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‘Who Benefits?’ Inside the EU’s Fight over Scanning for Child Sex Content

120 points by Vinnl 3y ago

kdottt 3y ago
Saw a giant billboard with something along the lines of "Apple hosts child sex abuse imagery on iCloud. They are complicit." Really wonder what groups are putting these up and where they're getting their funding. This was in California. It happens every few years, where organizations try to go after encryption or other privacies under the guise of public safety or "save the kids" type stuff, but I've never seen huge billboards like this before. Pretty jarring.
- nachteilig 3y ago
  I saw that and a car driving around with that on it in San Francisco and had the same thought. Who funds that and who is their real target audience? With the tech crowd you might need a bit more nuance.
- max_ 3y ago
  Could be the CIA launching a propaganda campaign as a way to weaken encryption.
  - colpabar 3y ago
    What? The CIA (and every other US agency, except the police, sometimes) are the good guys, the good guys on the good news sites told me so.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - Condition1952 3y ago
    Does the CIA need to weaken encryption? Don’t they have backdoors or front doors into each operating system connected to the power grid?
    - RIMR 3y ago
      No, lol. They don't. Maybe Windows, because Microsoft doesn't seem to care much about privacy, but Apple doesn't mess around. And if there were backdoors in Linux, we'd definitely know about it, because people are actively looking for stuff like that.
      - Sporktacular 3y ago
        This is just wrong. Apple's public position could differ from its actual one. And Hiding a backdoor (or hiding with the deniability of an innocent bug) in open source is possible. "we'd definitely know about it" is not how security works.
        RIMR 3y ago
        There have been exhaustive third party reviews of the Linux kernel, nothing is impossible, but a government backdoor would be extremely hard to hide from the level of scrutiny that codebase is put under. I would certainly consider it unlikely enough that any suggestion to the contrary, without evidence, is just a conspiracy theory.
        Try1275 3y ago
        Could there be a backdoor on the hardware level?
        RIMR 3y ago
        I mean, yes, as we have already agreed, anything is possible, but I'm not in the business of believing things without evidence.
        Sporktacular 3y ago
        "we'd definitely know about it". Yes, but extremely hard is not the same as impossible. How many security 'bugs' can we be sure were unintentional? This is not just semantics. Complacency can come from over-confidence.
- kevingadd 3y ago
  Spyware companies would be a good guess. There's a lot of money to be made in helping abusers spy on their partners and/or kids by installing malware on their devices, and of course there's a big enterprise/govt market for that as well whether your goal is to capture dissidents, bust internal unions, or do a little industrial espionage.
- bananapub 3y ago
  https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1705666301216141546 https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/17056663012161415...
  - MerelyMortal 3y ago
    If I was Apple, I would be getting that torn down and suing immediately (or hiring their quasi-police force to tear it down with or without permission). I doubt Apple "allows" it. Apple probably even forbids it in their Terms of Service. Just because Apple willingly avoids knowing what their users store on iCloud does not mean they are taking the active role of allowing illegal content to be stored.
    - novok 3y ago
      Thats a striessand effect waiting to happen
    - schoen 3y ago
      There are lots of good reasons for Apple to avoid a defamation lawsuit about this. (1) Streisand effect (mentioned by another commenter) - it would generate tons of free publicity for their opponents. (2) Civil discovery - the defendant would get to demand access to Apple's internal e-mails about this issue in order to try to prove its case. (3) Possibly losing - even though this feels obviously intended to make people believe false things about Apple, a court might accept that there is some interpretation of "allows" and "complicit" that are protected criticisms of the company under some jurisdiction's defamation standard.
    - mattnewton 3y ago
      Better to use your substantially larger ad budget to quietly outbid them on billboards in a way least likely to generate press on their billboard.
    - Aachen 3y ago
      > I doubt Apple "allows" it. Apple probably even forbids it in their Terms of Service. Encrocrypt and Cyberbunker probably had terms saying not to do illegal things... What matters is how they respond to problems as they are pointed out. If it would turn out that links to their hosting service keep popping up in child abuse cases, do they respond by deleting them piecemeal or do they put a system in place that tries to identify the content by fuzzy hash and flags it for proactive review? Do they actively cooperate with the countries' law enforcement where the picture got uploaded from? That sort of thing. That has infinitely more impact than "you wouldn't download a car" notices
