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From the article, the current flavor of "threat" this is being positioned to fight is CSAM. Does anyone believe that predators commit those heinous offenses be

by xp84 1y ago

From the article, the current flavor of "threat" this is being positioned to fight is CSAM. Does anyone believe that predators commit those heinous offenses because of the availability of encrypted channels to distribute those products of their crimes? I sure don't. The materials exist because of predators' access to children, which these surveillance measures won't solve. Best case scenario (and this is wildly optimistic) the offenders won't be able to find any 'safe' channels to distribute their materials to each other. The authorities really think every predator will just give up and stop abusing just because of that? What a joke. More likely of course, those criminals will just use decentralized tools that can't be suppressed or monitored, even as simple as plain old GPG and email. Therefore nothing of value will be gained from removing all privacy from all communication.

anal_reactor 1y ago
That's not a bug, that's a feature. They'll say that current surveillance tools are insufficient, and demand more.
dekken_ 1y ago
Absolutely, evidence of abuse is secondary to the actual abuse. Plus, the fact you could use/make AI/LLM/etc generate nefarious content that is hard to tell is fake, tells you the abuse isn't even what they are interested in.
gjsman-1000 1y ago
> Best case scenario (and this is wildly optimistic) the offenders won't be able to find any 'safe' channels to distribute their materials to each other. The theory is based on the documented fact that most crime is poorly thought through with terrible operational security. 41% is straight up opportunistic, spur of the moment, zero planning. It won't stop technologically savvy predators who plan things carefully; but that statistically is probably only a few percent of predators; so yes, it's probably pretty darn effective. There are no shortage of laws that are less effective that you probably don't want repealed - like how 40% of murderers and 75% of rapists get away with it. Sleep well tonight.
- nikkwong 1y ago
  Exactly. Econ 101: why do consumption taxes work at all? By increasing the amount of pain associated with purchasing a particular indulgent product, you decrease the consumption of that product on the margin. When you increase the price of cigarettes by 20%, cigarette smoking in a society decreases. But for the most addicted, no consumption tax will probably act as a deterrent. Some individuals will find a way to distribute and consume child pornography no matter the cost. But other addicted individuals will stop consuming if doing so becomes so laborious because they are consuming or distributing on the margin. I.e, imagine the individual who doesn't want to be consuming it, who knows they shouldn't—this type of deterrent may be the breaking point that gets them to stop altogether. And if you reduce the amount of consumption or production by any measure, you decrease a hell of a lot of suffering. But anyway, the goal of this legislation is not to drive the level of distribution to 0. The goal of policymakers could be seen charitably as an attempt to curtail consumption, because any reduction in consumption is a good thing.
  - gjsman-1000 1y ago
    Exactly my point, but also, to add to it: Let's say you're actually texting in a group. Even if you use perfect operational security, odds are terrible that all members of your group will perfectly uphold the same level of security every time they share their content. One is going to slip up. He's going to get arrested. And he's going to turn the whole group in to reduce his sentence. Everyone else meanwhile has their operational security become proof of intent, proof of deliberation, proof of trying to evade authorities. They thought they were clever with the encrypted ZIP files, but the judge and jury are going to be merciless. I don't think most authorities have a problem with that.
  - delis-thumbs-7e 1y ago
    Wait. Are you calling child pornography an ”indulgent product?”
    - nikkwong 1y ago
      Was referring to tobacco, alcohol, soft drinks etc
InvisGhost 1y ago
They better ban password protected zip files too!
- guerrilla 1y ago
  They will when they can.
blindriver 1y ago
This has nothing to do with csam and arguing that point is on purpose, to distract people and the politicians can say “xp84 supports child pornography!” It has everything to do with censorship and complete control over people’s ability to communicate. Politicians hate free speech and they want to control their citizens completely including their thoughts. This is true evil.
- palata 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - atoav 1y ago
