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EU lawyers say plan to scan private messages for child abuse may be unlawful
- raxxorraxor 4y agoIt may be unlawful to scan private messages? This deserves a more certain statement.
- bell-cot 4y agoIn context, "may be unlawful" is lawyerese for "the legality looks pretty dubious to me, but it is complex, and I am not the judge who will actually rule on this case".
- theragra 4y agoThis is specifically about EU law. From what I remember, EU has directives that any such scanning must be appropriate to the threats and benefits gained. It looks like here lawyers say it is not, which is kinda expected.
- raxxorraxor 4y agoI believe there is nobody that can come up with a definition of a threat that this would be warranted.
- bell-cot 4y agoIt would be nice if the Guardian at least threw in some mention of whether or not such scanning has actually been shown to be effective for the supposed purpose.
- matthewdgreen 4y agoNobody collects these numbers. I sat with the chief counsel of NCMEC a while back and asked whether they even kept track of outcomes from the reports they forward to law enforcement, and they said they don't have the funds to keep stats on this. The best you can do is look at total number of reports and account shutdowns (which are increasing at a pretty surprising clip!) and try to puzzle out whether this represents the total failure of scanning, or if it's actually evidence that the problem is getting exponentially worse and therefore we need more scanning.
- 1827163 4y agoI have heard rumors that the figures are often exaggerated, far in excess of what they really are... It was a long time ago, trying to find a source for this.... I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the bulk of the CSAM material is (supposedly consensual) sexting between teenagers. By the way I am scared to search Google for statistics on child pornography. Once I got a warning message from Google for a perfectly legal and reasonable search term regarding incidence rates of Japanese cartoon pornography. It absolutely chilled me to the bone when I saw that pop up, knowing well that my IP address was likely logged. My God, Orwell's 1984 nightmare, complete with thought crimes, but 39 years later. Welcome to the Police State. It's no longer fiction, but for real this time.
- 1827163 4y agoAnd when you hear me saying we have a "Police State" that is why. And it has crept up on us very slowly, that we didn't notice. What we have now is what some conspiracy theorists were talking about 20 years ago [1]. Especially the Snowden revelations on mass Internet surveillance by the NSA and GCHQ. 1. Note: I don't personally believe in conspiracy theories.
- LorenPechtel 4y agoI believe it has been admitted that the bulk of it is sexting. They try to hush that sort of thing, up, though, because that would be admitting it's mostly a made-up issue. There's also the revenge-porn distributing of sexting. Wrong, but hardly child sexual abuse. If they're keeping track of what everyone is searching for I'm probably way up there on their watch lists--I've done a lot of suspicious looking searches fleshing out ideas for answers to the worldbuilding forum on StackOverflow. And I recall long ago a discussion where someone asserted snuff porn was widely available--probably broke a few meters in the monitoring HQ on that one. (No--found nothing that wasn't obviously fake and said so. I did find the very discussion thread on page 1, though.)
- 1827163 4y agoYes, it's pressure groups with political agendas at work there, trying to stoke the moral panic as much as they can. Known that for a long time indeed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_entrepreneur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_entrepreneur