- mschuster91 3y ago
  If in doubt, look towards churches. They're always neck deep in anything involving sex or sexuality, mostly to distract from their own considerable issues.
- matthewdgreen 3y ago
  I find this stuff very alarming. The reporting in TFA about European politics (and the recent Heat Initiative pressure campaign here in the US) illustrate how much unaccountable dark money is flowing into these causes. I don’t think that there are huge pools of anonymous donor cash looking to influence child-safety campaigns for the sake of anyone caring about children, because that’s not typically how altruistic donors donate their money. Instead I think it’s likely that some commercial interests see a lucrative financial opportunity in this private data (either selling AI-based scanning tools, or mining it directly as a service.) This data is currently locked up with big firms like Apple and Meta, who are (for various reasons) leaning towards encrypting it rather than exploiting its contents, and the way to solve this problem involves passing laws through naive legislatures who don’t understand what they’re doing. And frankly that possibility worries me much more than where I thought we were previously - which was just a boring dispute between government and tech firms.
- standardUser 3y ago
  The first thing that comes to mind is the conservative movements growing obsessions with pedophilia, real and imagined. It has become the visceral hook that seems to emotionally motivate a lot of the far-right, not unlike abortion.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    Let's stick with "real" for a moment. There is absolutely nothing about real pedophilia that makes it a far-right-only concern. In fact, with the left's concern about sexual abuse of women, they ought to also care about sexual abuse of minors.
    - standardUser 3y ago
      You are asserting that people who are not far-right do not care about the abuse of minors, which is a nonsensical belief with no connection to reality and completely undermines whatever point you're trying to make. But it is a good example of the over-the-top rhetoric being used around this exact issue.
      - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
        I am not claiming what you say I am. You said: "It [pedophilia] has become the visceral hook that seems to emotionally motivate a lot of the far-right, not unlike abortion." I am claiming that pedophilia motivates many people, not just the far right. It is beyond me how you could misread that claim into something that would lead you to reply as you did. [Edit: My use of "ought to" may be the problem. The left, based on their positions, should be emotionally, viscerally motivated to oppose pedophilia. If they aren't, then that is an inconsistency in their position. But I think that they (or at least many of them) are motivated. So, to sum up, I'm not sure why you singled out the far-right in your initial statement.]
        standardUser 3y ago
        "...they ought to also care about sexual abuse of minors." That implies they do not care about the sexual abuse of minors, but they ought to. "There is absolutely nothing about real pedophilia that makes it a far-right-only concern" And implying that anyone, anywhere would think that it is a "far-right only concern" is absurd framing. It's make-believe nonsense.
- osamagirl69 3y ago
  These are from Heat initiative. The campaign was covered pretty well when it broke earlier this month[1] >The campaign is being led by Sarah Gardner, who was >previously the vice president for external affairs at >Thorn, a nonprofit founded by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore >to combat child sexual abuse online. Ms. Gardner raised >money from a number of child safety supporters, including >the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and the Oak >Foundation. [...] >Two investors -- Degroof Petercam, a Belgian asset manager, and Christian >Brothers Investment Services, a Catholic investment firm -- will submit a >shareholder proposal this month that would require Apple to provide a detailed >report on how effective its safety tools were at protecting children. FWIW the picture on the billboard is AI generated [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/01/technology/child-sex-abuse-imagery-apple-safety-privacy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/01/technology/child-sex-abus...
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - sbuk 3y ago
    May be the Catholic investment firm should sort out their own back yard before making demands of any other entity...
    - Aachen 3y ago
      I'm not in favor of public scaremongering like spreading half-truths about a random other company on a billboard, but I will say that perfect is the enemy of good. You can say "sort out your own back yard" about virtually anything. If you believe that what they do is good, it doesn't matter so much if their own back yard is sorted out, it's still good. If you don't, then not, and it still doesn't matter what their own state of affairs looks like.