    > if you can read all communications But you can't. You can legally require messages to implement client side scanning before the encryption happens or add some backdoor keys and hope they don't leak. Since cryptography is known anybody can always just create messengers that just don't implement that requirement. If you sexually abuse children the hurdle to illegally running a non-backdoored messenger seems pretty low to me. Thats like fighting illegal street races by implementing electronically-GPS-enforced tempolimits for everybody. You won't catch the people it is meant to catch. Only that surveilling your entire population minus the criminals has dire consequences for a free society.
    - palata 1y ago
      > But you can't. Be careful what you wish for. We could enforce client-side scanning on the OS. Everything that appears on the screen is scanned and reported. > If you sexually abuse children the hurdle to illegally running a non-backdoored messenger seems pretty low to me. How do you contact children on mainstream messengers if you can't use mainstream messengers? Not to mention that most people consuming CSAM are not technically savvy. It is known that such material goes through mainstream messengers. > Only that surveilling your entire population minus the criminals has dire consequences for a free society. Again: I am against ChatControl. We fundamentally cannot know what is running in this client side scanner, and that makes it a risk. But saying that it won't ever catch a single criminal is not a valid argument. You won't convince politicians to vote against ChatControl with such claims.
thfuran 1y ago
>The authorities really think every predator will just give up and stop abusing just because of that? What a joke. Yes, the framing is disingenuous, but so is yours. You're seriously suggesting that any policy that doesn't 100% eliminate a problem is a joke?
- like_any_other 1y ago
  Well, what is "the problem"? Is it children being abused, or is it the distribution of CSAM? And if you say both - how would you rate the relative severity of the two problems? Specifically, if you had to pick between preventing the rape of a child, and preventing N acts of CSAM distribution, how big would N have to be to make it worth choosing the latter?
  - jimbo808 1y ago
    I don't think they care what N is, they are just scapegoating a vile group they know will have no defenders, and they can use it to silence the critics by associating them with that group.
    - mystraline 1y ago
      Bingo. Today its the pedophiles and 15-17-philes (those are this fake group adolescent, which are also tried as adults when convenient). Tomorrow, its the adult sex workers. Then its the fringe group's topics that is on the outs with the majority. Then they come for you, and nobody is able to speak up because they banned protests. ... To paraphrase Martin Niemoller.
  - jMyles 1y ago
    > Well, what is "the problem"? Is it children being abused, or is it the distribution of CSAM? It seems obvious that it is entirely the former and not at all the latter. In other words, N is positive infinity. Am I missing something? I only care about kids being hurt. And I think this view is close to consensus.
    - 1y ago
lukan 1y ago
Best case scenario would be, lots of children will be saved from abuse because the magic software somehow discovers that. I kind of doubt it though.
- EGreg 1y ago
  No, you don’t get it. Hosting or possessing CSAM has criminal penalties even if no children were involved. For example AI generated imagery. In fact, even if zero children are ever trafficked or abused going forward, and pedophiles only use old photos of children from 30 years ago, merely having these images is still an issue. Conversely, the vast majority of sexual abuse of minors doesn’t involve images and goes unreported. "Considerable evidence exists to show that at least 20% of American women and 5% to 10% of American men experienced some form of sexual abuse as children" (Finkelhor, 1994). "Most sexual abuse is committed by men (90%) and by persons known to the child (70% to 90%), with family members constituting one-third to one-half of the perpetrators against girls and 10% to 20% of the perpetrators against boys" (Finkelhor, 1994). In short - if they wanted to reduce child abuse, scanning everyone’s communications for CSAM would not be the most straightforward way to go about it.
  - guerrilla 1y ago
    How do they know it's unreported if it's unreported? They mean unreported to police but reported in scientific self-report surveys?
  - palata 1y ago
    > if they wanted to reduce child abuse, scanning everyone’s communications for CSAM would not be the most straightforward way to go about it. * First, this is not what politicians do. What they want is to look like they are fighting it. * Second, what is your more straightforward way to fight CSAM? Asking for a backdoor is pretty straightforward, I find. I would rather say that fighting CSAM is more difficult than that.
  - lukan 1y ago
    "No, you don’t get it." Did you get my last sentence? "In short - if they wanted to reduce child abuse, scanning everyone’s communications for CSAM would not be the most straightforward way to go about it." What would be the most straightforwand way? Install a camera in every home? Yes, abuse is usually more to be found inside families. And the solution kind of complicated, involving social workers, phone numbers victims can call, safe houses for mothers with children to flee into, police officers with sensitive training who care, teachers who are not burned out to actually pay attention to troubled kids ...
