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The article talks about the possibilities of malicious cloning of these tokens by third parties, but fails to identify the much more common use case, and one th

The article talks about the possibilities of malicious cloning of these tokens by third parties, but fails to identify the much more common use case, and one that makes this scheme useless for age verification. It's one thing to be concerned about someone stealing my credential, but another to prevent the transfer of these credentials, especially if they are limited use credentials. The entire point of age verification systems is to prevent minors from accessing certain resources. I think we all know that this is basically impossible; but what these various governments and social media companies want to do is to make it high friction to do so. The highest friction version of this is that the credential ties to a real world identity somehow; maybe locked behind legal barriers, etc., but if a minor is caught using someone's credential, then the person whose credential they are using can be investigated, and, if necessary, charged with a crime roughly equivalent to providing alcohol to a minor. Without the possibility of real world enforcement, none of these identity solutions can possibly work. Keep dreaming of a technological solution -- there is none that does not lead to the world that FIRE is warning about, except to accept that we can only make a solution "good enough" and leave it at that, without expanding into full on identity verification. The solution here is likely to just try to provide better abilities for parents to monitor and limit their children's use of the internet. Let individual parents decide on the level of harm that they are willing to accept, and accept that there will be ways to work around this even if parents are vigilant, but just try to reduce it on the margins.