      - omginternets 3y ago
        In the case of the Catholic Church, it’s completely fair to call out their hypocrisy.
- xp84 3y ago
  Pretty weird. I mean, I guess since SD cards can be used to host it, SanDisk is also complicit. And you can use the open Wi-Fi at the airport to send it, so JFK airport is complicit. Just how many entities are obligated to scan all bits for these illegal sequences of ones and zeroes? Why not actually focus more effort on the twisted people who create the content by abusing minors and less on a global dragnet for all communications?
  - jbuhbjlnjbn 3y ago
    Absolutely. We already know why the interest groups focus on the communications, instead of proven ways. Because it is a false flag operation. The topic is used as a vehicle to undermine private encrypted communication.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- wkat4242 3y ago
  They should go after the US postal service too. The companies that make fibre cabling. Phone manufacturers. All complicit in their twisted narrative.
- vGPU 3y ago
  That sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
raverbashing 3y ago
I'm so glad Ashton Kutcher just recently proved he doesn't give a flying frack about sexual assault victims, he's just in this for the profit and the regulatory capture.
- davotoula 3y ago
  Source?
  - kdottt 3y ago
    I think they're referencing the character letter he wrote for Danny Masterson, pleading for a reduced sentence. Pretty hypocritical... to say the least.
    - lesuorac 3y ago
      I don't think the letter [1] [2] does any pleading. Did Ashton Kutcher claim that sexual abusers don't have a right to character letters; otherwise I don't think hypocritical is an accurate description. He obviously didn't know his friend very well if he never noticed the drugs his friend had though in all of the time they spent together. [1]: https://www.legalaffairsandtrials.com/p/ashton-kutcher-and-mila-kunis-wrote https://www.legalaffairsandtrials.com/p/ashton-kutcher-and-m... [2]: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F29669290-d4e6-4137-8db7-1ac35b49479b_600x775.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...
    - tzs 3y ago
      Crimes in the US often have a large range of possible sentences (15 years to life in Masterson's case). The court has to figure out where in that range the particular person they are dealing with should be sentence. Part of that involves trying to figure out how much of a danger the person is to society, and an important input to that is character witnesses (both favorable and unfavorable). If a friend of mine was convicted of a crime and asked me for a character letter, I would probably write one giving an honest and accurate report of what I personally knew of them. I don't see how that would be hypocritical, even if the crime they had committed went directly against something I advocated. Everybody deserves a fair sentence, and if someone involved in the case thinks I have useful information that might help with that I'll give it.
SenAnder 3y ago
Calling it "scanning for child sex content" is a mistake. Finding CSAM is just the claimed initial intended use. Call it what it is, not what it's allegedly for: "Mandatory submission of all private communication to the government" (either govt. employees, contractors, or AI systems running on your device but answering to someone else).
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  > to the government Well, to some international private organization with a completely opaque system that claims to answer to the government. It's not exactly any of the classes of people on your parenthesis. It's much worse.
  - onrust 3y ago
    It’s true that in most cases a private international organization will be doing the scanning. But part of the proposal is that it’ll be compulsory for online service providers to report any communications that are flagged up as suspicious to the EU, which is a governmental organization (both are pretty bad tho)
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      The thing is, the EU won't have the power to oversee that entity. - It this a false positive or The Scanner is exfiltrating confidential information? - Is The Scanner selling all the information to a 3rd party in another country? - Did a ad actor pay The Scanner to they can get exemptions for their content? - Alternatively, is The Scanner persecuting somebody through false positives? The EU won't be able to answer any of those or probably even arrange to investigate it. There is no practical overseeing over that entity. When the government does something, it imposes some strict rules over the people working on it so that kind of question can be answered. A private organization with no fixed country allows for no oversight at all.
  - dghlsakjg 3y ago
    Who is actually doing the scanning? I thought the private institution just provides image hashes from a database of known CSAM?
coretx 3y ago
This makes me think of the Roman empire.
wackycat 3y ago