jimbo808 1y ago
The thing that is crazy to me is that they choose to go after Signal of all things. Certainly there would be higher priority targets than a messaging app that has no social networking features to speak of, if child predators were really the target here.
- palata 1y ago
  This is nonsense. Anyone who has the smallest clue would use Signal for anything sensitive. Of course people would use Signal to talk about illegal stuff. I am against ChatControl. But I am amazed by all the bullshit arguments that people find to criticise ChatControl. If you have more control, obviously it's easier to track criminals. That's not the question at all. The question is: what is the cost to society? A few decades ago, all communications were unencrypted and people were fine. Why would it be different now? That's the question you need to answer.
  - kypro 1y ago
    You're all assuming that predators who are already deliberating using apps which are encrypted to share CSAM won't just move to something else where there is encryption – which will always be possible unless the EU fines a way to ban maths or reverts back to the pre-digital age. This might catch the odd moron sharing stuff on Facebook or on their phone, but I doubt it will stop the average offender was is already going out of their way to use encrypted apps/services. But okay great, at least you catch the morons I guess, but at what cost? Here in the UK it's pretty common to be arrested for tweets at it is. There's no doubt in my mind this will be used to catch individuals committing speech crimes who are currently getting away with it because they share their opinions behind closed doors.
    - palata 1y ago
      > but I doubt it will stop the average offender I strongly believe it will catch the average offender. The average human doesn't have a clue about cryptography. It won't catch all of them, of course. My point is that it is invalid to say that it won't catch anyone. > but at what cost? EXACTLY! The problem is that whoever controls the list of illegal material can abuse it. We fundamentally cannot audit the list because the material on this list is highly illegal. There is a risk of abuse.
palata 1y ago
Disclaimer: I am against ChatControl. > Does anyone believe that predators commit those heinous offenses because of the availability of encrypted channels to distribute those products of their crimes? Who says that? I don't think they say that. > The authorities really think every predator will just give up and stop abusing just because of that? Nope, they think they will be able to arrest more predators. > More likely of course, those criminals will just use [...] You'd be surprised how many criminals are technically illiterate and just use whatever is the default.
- GoblinSlayer 1y ago
  >just use whatever is the default gmail? google drive?
Animats 1y ago
Is text-only CSAM even a thing?
- Saline9515 1y ago
  It is ! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_porn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_porn
brikym 1y ago
The same EU that let loads of rapists into Europe is telling us that they care about the people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_swimming_pool_rape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_swimming_pool_rape https://portal.research.lu.se/en/activities/nearly-two-thirds-of-convicted-rapists-in-sweden-are-migrants-or- https://portal.research.lu.se/en/activities/nearly-two-third... More likely it's ironically so that the people cannot oppose such policies as they won't be able to organize when all comms are tapped.
jalapenos 1y ago
The calculus is simple: - People who go into government want power over others, and they'd therefore prefer more power than less at every junction - The population put up very little resistance in general - e.g. as we saw with COVID, they'll freely let the government put them under house arrest and destroy their businesses, to protect them against a bug only slightly deadlier than the flu - However they do need some pretext - with none at all, impinging on people's civil liberties would cause confusion, and the people might even ponder grumbling about it, which would be unnecessarily messy for everyone involved - Hence they simply need to lay out some half-assed pretext, just to make it easy for people to internally justify their further loss of rights, so that they don't have to have any uncomfortable thoughts like "maybe I should disagree with this?" - "Think of the children" is a nice easy one. It's basically a farcical meme at this point, but that doesn't affect its effectiveness, for the reasons described. You could use this for literally anything, no matter how extreme (I'm sure for instance the Nazis used it as one reason for exterminating Jews - to protect "Aryan" children & their future etc)