Aurornis 4mo ago
Yes, this is the part of the issue that is so frequently ignored: Anonymous age verification schemes are easily defeated through proxying because there wouldn't be any consequences for selling your tokens. "Install this app on your phone and we'll pay you $1 per day" and it will mint your anonymous identity tokens and send them off to kids who want to buy them. If there's no way to track the tokens, there is no possibility of negative consequences. So the schemes always start introducing features to reduce the anonymity of the tokens or make them more trackable in some way: > The highest friction version of this is that the credential ties to a real world identity somehow; maybe locked behind legal barriers, etc., but if a minor is caught using someone's credential, then the person whose credential they are using can be investigated, and, if necessary, charged with a crime Which requires that these identity tokens not be anonymous age-verification credentials. They become a traceable identity token tied to your government-issued ID.
- DennisP 4mo ago
  > They become a traceable identity token Not if you use a challenge-response protocol where the client returns a zero-knowledge proof of age, where the proof incorporates a random string sent by the website. The traceable stuff is private information that the website never sees. If a minor is caught with it, then law enforcement has local access to the minor's hardware and can probably view the private data. At that point, the private key can be put on a public revocation list. The zero-knowledge proof can include a proof that you're not on the revocation list. Once you've been revoked, you have to go through the hassle of setting this all up again, which might be enough incentive to keep it reasonably secure.
  - pastel8739 4mo ago
    This doesn’t stop the scheme the parent proposes, where adults install some proxy on their device and challenges are responded to on the parent device. Then the private key never leaves the parent device and all the child device has is the proxy software, which could be set up to not log any identifier of the key that it used
    - 7e 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      - pastel8739 4mo ago
        How so?
        LoganDark 4mo ago
        Presumably, if you have a trusted application on a trusted device, the identifier was installed in a trusted way, the device is in trusted possession and the device won't be given to anyone else, trusted computing may be able, in certain cases, to make it more difficult for a remote minor to use the identifier.
ajsnigrutin 4mo ago
> The highest friction version of this is that the credential ties to a real world identity somehow; maybe locked behind legal barriers, etc., but if a minor is caught using someone's credential, then the person whose credential they are using can be investigated, and, if necessary, charged with a crime roughly equivalent to providing alcohol to a minor. Without the possibility of real world enforcement, none of these identity solutions can possibly work. Buying alcohol for a minor implies knowledge and intent. Getting the tokens out of a phone doesn't require the user to do any of that, the user just has to be frugal and keep the phone longer than it's supported by the manufacturer, until some local exploit is found again, and that token will be extracted and available online for everyone to use. Parents buy those phones, phones could easily have a "user is a minor" setting (and a flag sent to all the sites that want one) with a password for parents to unlock stuff if needed. This would be set during the phones first set up, and it's done. But nope, the plan is for everyone to install a form if a digital ID on their phones, and once it's there, requiring full-name identification when registering is just one step away.
- meindnoch 4mo ago
  >charged with a crime roughly equivalent to providing alcohol to a minor In most countries it's perfectly legal to provide alcohol to your kids.
- darthwalsh 4mo ago
  > Parents buy those phones, phones could easily have a "user is a minor" setting (and a flag sent to all the sites that want one) That's basically the California law! I hope other states adopt the "ask nicely for age but no online verification." OS setup asks for birthday, but you can just say January 1. I also thought it should just send the flag, but I've heard there's good reasons not to. There's normally an affirmative prompt from the user to agree to send the age bucket data.
what 4mo ago
Why can’t you just sell single use codes at gas stations/liquor stores/etc and they just check your ID before sale? Of course shady places can still sell them without ID check, but we have this problem already for liquor and tobacco.
- Tannic 4mo ago
  [dead]
AnthonyMouse 4mo ago
> but if a minor is caught using someone's credential, then the person whose credential they are using can be investigated, and, if necessary, charged with a crime roughly equivalent to providing alcohol to a minor. Without the possibility of real world enforcement, none of these identity solutions can possibly work. They don't work even then. Suppose you completely eliminate privacy on the internet and require every domestic site to collect the name and social security number of everyone who visits. Then a child uses an adult's ID, regardless of whether it's with or without their knowledge. Is the child going to inform on themselves? No. Is the adult, when they don't even know about it? No. Is the adult, when they provided it on purpose? No. That constitutes the entire set of people who would typically know that the person using the device isn't the person on the ID. On top of that, we can punch an even bigger hole in it. Search engines, among other things, index other sites. Google is obviously the biggest but there are many others -- Bing, Marginalia, Brave, Swisscows, Yandex, Perplexity, Baidu, etc. They're run by adults and most of their users are adults, who reasonably expect to be able to turn off "safe search" if they want to. So some adult at each search engine would have to provide their ID to the crawler so it can index things inappropriate for children and show them to adult users. It would therefore be a fairly unremarkable and recurring thing to see the same ID make a zillion gigatons of requests. But then you can't use "why is this person downloading 100 things from 100 computers at once" as an indication of anything nefarious happening, and anyone can still set up a service hosted on a foreign server that will serve adult content to anyone without an ID by serving it out of a cache. (And in the case where you're invading everyone's privacy, that service would also be very popular with adults.)
- Barrin92 4mo ago
  > Is the child going to inform on themselves? No. Is the adult, when they don't even know about it? In the context of social media, if they want to actively participate they have to given that it's the entire point. It's true that even with a government ID scheme people could borrow someone's ID to get passive access with their consent. But a kid couldn't share an account with a parent without that parent knowing because you see their activity, and they also couldn't post.
  - 4mo ago
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
ian_holt 4mo ago
the article also mentions; <But the government puts much of the onus on social media platforms to ensure users understand the verification process and on users to read up to make sure they aren’t being scammed.> Unfortunately, the said-government doesn't seem to worry about the fact that their own systems have been breached over the years
shevy-java 4mo ago
> The entire point of age verification systems is to prevent minors from accessing certain resources. Then why are they forbidding VPNs? This is clearly NOT a use case that is solely referring to minors. The whole cake is a lie and so is your assumption that age sniffing is "to protect children". > Keep dreaming of a technological solution We don't "dream" - we know what is possible and what is not. Mass surveillance of everyone is simply not an option. > Let individual parents decide on the level of harm that they are willing to accep Nobody has an issue IF it were about individual parents, but it clearly is not. Governments try to criminalize and restrict everyone - and that is the true agenda.