Weighing privacy and safety is so important but it seems like both sides are not careful with nuance. My understanding is that a non-profit / charity can generate revenue as long as it stays within the organization, feeding back into the cause; so it seems a little disingenuous when this article paints it as profit. Personally, I hope to see advances that can help balance crucially important privacy protection and the safety of children and prevention of the spread of abuse material; for example fully homomorphic encryption or on device scanning.
tupac_speedrap 3y ago
You can't win against: "think of the children" unfortunately.
- anonymousx3333 3y ago
  [dead]
loteck 3y ago
Minutes after the proposed regulation was unveiled in May last year, Labrador Jimenez emailed his Commission colleagues: “The EU does not accept that children cannot be protected and become casualties of policies that put any other values or rights above their protection, whatever these may be.” One of the most often-missed problems with the safety vs. rights debate is the claim that the state is best positioned to ensure proactive safety of people by preventing victimization. This claim is probably false, most certainly debatable, and yet the point is almost always ceded.
- amenhotep 3y ago
  Whatever these may be! Vote for a party that doesn't sufficiently support protecting children? Grounds to take away your right to vote, we must protect the children. Have a compatible kidney and refuse to donate it? Grounds to forcibly seize your kidney, the children are more important than your bodily autonomy. These people are astonishing.
jokethrowaway 3y ago
A few more years (maybe? Are we already there?) and productive people will be better off moving to China or Saudi Arabia. You get the same surveillance and totalitarianism but at least you don't get attacked with propaganda designed to brainwash westerner and make them mentally ill and you don't get politician-engineered high level of crime. I don't think we have a way back from this, but I hope in the next version of society we won't be so dumb to give all this power in the hands of the government, no matter how "democratic" it is. I'm curious to see if Argentina will be saved or if it will just the nth puppet in the hands of world governments.
Woodi 3y ago
It can't work. Simply becouse they trying to skip over parents and family - which are first and always best protection on mass scale. Also what they propose is LITERALY equivalent of permament ankle monitor, just for not-sentenced members of society ! "Not guilty until found gilty" anyone ? And imposibility of controling businesses doing that scaning ? And of course it's just excuse ! LOL, they just trying to downgrade internet encryption to plain text like 80's and 90's :> Client-side is only way to have _basic sanity_ of that system but such all-seeing system can be used to stream from kids phones in real time ! Just one upgrade away. Or bug. Which is sure as death. Pedophiles will voluntire as system operators, as they did with other systems. Or FBI or other TLA will try some sting operation by allowing system abuse... And "what's once in net then alway in net". Technical imposibility of abuse is only way to prevent abuse. Do not create such posibility. Actively prevent it ! Pedophiles already are opening bottles... And that hollywood mogul will be doing censoring ?? Probably they already hoarding storage... Let's start with ankle monitor with microphone and camera for Mrs. Ursula and rest of commision and commisaries. And Kutcher and More, no excuse. Family first for kids protection or you will destroy your own society EU DOT
- petre 3y ago
  > Let's start with ankle monitor with microphone and camera for Mrs. Ursula Really? She erased her phone to hide a contracting scandal. https://www.politico.eu/article/wiped-phone-puts-von-der-leyen-back-in-contracting-scandal-spotlight/ https://www.politico.eu/article/wiped-phone-puts-von-der-ley...
skilled 3y ago
The Eurobarometer did an insane "survey" on this, https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/news/strong-support-citizens-across-eu-prevent-and-combat-child-sexual-abuse-online-2023-07-20_en https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/news/strong-support-citize... https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/2656 https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/2656 > Europeans indicate clear support for the detection of online child sexual abuse in messages such as e-mails and chat (87%) and in end-to-end encrypted messages (83%). The questions in the survey were worded in a way where you couldn't possibly say "no", but they're still shaping it to focus specifically on E2E. I didn't see this picked up.
hulitu 3y ago
> ‘Who Benefits?’ Inside the EU’s Fight over Scanning for Child Sex Content Companies which sell user data. Apple, Google, Microsoft etc.
zzo38computer 3y ago
What is needing is FOSS that you can use a separate program for encryption and for communication (which do not necessarily need to run on the same computer; the service need not care about that, nor how they are sandboxed (on the same computer) or connected (on different computers), nor what ciphers are in use, what language or character set it is written in, picture formats, etc).