by xp84 1y ago

anal_reactor 1y ago

That's not a bug, that's a feature. They'll say that current surveillance tools are insufficient, and demand more.

dekken_ 1y ago

Absolutely, evidence of abuse is secondary to the actual abuse. Plus, the fact you could use/make AI/LLM/etc generate nefarious content that is hard to tell is fake, tells you the abuse isn't even what they are interested in.

gjsman-1000 1y ago

> Best case scenario (and this is wildly optimistic) the offenders won't be able to find any 'safe' channels to distribute their materials to each other. The theory is based on the documented fact that most crime is poorly thought through with terrible operational security. 41% is straight up opportunistic, spur of the moment, zero planning. It won't stop technologically savvy predators who plan things carefully; but that statistically is probably only a few percent of predators; so yes, it's probably pretty darn effective. There are no shortage of laws that are less effective that you probably don't want repealed - like how 40% of murderers and 75% of rapists get away with it. Sleep well tonight.

nikkwong 1y ago
Exactly. Econ 101: why do consumption taxes work at all? By increasing the amount of pain associated with purchasing a particular indulgent product, you decrease the consumption of that product on the margin. When you increase the price of cigarettes by 20%, cigarette smoking in a society decreases. But for the most addicted, no consumption tax will probably act as a deterrent. Some individuals will find a way to distribute and consume child pornography no matter the cost. But other addicted individuals will stop consuming if doing so becomes so laborious because they are consuming or distributing on the margin. I.e, imagine the individual who doesn't want to be consuming it, who knows they shouldn't—this type of deterrent may be the breaking point that gets them to stop altogether. And if you reduce the amount of consumption or production by any measure, you decrease a hell of a lot of suffering. But anyway, the goal of this legislation is not to drive the level of distribution to 0. The goal of policymakers could be seen charitably as an attempt to curtail consumption, because any reduction in consumption is a good thing.
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  Exactly my point, but also, to add to it: Let's say you're actually texting in a group. Even if you use perfect operational security, odds are terrible that all members of your group will perfectly uphold the same level of security every time they share their content. One is going to slip up. He's going to get arrested. And he's going to turn the whole group in to reduce his sentence. Everyone else meanwhile has their operational security become proof of intent, proof of deliberation, proof of trying to evade authorities. They thought they were clever with the encrypted ZIP files, but the judge and jury are going to be merciless. I don't think most authorities have a problem with that.
- delis-thumbs-7e 1y ago
  Wait. Are you calling child pornography an ”indulgent product?”
  - nikkwong 1y ago
    Was referring to tobacco, alcohol, soft drinks etc

InvisGhost 1y ago

They better ban password protected zip files too!

guerrilla 1y ago
They will when they can.

blindriver 1y ago

This has nothing to do with csam and arguing that point is on purpose, to distract people and the politicians can say “xp84 supports child pornography!” It has everything to do with censorship and complete control over people’s ability to communicate. Politicians hate free speech and they want to control their citizens completely including their thoughts. This is true evil.

