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This is such an insidious movement. It has nothing to do with child safety. The ~35 people that showed up here are nothing more than useful idiots for surveilla

by RIMR 2y ago

This is such an insidious movement. It has nothing to do with child safety. The ~35 people that showed up here are nothing more than useful idiots for surveillance lobbyists, if not planted there by the lobbyists themselves. The entire "Apple won't protect children" narrative pivots around Apple's decision to back away from their earlier misguided plan to monitor iCloud accounts for CSAM and alert the authorities to offenders. Privacy advocates correctly pointed out that if Apple can scan your iCloud account for CSAM on behalf of the government, Apple can scan your iCloud account for anything on behalf of the government. Given Apple's privacy-centered marketing, the entire plan was dead-in-the-water from a customer trust perspective. But a small subset of mostly right-wing reactionaries have decided that this is another moral failure of big tech, and are demanding that Apple "stand up to pedophiles" by tearing down user privacy. It's a complete non-issue, because people who deal in CSAM are generally never going to store their contraband on cloud services, and even if they are careless enough to do so, iCloud isn't really the service to use if you intend to distribute this material. At the end of the day, people are demanding that their own right to privacy be torn down just so that we can expose a small subset of harmful people that were never meaningfully enabled or empowered by Apple in the commission of their crimes. And the loudest voices here are coming from a deep bias against "big tech", where they paradoxically demand that these companies be held accountable, not by restricting them, but by demanding that they exert authority against their user base...

bgentry 2y ago
> But a small subset of mostly right-wing reactionaries If you look at the photo of the protestors in the article or research the groups stated to be involved, it seems pretty unlikely that these individuals are "right-wing". There is a contingent in support of this that is likely more conservative by way of being law enforcement aligned, but there are also other segments in support of these measures that have very different motivations. I am not one of these people FWIW—I think opaque on-device scanning is a clear and unacceptable invasion of personal privacy.
- RIMR 2y ago
  I don't accept your "just look at them" photo analysis to be any real indicator of the political leanings of the movement, especially not when these people appear to be the few opportunists in the Cupertino area who physically showed up. I will instead rely on tangible data that that suggests that these kinds of causes are propelled largely due to right-wing reactionary politics and the moral panics they cultivate. In the United States at least, the MAGA right tends to be rather obsessed with pedophilia and child sex abuse, and use it as a cudgel to attack any politician, business, or group of people they don't like. They call Joe Biden a pedophile, and use photoshopped images to suggest that he has a penchant for touching children. It's not true, and his dishonest accusers are the ones photoshopping children into implied sexual situations, but the lie persists because it is useful They call Transgender people pedophiles and "groomers", and suggest that they should be forced from public life and treated like criminals, being denied any job that might put them in contact with a child. There is no evidence that queer people are any more likely than the general public to engage in child sex abuse, but the lie persists because it is useful. They even managed to stir themselves into a frenzy with the claim that a pizza restaurant in D.C. that was popular with members of the Obama administration was actually a front for a child sex trafficking ring masterminded by Hillary Clinton. There's absolutely zero evidence for any of that, but the lie persists because it is useful. While there are definitely people that fall for this propaganda that aren't right-wing, right-wingers make the perfect useful idiot for this kind of cause. The people at the top of the chain. The people who made those professional looking signs. The people who run the OSEAC. They are predominately right-wing, and have political goals that are far divorced from any notion of "protecting children". As a general rule of thumb, in America, if there is any group of people trying to convince you to give up your rights and freedoms because children are in danger, if you follow the breadcrumbs, you'll find Republicans in charge. On a side note, for an or that wants to fight back against the exploitation of children, the Heat Initiative having a website covered with AI-generated images of children is horrible optics, given how Generative AI has become a focus on CSAM creation.
gs17 2y ago
> right-wing In this case, maybe not. The wiki page for the money one layer deeper: >The Hopewell Fund is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization managed by Arabella Advisors, a for-profit consulting company that advises left-leaning donors and nonprofits about where to give money and serves as the hub of a politically liberal "dark money" network in the United States Oak Foundation seems to be similar and has a history of funding this kind of anti-privacy group.

by RIMR 2y ago

bgentry 2y ago

> But a small subset of mostly right-wing reactionaries If you look at the photo of the protestors in the article or research the groups stated to be involved, it seems pretty unlikely that these individuals are "right-wing". There is a contingent in support of this that is likely more conservative by way of being law enforcement aligned, but there are also other segments in support of these measures that have very different motivations. I am not one of these people FWIW—I think opaque on-device scanning is a clear and unacceptable invasion of personal privacy.

RIMR 2y ago
I don't accept your "just look at them" photo analysis to be any real indicator of the political leanings of the movement, especially not when these people appear to be the few opportunists in the Cupertino area who physically showed up. I will instead rely on tangible data that that suggests that these kinds of causes are propelled largely due to right-wing reactionary politics and the moral panics they cultivate. In the United States at least, the MAGA right tends to be rather obsessed with pedophilia and child sex abuse, and use it as a cudgel to attack any politician, business, or group of people they don't like. They call Joe Biden a pedophile, and use photoshopped images to suggest that he has a penchant for touching children. It's not true, and his dishonest accusers are the ones photoshopping children into implied sexual situations, but the lie persists because it is useful They call Transgender people pedophiles and "groomers", and suggest that they should be forced from public life and treated like criminals, being denied any job that might put them in contact with a child. There is no evidence that queer people are any more likely than the general public to engage in child sex abuse, but the lie persists because it is useful. They even managed to stir themselves into a frenzy with the claim that a pizza restaurant in D.C. that was popular with members of the Obama administration was actually a front for a child sex trafficking ring masterminded by Hillary Clinton. There's absolutely zero evidence for any of that, but the lie persists because it is useful. While there are definitely people that fall for this propaganda that aren't right-wing, right-wingers make the perfect useful idiot for this kind of cause. The people at the top of the chain. The people who made those professional looking signs. The people who run the OSEAC. They are predominately right-wing, and have political goals that are far divorced from any notion of "protecting children". As a general rule of thumb, in America, if there is any group of people trying to convince you to give up your rights and freedoms because children are in danger, if you follow the breadcrumbs, you'll find Republicans in charge. On a side note, for an or that wants to fight back against the exploitation of children, the Heat Initiative having a website covered with AI-generated images of children is horrible optics, given how Generative AI has become a focus on CSAM creation.

gs17 2y ago

> right-wing In this case, maybe not. The wiki page for the money one layer deeper: >The Hopewell Fund is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization managed by Arabella Advisors, a for-profit consulting company that advises left-leaning donors and nonprofits about where to give money and serves as the hub of a politically liberal "dark money" network in the United States Oak Foundation seems to be similar and has a history of funding this kind of anti-privacy group.