120 points by Vinnl 3y ago

Saw a giant billboard with something along the lines of "Apple hosts child sex abuse imagery on iCloud. They are complicit." Really wonder what groups are putting these up and where they're getting their funding. This was in California. It happens every few years, where organizations try to go after encryption or other privacies under the guise of public safety or "save the kids" type stuff, but I've never seen huge billboards like this before. Pretty jarring.

nachteilig 3y ago
I saw that and a car driving around with that on it in San Francisco and had the same thought. Who funds that and who is their real target audience? With the tech crowd you might need a bit more nuance.
max_ 3y ago
Could be the CIA launching a propaganda campaign as a way to weaken encryption.
- colpabar 3y ago
  What? The CIA (and every other US agency, except the police, sometimes) are the good guys, the good guys on the good news sites told me so.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- Condition1952 3y ago
  Does the CIA need to weaken encryption? Don’t they have backdoors or front doors into each operating system connected to the power grid?
  - RIMR 3y ago
    No, lol. They don't. Maybe Windows, because Microsoft doesn't seem to care much about privacy, but Apple doesn't mess around. And if there were backdoors in Linux, we'd definitely know about it, because people are actively looking for stuff like that.
    - Sporktacular 3y ago
      This is just wrong. Apple's public position could differ from its actual one. And Hiding a backdoor (or hiding with the deniability of an innocent bug) in open source is possible. "we'd definitely know about it" is not how security works.
      - RIMR 3y ago
        There have been exhaustive third party reviews of the Linux kernel, nothing is impossible, but a government backdoor would be extremely hard to hide from the level of scrutiny that codebase is put under. I would certainly consider it unlikely enough that any suggestion to the contrary, without evidence, is just a conspiracy theory.
        Try1275 3y ago
        Could there be a backdoor on the hardware level?
        RIMR 3y ago
        I mean, yes, as we have already agreed, anything is possible, but I'm not in the business of believing things without evidence.
        Sporktacular 3y ago
        "we'd definitely know about it". Yes, but extremely hard is not the same as impossible. How many security 'bugs' can we be sure were unintentional? This is not just semantics. Complacency can come from over-confidence.
kevingadd 3y ago
Spyware companies would be a good guess. There's a lot of money to be made in helping abusers spy on their partners and/or kids by installing malware on their devices, and of course there's a big enterprise/govt market for that as well whether your goal is to capture dissidents, bust internal unions, or do a little industrial espionage.
bananapub 3y ago
https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1705666301216141546 https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/17056663012161415...
- MerelyMortal 3y ago
  If I was Apple, I would be getting that torn down and suing immediately (or hiring their quasi-police force to tear it down with or without permission). I doubt Apple "allows" it. Apple probably even forbids it in their Terms of Service. Just because Apple willingly avoids knowing what their users store on iCloud does not mean they are taking the active role of allowing illegal content to be stored.
  - novok 3y ago
    Thats a striessand effect waiting to happen
  - schoen 3y ago
    There are lots of good reasons for Apple to avoid a defamation lawsuit about this. (1) Streisand effect (mentioned by another commenter) - it would generate tons of free publicity for their opponents. (2) Civil discovery - the defendant would get to demand access to Apple's internal e-mails about this issue in order to try to prove its case. (3) Possibly losing - even though this feels obviously intended to make people believe false things about Apple, a court might accept that there is some interpretation of "allows" and "complicit" that are protected criticisms of the company under some jurisdiction's defamation standard.
  - mattnewton 3y ago
    Better to use your substantially larger ad budget to quietly outbid them on billboards in a way least likely to generate press on their billboard.
  - Aachen 3y ago
    > I doubt Apple "allows" it. Apple probably even forbids it in their Terms of Service. Encrocrypt and Cyberbunker probably had terms saying not to do illegal things... What matters is how they respond to problems as they are pointed out. If it would turn out that links to their hosting service keep popping up in child abuse cases, do they respond by deleting them piecemeal or do they put a system in place that tries to identify the content by fuzzy hash and flags it for proactive review? Do they actively cooperate with the countries' law enforcement where the picture got uploaded from? That sort of thing. That has infinitely more impact than "you wouldn't download a car" notices
mschuster91 3y ago
If in doubt, look towards churches. They're always neck deep in anything involving sex or sexuality, mostly to distract from their own considerable issues.
matthewdgreen 3y ago