palata 1y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- atoav 1y ago
  > if you can read all communications But you can't. You can legally require messages to implement client side scanning before the encryption happens or add some backdoor keys and hope they don't leak. Since cryptography is known anybody can always just create messengers that just don't implement that requirement. If you sexually abuse children the hurdle to illegally running a non-backdoored messenger seems pretty low to me. Thats like fighting illegal street races by implementing electronically-GPS-enforced tempolimits for everybody. You won't catch the people it is meant to catch. Only that surveilling your entire population minus the criminals has dire consequences for a free society.
  - palata 1y ago
    > But you can't. Be careful what you wish for. We could enforce client-side scanning on the OS. Everything that appears on the screen is scanned and reported. > If you sexually abuse children the hurdle to illegally running a non-backdoored messenger seems pretty low to me. How do you contact children on mainstream messengers if you can't use mainstream messengers? Not to mention that most people consuming CSAM are not technically savvy. It is known that such material goes through mainstream messengers. > Only that surveilling your entire population minus the criminals has dire consequences for a free society. Again: I am against ChatControl. We fundamentally cannot know what is running in this client side scanner, and that makes it a risk. But saying that it won't ever catch a single criminal is not a valid argument. You won't convince politicians to vote against ChatControl with such claims.

thfuran 1y ago

>The authorities really think every predator will just give up and stop abusing just because of that? What a joke. Yes, the framing is disingenuous, but so is yours. You're seriously suggesting that any policy that doesn't 100% eliminate a problem is a joke?

like_any_other 1y ago
Well, what is "the problem"? Is it children being abused, or is it the distribution of CSAM? And if you say both - how would you rate the relative severity of the two problems? Specifically, if you had to pick between preventing the rape of a child, and preventing N acts of CSAM distribution, how big would N have to be to make it worth choosing the latter?
- jimbo808 1y ago
  I don't think they care what N is, they are just scapegoating a vile group they know will have no defenders, and they can use it to silence the critics by associating them with that group.
  - mystraline 1y ago
    Bingo. Today its the pedophiles and 15-17-philes (those are this fake group adolescent, which are also tried as adults when convenient). Tomorrow, its the adult sex workers. Then its the fringe group's topics that is on the outs with the majority. Then they come for you, and nobody is able to speak up because they banned protests. ... To paraphrase Martin Niemoller.
- jMyles 1y ago
  > Well, what is "the problem"? Is it children being abused, or is it the distribution of CSAM? It seems obvious that it is entirely the former and not at all the latter. In other words, N is positive infinity. Am I missing something? I only care about kids being hurt. And I think this view is close to consensus.
  - 1y ago

lukan 1y ago

Best case scenario would be, lots of children will be saved from abuse because the magic software somehow discovers that. I kind of doubt it though.

EGreg 1y ago
No, you don’t get it. Hosting or possessing CSAM has criminal penalties even if no children were involved. For example AI generated imagery. In fact, even if zero children are ever trafficked or abused going forward, and pedophiles only use old photos of children from 30 years ago, merely having these images is still an issue. Conversely, the vast majority of sexual abuse of minors doesn’t involve images and goes unreported. "Considerable evidence exists to show that at least 20% of American women and 5% to 10% of American men experienced some form of sexual abuse as children" (Finkelhor, 1994). "Most sexual abuse is committed by men (90%) and by persons known to the child (70% to 90%), with family members constituting one-third to one-half of the perpetrators against girls and 10% to 20% of the perpetrators against boys" (Finkelhor, 1994). In short - if they wanted to reduce child abuse, scanning everyone’s communications for CSAM would not be the most straightforward way to go about it.
- guerrilla 1y ago
  How do they know it's unreported if it's unreported? They mean unreported to police but reported in scientific self-report surveys?
- palata 1y ago
  > if they wanted to reduce child abuse, scanning everyone’s communications for CSAM would not be the most straightforward way to go about it. * First, this is not what politicians do. What they want is to look like they are fighting it. * Second, what is your more straightforward way to fight CSAM? Asking for a backdoor is pretty straightforward, I find. I would rather say that fighting CSAM is more difficult than that.
- lukan 1y ago
  "No, you don’t get it." Did you get my last sentence? "In short - if they wanted to reduce child abuse, scanning everyone’s communications for CSAM would not be the most straightforward way to go about it." What would be the most straightforwand way? Install a camera in every home? Yes, abuse is usually more to be found inside families. And the solution kind of complicated, involving social workers, phone numbers victims can call, safe houses for mothers with children to flee into, police officers with sensitive training who care, teachers who are not burned out to actually pay attention to troubled kids ...