spwa4 4mo ago
> The entire point of age verification systems is to prevent minors from accessing certain resources. I think we all know that this is basically impossible; but what these various governments and social media companies want to do is to make it high friction to do so. The problem is, this is wrong. What these governments want to do is get a grip on online behavior, through actions against individuals, who can't/won't defend themselves, rather than through actions against gigantic corporations that may choose litigation and take years to change their behavior, if they do at all. Governments want to declare something illegal, say downloading a movie, putting racist comments online, ... then catch everyone who engages in that behavior online through mandatory identification, and actually have an effect. To do this, breaking privacy is, of course, a core requirement. This can be introduced into these systems afterwards ("judge X wants to know who authenticated with token <token>, please provide the information"). Without this, government rules will remain totally ineffective online like they have been in the last 40 years. I personally much prefer government rules remaining totally ineffective online.
- andrewla 4mo ago
  > What these governments want to do I feel strongly that this conspiratorial mind-reading approach to this sort of issue is just counterproductive. What all the governments (and non-governments, frankly, there are many supporters of these things) are asking for is excluding minors from certain websites and services. The problem is that this translates to age verification, which translates to identify verification, which incidentally gives states and other actors a variety of other tools they can use for anti-civil-liberties purposes. In the end their motives are just irrelevant unless there is a clear way to exclude minors from certain services without going down the chain towards identity verification. Such a way does not exist, so we have to fight it here, at the point where the basic ask emerges.
RajT88 4mo ago
Kids shred these schemes. The designers of them seem to forget that the social dynamics of the adult world are completely different - just one kid needs to figure out how to bypass the system, and the knowledge spreads like wildfire. Example: schools banned phones, so kids switched to talking over Google docs: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/hottest-chat-app-teens-google-docs/584857/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/hotte... If we give parents better tools to limit and monitor internet access, kids will just buy a used phone which is unregulated. If their parents even bother to use the tools in the first place (it is my impression most parents do not). There is also a lot of loopholes parents do not even think of (like a web browser on a game console).
- raffael_de 4mo ago
  having kids fiddle around with alternative means and schemes of communication might well turn out to be an intellectual and academic net positive.
- godelski 4mo ago
  > just one kid needs to figure out how to bypass the system, and the knowledge spreads like wildfire. I'm surprised this is not obvious to people here on HACKER News. When I was in high school we all learned about proxies and bypassed the school firewalls. You didn't have to know anything technical after a few people figured it out. Hell, even the teachers were in on it. I remember one wanted to know so he could check the lotto numbers lol. It's an eternal cat and mouse game and the mouse is going to win. I agree that the right idea is friction but if people aren't aware that there's no clear win that's going you work even 80% of the time then we'll write the wrong laws and have the wrong idea
somenameforme 4mo ago
This is where social media and other sites' endless datamining and profiling will come back to bite them. These sites already know the age range of users to a very high degree of certainty, and can continue to obtain such in an ongoing fashion. If an underage person is using these sites, it's likely going to be because the store clerk just nodded and winked, instead of because they were genuinely fooled by a borrowed or fraudulent ID. And in that case, the clerk is the one facing the penalties. Put the burden of responsibility on the sites themselves and the number of people that will be able to successfully bypass such restrictions is going to be negligible and largely depend upon ongoing inorganic behavior or being an outlier in terms of behavior/interests.
thomastjeffery 4mo ago
Even more significant than the means are the ends. Why does my government get to decide what is appropriate for children? This sounds a lot like what governance is supposed to be, but there is a critical difference. It's one thing for our society to agree generally on categories that are inappropriate for children, to encode those into law, and to enforce those laws. The difference is, enforce to whom? Children are victims, not perpetrators. Age verification restates a child's role as perpetrator. This is the premise that I find unacceptable.
rstuart4133 4mo ago
> Keep dreaming of a technological solution -- there is none that does not lead to the world that FIRE is warning about, except to accept that we can only make a solution "good enough" and leave it at that, without expanding into full on identity verification. The world that FIRE is warning about already exists in Australia, whose age verification laws prompted the article. I'm an Australian. Our government passed the Assistance and Access bill on New Year's Eve in 2018, without much debate. The law allows them to demand "assistance" (code word for: you shall develop an undetectable spy app for us), and "access" (code word for: you shall silently install that app on the devices of any persons we nominate). Both requests are subject to a gag order. As an example of what's possible, this allows them to demand Google "assists" them to develop an undetectable app that records the phone screen and keyboard usage at periodic intervals, and send it back to them, and then to demand Google installs it on devices owned by persons of interest. The world has continued on. That may be because the tech bros are resisting helping (there were threats by a government head of security implying they weren't getting the level of compliance they wanted). But it may also be because we are a democracy, and blatant misuse of powers like this is likely to get you unelected. I've seen a few cases where it "felt" like the government bureaucracies used this tool against whistleblowers, which made me feel distinctly uncomfortable. But I don't know, and until recently they had a remarkably good track record against local terrorism. The recent exception is the recent Bondi killings, where a completely bonkers father convinced his son to go on a shooting spree. But they managed to maintain complete radio silence during the perpetration stage - I guess it was all planned over the kitchen table. That couldn't be detected by any surveillance network. So for now, it looks like they have used the tool according to the rules laid down in the bill. All spying requires independent judicial orders, which I'm fairly sure they obtained. (To put that into perspective - when the threshold is "the person broke the law" and you get to write the laws, the threshold is not quite as high as it might appear - particularly for government whistleblowers that pissed off the incumbents.) But for most of us, whose "crimes" are at most indulging in naughty pleasures, the bill offers pretty good privacy guarantees. If the government doesn't follow its own laws all bets are off, of course - and yes, this very scenario is playing out in another Five Eyes country. But if the government does follow its own rules, then any government-backed zero-knowledge proof scheme that includes a snitch code that can only be unlocked by a judicial order is going to be fine. TL;DR: for the scenario FIRE is worried about, the horse bolted 8 years ago in Australia. The current alternative of being forced to hand over photos, identity documents, and god knows what other PII to random web sites is far worse in terms of privacy than a zero-knowledge proof of age issued by the government - even if isn't truly private.