I find this stuff very alarming. The reporting in TFA about European politics (and the recent Heat Initiative pressure campaign here in the US) illustrate how much unaccountable dark money is flowing into these causes. I don’t think that there are huge pools of anonymous donor cash looking to influence child-safety campaigns for the sake of anyone caring about children, because that’s not typically how altruistic donors donate their money. Instead I think it’s likely that some commercial interests see a lucrative financial opportunity in this private data (either selling AI-based scanning tools, or mining it directly as a service.) This data is currently locked up with big firms like Apple and Meta, who are (for various reasons) leaning towards encrypting it rather than exploiting its contents, and the way to solve this problem involves passing laws through naive legislatures who don’t understand what they’re doing. And frankly that possibility worries me much more than where I thought we were previously - which was just a boring dispute between government and tech firms.
standardUser 3y ago
The first thing that comes to mind is the conservative movements growing obsessions with pedophilia, real and imagined. It has become the visceral hook that seems to emotionally motivate a lot of the far-right, not unlike abortion.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  Let's stick with "real" for a moment. There is absolutely nothing about real pedophilia that makes it a far-right-only concern. In fact, with the left's concern about sexual abuse of women, they ought to also care about sexual abuse of minors.
  - standardUser 3y ago
    You are asserting that people who are not far-right do not care about the abuse of minors, which is a nonsensical belief with no connection to reality and completely undermines whatever point you're trying to make. But it is a good example of the over-the-top rhetoric being used around this exact issue.
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      I am not claiming what you say I am. You said: "It [pedophilia] has become the visceral hook that seems to emotionally motivate a lot of the far-right, not unlike abortion." I am claiming that pedophilia motivates many people, not just the far right. It is beyond me how you could misread that claim into something that would lead you to reply as you did. [Edit: My use of "ought to" may be the problem. The left, based on their positions, should be emotionally, viscerally motivated to oppose pedophilia. If they aren't, then that is an inconsistency in their position. But I think that they (or at least many of them) are motivated. So, to sum up, I'm not sure why you singled out the far-right in your initial statement.]
      - standardUser 3y ago
        "...they ought to also care about sexual abuse of minors." That implies they do not care about the sexual abuse of minors, but they ought to. "There is absolutely nothing about real pedophilia that makes it a far-right-only concern" And implying that anyone, anywhere would think that it is a "far-right only concern" is absurd framing. It's make-believe nonsense.
osamagirl69 3y ago
These are from Heat initiative. The campaign was covered pretty well when it broke earlier this month[1] >The campaign is being led by Sarah Gardner, who was >previously the vice president for external affairs at >Thorn, a nonprofit founded by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore >to combat child sexual abuse online. Ms. Gardner raised >money from a number of child safety supporters, including >the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and the Oak >Foundation. [...] >Two investors -- Degroof Petercam, a Belgian asset manager, and Christian >Brothers Investment Services, a Catholic investment firm -- will submit a >shareholder proposal this month that would require Apple to provide a detailed >report on how effective its safety tools were at protecting children. FWIW the picture on the billboard is AI generated [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/01/technology/child-sex-abuse-imagery-apple-safety-privacy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/01/technology/child-sex-abus...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- sbuk 3y ago
  May be the Catholic investment firm should sort out their own back yard before making demands of any other entity...
  - Aachen 3y ago
    I'm not in favor of public scaremongering like spreading half-truths about a random other company on a billboard, but I will say that perfect is the enemy of good. You can say "sort out your own back yard" about virtually anything. If you believe that what they do is good, it doesn't matter so much if their own back yard is sorted out, it's still good. If you don't, then not, and it still doesn't matter what their own state of affairs looks like.
    - omginternets 3y ago
      In the case of the Catholic Church, it’s completely fair to call out their hypocrisy.
xp84 3y ago
Pretty weird. I mean, I guess since SD cards can be used to host it, SanDisk is also complicit. And you can use the open Wi-Fi at the airport to send it, so JFK airport is complicit. Just how many entities are obligated to scan all bits for these illegal sequences of ones and zeroes? Why not actually focus more effort on the twisted people who create the content by abusing minors and less on a global dragnet for all communications?
- jbuhbjlnjbn 3y ago
  Absolutely. We already know why the interest groups focus on the communications, instead of proven ways. Because it is a false flag operation. The topic is used as a vehicle to undermine private encrypted communication.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wkat4242 3y ago
They should go after the US postal service too. The companies that make fibre cabling. Phone manufacturers. All complicit in their twisted narrative.
vGPU 3y ago
That sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

