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I don't think there is a way around the fact that governments will always want at least "lawful intercept" (with warrants) capabilities. It's a noble fight try

I don't think there is a way around the fact that governments will always want at least "lawful intercept" (with warrants) capabilities. It's a noble fight trying to get E2EE be compatible with the law. But I think some perspective for privacy advocates is due. People don't want freedom and privacy at the cost of their own security. We shouldn't have to choose, but if nothing else, the government has one most important role, and that is not safeguarding freedoms, but ensuring the safety of its people. No government, no matter how free or wealthy can abdicate its role in securing its people. There must be a solution to fight harmful (not neccesarily illegal) content incorporated into secure messaging solutions. I'm not arguing for backdoors in this post, but even things like Apple's CSAM scanning approach are met with fierce resistance from the privacy advocate community. This stance that "No, we can't have any solutions, leave E2EE alone" is not a practical stance. Speaking purely as a citizen, if you're telling me "you will lose civil liberties and democracy, if you let governments reduce cp content", my response would be "what's the hold up?". Even if governments are just using that as an excuse. As someone slightly familiar with the topic, of course I wouldn't want to trade my liberties and freedoms, but is anyone working on a solution? are there working groups? Why did Apple get so much resistance, but there are no opensource solutions? There are solutions for anonymous payments using homomorphic encryption. Things like Zcash and Monero exist. But you're telling me privacy preserving solutions to combat illicit content are impossible? My problem is with the impossible part. Are there researchers working to make this happen using differential privacy or some other solution? How can I help? Let's talk about solutions. If your position is that governments (who represent us,voters) should accept the status quo, and just let their people suffer injustice, I don't think I can support that. Mullvad is also in for a rude awakening. If criminals use Tor or VPNs, those will also face a ban. We need to give governments solutions that lets them do what they claim they want to do (protect the public from victimization) while preserving privacy to avoid a very real dystopia. Freedoms and liberties must not come at the cost of injustice. And as i argued elsewhere on HN, in the end, ignoring ongoing injustice will result in even less freedoms and liberties. If there was a pluralistic referendum in the EU over chat control, I would be surprised if the result isn't a law that is even far worse than chat control. EDIT: Here is one idea I had: Sign images/video with hardware-secured chips (camera sensor or GPU?) that is traceable to the device. When images are further processed/edited, then they will be subject to differential-privacy scanning. This can also combat deepfakes, if image authenticity can be proven by the device that took the image.

least 1y ago
> But you're telling me privacy preserving solutions to combat illicit content are impossible? Yes. You cannot have a system that positively associates illicit content with an owner while preserving privacy.
- notepad0x90 1y ago
  Thanks for the reply, but you are exactly the audience my post is for. Because you say that, we will lose what little figments of privacy and freedoms we have left. Apple tried and made good progress. They had bugs which could be resolved but your insistence that it couldn't be done caused too much of an uproar. You can have a system that flags illicit content with some confidence level and have a human review that content. You can make any model or heuristic used is publicly logged and audited. You can anonymously flag that content to reviewers, and when deemed as actually illicit by a human, the hash or some other signature of the content can be published globally to reveal the devices and owners of those devices. You can presume innocence (such as a parent taking a pic of their kids bathing) and question suspects discretely without an arrest. You can require cops to build multiple sufficient points of independently corroborated evidence before arresting people. These are just some of the things that are possible that I came up with in the last minute of typing this post. Better and more well thought out solutions can be developed if taken seriously and funded well. However, your response of "Yes." is materially false, law makers will catch on to that and discredit anything the privacy community has been advocating. Even simple heuristics that isn't using ML models can have a higher "true positive" rate of identifying criminal activity than eye witness testimony, which is used to convict people of serious crimes. And I suspect, you meant security, not privacy. Because as I mentioned, for privacy, humans can review before a decision is made to search for the confirmed content across devices.
  - admash 1y ago
    Except that it is not materially false. Only in a perfect society will your “system that flags illicit content” not become a system that flags whatever some authoritarian regime considers threatening, and subverting public logging/auditing is similarly trivial to a motivated authoritarian. All your hypothetical solutions rely on humans, who are notoriously susceptible to being influenced by either money or being beaten with pipes, and on corporations, who are notoriously susceptible to being influenced by things that influence their stock price. The Pleyel’s corollary to Murphy’s law is that all compromises to individuals’ rights made for the sake of security will eventually be used to further deprive them of those rights. (I especially liked the line “You can require cops to build multiple sufficient points of independently corroborated evidence before arresting people.”)

least 1y ago

> But you're telling me privacy preserving solutions to combat illicit content are impossible? Yes. You cannot have a system that positively associates illicit content with an owner while preserving privacy.

notepad0x90 1y ago
Thanks for the reply, but you are exactly the audience my post is for. Because you say that, we will lose what little figments of privacy and freedoms we have left. Apple tried and made good progress. They had bugs which could be resolved but your insistence that it couldn't be done caused too much of an uproar. You can have a system that flags illicit content with some confidence level and have a human review that content. You can make any model or heuristic used is publicly logged and audited. You can anonymously flag that content to reviewers, and when deemed as actually illicit by a human, the hash or some other signature of the content can be published globally to reveal the devices and owners of those devices. You can presume innocence (such as a parent taking a pic of their kids bathing) and question suspects discretely without an arrest. You can require cops to build multiple sufficient points of independently corroborated evidence before arresting people. These are just some of the things that are possible that I came up with in the last minute of typing this post. Better and more well thought out solutions can be developed if taken seriously and funded well. However, your response of "Yes." is materially false, law makers will catch on to that and discredit anything the privacy community has been advocating. Even simple heuristics that isn't using ML models can have a higher "true positive" rate of identifying criminal activity than eye witness testimony, which is used to convict people of serious crimes. And I suspect, you meant security, not privacy. Because as I mentioned, for privacy, humans can review before a decision is made to search for the confirmed content across devices.
- admash 1y ago
  Except that it is not materially false. Only in a perfect society will your “system that flags illicit content” not become a system that flags whatever some authoritarian regime considers threatening, and subverting public logging/auditing is similarly trivial to a motivated authoritarian. All your hypothetical solutions rely on humans, who are notoriously susceptible to being influenced by either money or being beaten with pipes, and on corporations, who are notoriously susceptible to being influenced by things that influence their stock price. The Pleyel’s corollary to Murphy’s law is that all compromises to individuals’ rights made for the sake of security will eventually be used to further deprive them of those rights. (I especially liked the line “You can require cops to build multiple sufficient points of independently corroborated evidence before arresting people.”)