Aurornis 4mo ago

Yes, this is the part of the issue that is so frequently ignored: Anonymous age verification schemes are easily defeated through proxying because there wouldn't be any consequences for selling your tokens. "Install this app on your phone and we'll pay you $1 per day" and it will mint your anonymous identity tokens and send them off to kids who want to buy them. If there's no way to track the tokens, there is no possibility of negative consequences. So the schemes always start introducing features to reduce the anonymity of the tokens or make them more trackable in some way: > The highest friction version of this is that the credential ties to a real world identity somehow; maybe locked behind legal barriers, etc., but if a minor is caught using someone's credential, then the person whose credential they are using can be investigated, and, if necessary, charged with a crime Which requires that these identity tokens not be anonymous age-verification credentials. They become a traceable identity token tied to your government-issued ID.

DennisP 4mo ago
> They become a traceable identity token Not if you use a challenge-response protocol where the client returns a zero-knowledge proof of age, where the proof incorporates a random string sent by the website. The traceable stuff is private information that the website never sees. If a minor is caught with it, then law enforcement has local access to the minor's hardware and can probably view the private data. At that point, the private key can be put on a public revocation list. The zero-knowledge proof can include a proof that you're not on the revocation list. Once you've been revoked, you have to go through the hassle of setting this all up again, which might be enough incentive to keep it reasonably secure.
- pastel8739 4mo ago
  This doesn’t stop the scheme the parent proposes, where adults install some proxy on their device and challenges are responded to on the parent device. Then the private key never leaves the parent device and all the child device has is the proxy software, which could be set up to not log any identifier of the key that it used
  - 7e 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - pastel8739 4mo ago
      How so?
      - LoganDark 4mo ago
        Presumably, if you have a trusted application on a trusted device, the identifier was installed in a trusted way, the device is in trusted possession and the device won't be given to anyone else, trusted computing may be able, in certain cases, to make it more difficult for a remote minor to use the identifier.

ajsnigrutin 4mo ago

> The highest friction version of this is that the credential ties to a real world identity somehow; maybe locked behind legal barriers, etc., but if a minor is caught using someone's credential, then the person whose credential they are using can be investigated, and, if necessary, charged with a crime roughly equivalent to providing alcohol to a minor. Without the possibility of real world enforcement, none of these identity solutions can possibly work. Buying alcohol for a minor implies knowledge and intent. Getting the tokens out of a phone doesn't require the user to do any of that, the user just has to be frugal and keep the phone longer than it's supported by the manufacturer, until some local exploit is found again, and that token will be extracted and available online for everyone to use. Parents buy those phones, phones could easily have a "user is a minor" setting (and a flag sent to all the sites that want one) with a password for parents to unlock stuff if needed. This would be set during the phones first set up, and it's done. But nope, the plan is for everyone to install a form if a digital ID on their phones, and once it's there, requiring full-name identification when registering is just one step away.