raverbashing 3y ago

I'm so glad Ashton Kutcher just recently proved he doesn't give a flying frack about sexual assault victims, he's just in this for the profit and the regulatory capture.

davotoula 3y ago
Source?
- kdottt 3y ago
  I think they're referencing the character letter he wrote for Danny Masterson, pleading for a reduced sentence. Pretty hypocritical... to say the least.
  - lesuorac 3y ago
    I don't think the letter [1] [2] does any pleading. Did Ashton Kutcher claim that sexual abusers don't have a right to character letters; otherwise I don't think hypocritical is an accurate description. He obviously didn't know his friend very well if he never noticed the drugs his friend had though in all of the time they spent together. [1]: https://www.legalaffairsandtrials.com/p/ashton-kutcher-and-mila-kunis-wrote https://www.legalaffairsandtrials.com/p/ashton-kutcher-and-m... [2]: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F29669290-d4e6-4137-8db7-1ac35b49479b_600x775.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...
  - tzs 3y ago
    Crimes in the US often have a large range of possible sentences (15 years to life in Masterson's case). The court has to figure out where in that range the particular person they are dealing with should be sentence. Part of that involves trying to figure out how much of a danger the person is to society, and an important input to that is character witnesses (both favorable and unfavorable). If a friend of mine was convicted of a crime and asked me for a character letter, I would probably write one giving an honest and accurate report of what I personally knew of them. I don't see how that would be hypocritical, even if the crime they had committed went directly against something I advocated. Everybody deserves a fair sentence, and if someone involved in the case thinks I have useful information that might help with that I'll give it.

SenAnder 3y ago

Calling it "scanning for child sex content" is a mistake. Finding CSAM is just the claimed initial intended use. Call it what it is, not what it's allegedly for: "Mandatory submission of all private communication to the government" (either govt. employees, contractors, or AI systems running on your device but answering to someone else).

marcosdumay 3y ago
> to the government Well, to some international private organization with a completely opaque system that claims to answer to the government. It's not exactly any of the classes of people on your parenthesis. It's much worse.
- onrust 3y ago
  It’s true that in most cases a private international organization will be doing the scanning. But part of the proposal is that it’ll be compulsory for online service providers to report any communications that are flagged up as suspicious to the EU, which is a governmental organization (both are pretty bad tho)
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    The thing is, the EU won't have the power to oversee that entity. - It this a false positive or The Scanner is exfiltrating confidential information? - Is The Scanner selling all the information to a 3rd party in another country? - Did a ad actor pay The Scanner to they can get exemptions for their content? - Alternatively, is The Scanner persecuting somebody through false positives? The EU won't be able to answer any of those or probably even arrange to investigate it. There is no practical overseeing over that entity. When the government does something, it imposes some strict rules over the people working on it so that kind of question can be answered. A private organization with no fixed country allows for no oversight at all.
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  Who is actually doing the scanning? I thought the private institution just provides image hashes from a database of known CSAM?

coretx 3y ago

This makes me think of the Roman empire.

wackycat 3y ago

Weighing privacy and safety is so important but it seems like both sides are not careful with nuance. My understanding is that a non-profit / charity can generate revenue as long as it stays within the organization, feeding back into the cause; so it seems a little disingenuous when this article paints it as profit. Personally, I hope to see advances that can help balance crucially important privacy protection and the safety of children and prevention of the spread of abuse material; for example fully homomorphic encryption or on device scanning.

