoritarians.
daveoc64 4y ago
>Make no mistake: the Online Safety Bill has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children. I don't think that's entirely true. I am sure many MPs, charities, and campaigners do only see this as an issue of child (and more generally, public) safety. I think the difficulty has always been explaining to laypeople that allowing any kind of monitoring or surveillance significantly weakens the security of encrypted messaging.
- stephen_g 4y ago
  I think of it another way. The bill itself isn’t anything to do with protecting children - but lots of people (MPs, charities, campaigners) have been misled into supporting it. It’s what makes “think of the children” the best way to pass bad legislation. Not only does it make it very hard to object to a bill that won’t actually help children, but you get lots of free support from well-meaning people who don’t understand the implications of the bad legislation they’ve been conned into fighting for!
tolstoshev 4y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jFqhjaGh30 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jFqhjaGh30
moremetadata 4y ago
>Make no mistake: the Online Safety Bill has absolutely nothing to do with protecting children Exactly, they could start teaching law in a concept understandable manner from primary school age, concentrating on what can cause the damage mentally and physically, like the spread of germs from a young age. But they dont, so kids cant even protect themselves in an offline world and the state gets to maintain its air of pseudo respectability whilst most people dont understand how the state is causing lifelong trouble.

raxxorraxor 4y ago

> So take using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It is worse. Encryption does protect children instead of endangering them. So these "charities" aren't even doing their job.

cnity 4y ago
Indeed: it is worthwhile to note the nefarious absence of the role of privacy in the laid out "risk assessment" of children's usage of a service, in part 3, chapter 2, point (6) of the bill. https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/49376/documents/2822 https://bills.parliament.uk/publications/49376/documents/282...
thallium205 4y ago
These “charities” are all funded by government grants anyway. You can safely claim they are both the same entity: the government.
clnq 4y ago
Yes. I don't want to live in a world where my kid sends someone a picture of immigrants on a boat and gets a criminal record. It's just a step between abolishing encryption and this. And the next step is wide scope censorship like that instituted by the CCP. The ideas that we should censor politically inconvenient truths like the migrant crisis are already in the UK.

isodev 4y ago

Really hard to imagine a sane and rational policy maker naming encryption as something that compromises safety. If anything, it facilitates it. But then again, this isn’t about policy, it’s about control and surveillance.

nhchris 4y ago

> encryption hinders efforts to combat online child abuse So do opaque walls and the absence of surveillance cameras in cars and homes. Oh don't worry - the recordings will be securely stored, and only available with a court order, only issued for "serious" crime! It's strange that as surveillance proliferates, the shrinking scraps of privacy we have left are deemed a growing problem, not a vanishing one.

robertlagrant 4y ago
I don't think breaking encryption is a good idea, but I will say that until recently law enforcement could tap phones, rip open envelopes, and get a court order to break into your house and search it. There was never the level of privacy against law enforcement that encryption offers.
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  > rip open envelopes, and get a court order to break into your house and search it One limiting factor was that this wasn't scalable - so a lot of people would be comfortable with it because there is little potential for widespread abuse - there just aren't enough resources to search & monitor everyone's mail and houses at all times. There are no such limitations online, so better protections such as encryption are required to counterbalance it.
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    I agree, but that still isn't a net loss in privacy. We can still communicate the way we could, except now we also would like an unbreakable way of communicating online. I understand of course that scale is an issue online, but that doesn't affect the idea that encryption gives us basically unbreakable communication over a distance, and removing it is not eroding our last vestiges of privacy.
    - Nextgrid 4y ago
      The fact that most communication has moved online means that there's significantly less physical mail traffic than back in the day, so maybe physical mail is not secure either if total capacity is now below what the government can monitor?

sgjohnson 4y ago

> So take using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. It's less of a sledgehammer and more of a ballistic missile. With nuclear payload.

dfxm12 4y ago

"Think of the children" is one of the 4 horsemen of the infocalypse. It was never about stopping CP. It's about justifying laws that take away privacy, no matter how flimsily. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

wonderwonder 4y ago

I agree. Next step. Majority of CP is filmed in homes where children live. To protect the children every home must have a government monitored camera in it so that the safety of the children can be insured. You don't have anything to hide do you? No criminal activity going on? There is no way this doesn't quickly turn into full government monitoring of everything being sent over technology. Before that even, I assume the search for CP will be done via image hashes provided by a government database. Whats to stop the government from simply putting a hash of information it does not want public? The snowden files or something similar. Quickly identify and remove leakers. Its a very slippery slope.