jimbo808 1y ago

The thing that is crazy to me is that they choose to go after Signal of all things. Certainly there would be higher priority targets than a messaging app that has no social networking features to speak of, if child predators were really the target here.

palata 1y ago
This is nonsense. Anyone who has the smallest clue would use Signal for anything sensitive. Of course people would use Signal to talk about illegal stuff. I am against ChatControl. But I am amazed by all the bullshit arguments that people find to criticise ChatControl. If you have more control, obviously it's easier to track criminals. That's not the question at all. The question is: what is the cost to society? A few decades ago, all communications were unencrypted and people were fine. Why would it be different now? That's the question you need to answer.
- kypro 1y ago
  You're all assuming that predators who are already deliberating using apps which are encrypted to share CSAM won't just move to something else where there is encryption – which will always be possible unless the EU fines a way to ban maths or reverts back to the pre-digital age. This might catch the odd moron sharing stuff on Facebook or on their phone, but I doubt it will stop the average offender was is already going out of their way to use encrypted apps/services. But okay great, at least you catch the morons I guess, but at what cost? Here in the UK it's pretty common to be arrested for tweets at it is. There's no doubt in my mind this will be used to catch individuals committing speech crimes who are currently getting away with it because they share their opinions behind closed doors.
  - palata 1y ago
    > but I doubt it will stop the average offender I strongly believe it will catch the average offender. The average human doesn't have a clue about cryptography. It won't catch all of them, of course. My point is that it is invalid to say that it won't catch anyone. > but at what cost? EXACTLY! The problem is that whoever controls the list of illegal material can abuse it. We fundamentally cannot audit the list because the material on this list is highly illegal. There is a risk of abuse.

palata 1y ago

Disclaimer: I am against ChatControl. > Does anyone believe that predators commit those heinous offenses because of the availability of encrypted channels to distribute those products of their crimes? Who says that? I don't think they say that. > The authorities really think every predator will just give up and stop abusing just because of that? Nope, they think they will be able to arrest more predators. > More likely of course, those criminals will just use [...] You'd be surprised how many criminals are technically illiterate and just use whatever is the default.

GoblinSlayer 1y ago
>just use whatever is the default gmail? google drive?

Animats 1y ago

Is text-only CSAM even a thing?

Saline9515 1y ago
It is ! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_porn https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_porn

brikym 1y ago

The same EU that let loads of rapists into Europe is telling us that they care about the people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_swimming_pool_rape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_swimming_pool_rape https://portal.research.lu.se/en/activities/nearly-two-thirds-of-convicted-rapists-in-sweden-are-migrants-or- https://portal.research.lu.se/en/activities/nearly-two-third... More likely it's ironically so that the people cannot oppose such policies as they won't be able to organize when all comms are tapped.

jalapenos 1y ago

The calculus is simple: - People who go into government want power over others, and they'd therefore prefer more power than less at every junction - The population put up very little resistance in general - e.g. as we saw with COVID, they'll freely let the government put them under house arrest and destroy their businesses, to protect them against a bug only slightly deadlier than the flu - However they do need some pretext - with none at all, impinging on people's civil liberties would cause confusion, and the people might even ponder grumbling about it, which would be unnecessarily messy for everyone involved - Hence they simply need to lay out some half-assed pretext, just to make it easy for people to internally justify their further loss of rights, so that they don't have to have any uncomfortable thoughts like "maybe I should disagree with this?" - "Think of the children" is a nice easy one. It's basically a farcical meme at this point, but that doesn't affect its effectiveness, for the reasons described. You could use this for literally anything, no matter how extreme (I'm sure for instance the Nazis used it as one reason for exterminating Jews - to protect "Aryan" children & their future etc)