tupac_speedrap 3y ago

You can't win against: "think of the children" unfortunately.

anonymousx3333 3y ago
[dead]

loteck 3y ago

Minutes after the proposed regulation was unveiled in May last year, Labrador Jimenez emailed his Commission colleagues: “The EU does not accept that children cannot be protected and become casualties of policies that put any other values or rights above their protection, whatever these may be.” One of the most often-missed problems with the safety vs. rights debate is the claim that the state is best positioned to ensure proactive safety of people by preventing victimization. This claim is probably false, most certainly debatable, and yet the point is almost always ceded.

amenhotep 3y ago
Whatever these may be! Vote for a party that doesn't sufficiently support protecting children? Grounds to take away your right to vote, we must protect the children. Have a compatible kidney and refuse to donate it? Grounds to forcibly seize your kidney, the children are more important than your bodily autonomy. These people are astonishing.

jokethrowaway 3y ago

A few more years (maybe? Are we already there?) and productive people will be better off moving to China or Saudi Arabia. You get the same surveillance and totalitarianism but at least you don't get attacked with propaganda designed to brainwash westerner and make them mentally ill and you don't get politician-engineered high level of crime. I don't think we have a way back from this, but I hope in the next version of society we won't be so dumb to give all this power in the hands of the government, no matter how "democratic" it is. I'm curious to see if Argentina will be saved or if it will just the nth puppet in the hands of world governments.

Woodi 3y ago

It can't work. Simply becouse they trying to skip over parents and family - which are first and always best protection on mass scale. Also what they propose is LITERALY equivalent of permament ankle monitor, just for not-sentenced members of society ! "Not guilty until found gilty" anyone ? And imposibility of controling businesses doing that scaning ? And of course it's just excuse ! LOL, they just trying to downgrade internet encryption to plain text like 80's and 90's :> Client-side is only way to have _basic sanity_ of that system but such all-seeing system can be used to stream from kids phones in real time ! Just one upgrade away. Or bug. Which is sure as death. Pedophiles will voluntire as system operators, as they did with other systems. Or FBI or other TLA will try some sting operation by allowing system abuse... And "what's once in net then alway in net". Technical imposibility of abuse is only way to prevent abuse. Do not create such posibility. Actively prevent it ! Pedophiles already are opening bottles... And that hollywood mogul will be doing censoring ?? Probably they already hoarding storage... Let's start with ankle monitor with microphone and camera for Mrs. Ursula and rest of commision and commisaries. And Kutcher and More, no excuse. Family first for kids protection or you will destroy your own society EU DOT

petre 3y ago
> Let's start with ankle monitor with microphone and camera for Mrs. Ursula Really? She erased her phone to hide a contracting scandal. https://www.politico.eu/article/wiped-phone-puts-von-der-leyen-back-in-contracting-scandal-spotlight/ https://www.politico.eu/article/wiped-phone-puts-von-der-ley...

skilled 3y ago

The Eurobarometer did an insane "survey" on this, https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/news/strong-support-citizens-across-eu-prevent-and-combat-child-sexual-abuse-online-2023-07-20_en https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/news/strong-support-citize... https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/2656 https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/2656 > Europeans indicate clear support for the detection of online child sexual abuse in messages such as e-mails and chat (87%) and in end-to-end encrypted messages (83%). The questions in the survey were worded in a way where you couldn't possibly say "no", but they're still shaping it to focus specifically on E2E. I didn't see this picked up.

hulitu 3y ago

> ‘Who Benefits?’ Inside the EU’s Fight over Scanning for Child Sex Content Companies which sell user data. Apple, Google, Microsoft etc.

zzo38computer 3y ago

What is needing is FOSS that you can use a separate program for encryption and for communication (which do not necessarily need to run on the same computer; the service need not care about that, nor how they are sandboxed (on the same computer) or connected (on different computers), nor what ciphers are in use, what language or character set it is written in, picture formats, etc).