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My greatest concern is the planting of this material on political activists' computers. It's by far the easiest way for the state to take their political oppone

My greatest concern is the planting of this material on political activists' computers. It's by far the easiest way for the state to take their political opponents down. The general public will believe the accusations without questioning it. Russia is known to do this. Live in the UK, speak out about Vladimir Putin, go to jail... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Bukovsky#"Prohibited_images"_prosecution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Bukovsky#"Prohibited_... These laws over image and text possession[1] are complete and utter madness. It is like Islamic fundamentalism. No way this should be happening in the UK or the USA either, especially in this day and age. We are supposed to be past all of this, just as with blasphemy and heresy laws. Something's gone really wrong here. 1. 'Simple' possession, with no intent to distribute.

onetimeusename 3y ago
There's the soft power LE uses also as a result of this issue. This covers things like abolishing encryption and privacy, scanning, liaisons, etc. I believe people self-censor when they know they are being monitored and LE knows that too.
qingcharles 3y ago
I used to run a web site that focused on British TV shows. A competitor used to call up our hosts and PayPal (we used for donations) and tell them the site was dealing in CSAM. There was nothing of the sort on the site, but it would get us cut off for days at a time until investigations were completed. This would happen every couple of months. There is no protection against such an attack.
- 1827163 3y ago
  And GitHub has added a new "Report Repository" link on every repo now, and it gave me the creeps that there's a very easy way to report CSAM through it. It's listed right there out of the several types of prohibited content. So 4chan, trolls, etc. could quite easily mass report someone's repository. And it frightens me just to contemplate what might happen to someone if they got 100 or 1000 false reports on their repository. So everyone is at risk from being labelled as the modern day version of a witch or heretic, just at the push of a button. My God, what has the world come to nowadays. All done in the name of protecting us from a so-called widespread threat to our safety. Straight out of a fascist's playbook there. History repeating itself again?
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    I could easily see some web sites just forwarding complaints of this nature to one of the national CSAM organizations (that are privately held and therefore unregulated and not open) who then add you to their database for future reference, even if the allegation is totally unfounded.
    - 1827163 3y ago
      There might be a mandatory reporting requirement, so even if it's unfounded, it still ends up on a NCMEC database. Or that law enforcement is still notified, even if no arrest happens. Anyway it's all completely overwhelming to comprehend, emotionally. Time to take a break, to pull the network cable out of the back of my computer, and be back to normal, instead of living in Orwell's 1984 world, come true. Thankfully there's so much more to life than the Internet.

onetimeusename 3y ago

There's the soft power LE uses also as a result of this issue. This covers things like abolishing encryption and privacy, scanning, liaisons, etc. I believe people self-censor when they know they are being monitored and LE knows that too.

qingcharles 3y ago

I used to run a web site that focused on British TV shows. A competitor used to call up our hosts and PayPal (we used for donations) and tell them the site was dealing in CSAM. There was nothing of the sort on the site, but it would get us cut off for days at a time until investigations were completed. This would happen every couple of months. There is no protection against such an attack.

1827163 3y ago
And GitHub has added a new "Report Repository" link on every repo now, and it gave me the creeps that there's a very easy way to report CSAM through it. It's listed right there out of the several types of prohibited content. So 4chan, trolls, etc. could quite easily mass report someone's repository. And it frightens me just to contemplate what might happen to someone if they got 100 or 1000 false reports on their repository. So everyone is at risk from being labelled as the modern day version of a witch or heretic, just at the push of a button. My God, what has the world come to nowadays. All done in the name of protecting us from a so-called widespread threat to our safety. Straight out of a fascist's playbook there. History repeating itself again?
- qingcharles 3y ago
  I could easily see some web sites just forwarding complaints of this nature to one of the national CSAM organizations (that are privately held and therefore unregulated and not open) who then add you to their database for future reference, even if the allegation is totally unfounded.
  - 1827163 3y ago
    There might be a mandatory reporting requirement, so even if it's unfounded, it still ends up on a NCMEC database. Or that law enforcement is still notified, even if no arrest happens. Anyway it's all completely overwhelming to comprehend, emotionally. Time to take a break, to pull the network cable out of the back of my computer, and be back to normal, instead of living in Orwell's 1984 world, come true. Thankfully there's so much more to life than the Internet.