meindnoch 4mo ago
>charged with a crime roughly equivalent to providing alcohol to a minor In most countries it's perfectly legal to provide alcohol to your kids.
darthwalsh 4mo ago
> Parents buy those phones, phones could easily have a "user is a minor" setting (and a flag sent to all the sites that want one) That's basically the California law! I hope other states adopt the "ask nicely for age but no online verification." OS setup asks for birthday, but you can just say January 1. I also thought it should just send the flag, but I've heard there's good reasons not to. There's normally an affirmative prompt from the user to agree to send the age bucket data.

what 4mo ago

Why can’t you just sell single use codes at gas stations/liquor stores/etc and they just check your ID before sale? Of course shady places can still sell them without ID check, but we have this problem already for liquor and tobacco.

Tannic 4mo ago
[dead]

AnthonyMouse 4mo ago

> but if a minor is caught using someone's credential, then the person whose credential they are using can be investigated, and, if necessary, charged with a crime roughly equivalent to providing alcohol to a minor. Without the possibility of real world enforcement, none of these identity solutions can possibly work. They don't work even then. Suppose you completely eliminate privacy on the internet and require every domestic site to collect the name and social security number of everyone who visits. Then a child uses an adult's ID, regardless of whether it's with or without their knowledge. Is the child going to inform on themselves? No. Is the adult, when they don't even know about it? No. Is the adult, when they provided it on purpose? No. That constitutes the entire set of people who would typically know that the person using the device isn't the person on the ID. On top of that, we can punch an even bigger hole in it. Search engines, among other things, index other sites. Google is obviously the biggest but there are many others -- Bing, Marginalia, Brave, Swisscows, Yandex, Perplexity, Baidu, etc. They're run by adults and most of their users are adults, who reasonably expect to be able to turn off "safe search" if they want to. So some adult at each search engine would have to provide their ID to the crawler so it can index things inappropriate for children and show them to adult users. It would therefore be a fairly unremarkable and recurring thing to see the same ID make a zillion gigatons of requests. But then you can't use "why is this person downloading 100 things from 100 computers at once" as an indication of anything nefarious happening, and anyone can still set up a service hosted on a foreign server that will serve adult content to anyone without an ID by serving it out of a cache. (And in the case where you're invading everyone's privacy, that service would also be very popular with adults.)

Barrin92 4mo ago
> Is the child going to inform on themselves? No. Is the adult, when they don't even know about it? In the context of social media, if they want to actively participate they have to given that it's the entire point. It's true that even with a government ID scheme people could borrow someone's ID to get passive access with their consent. But a kid couldn't share an account with a parent without that parent knowing because you see their activity, and they also couldn't post.
- 4mo ago

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

ian_holt 4mo ago

the article also mentions; <But the government puts much of the onus on social media platforms to ensure users understand the verification process and on users to read up to make sure they aren’t being scammed.> Unfortunately, the said-government doesn't seem to worry about the fact that their own systems have been breached over the years

shevy-java 4mo ago

> The entire point of age verification systems is to prevent minors from accessing certain resources. Then why are they forbidding VPNs? This is clearly NOT a use case that is solely referring to minors. The whole cake is a lie and so is your assumption that age sniffing is "to protect children". > Keep dreaming of a technological solution We don't "dream" - we know what is possible and what is not. Mass surveillance of everyone is simply not an option. > Let individual parents decide on the level of harm that they are willing to accep Nobody has an issue IF it were about individual parents, but it clearly is not. Governments try to criminalize and restrict everyone - and that is the true agenda.

spwa4 4mo ago

> The entire point of age verification systems is to prevent minors from accessing certain resources. I think we all know that this is basically impossible; but what these various governments and social media companies want to do is to make it high friction to do so. The problem is, this is wrong. What these governments want to do is get a grip on online behavior, through actions against individuals, who can't/won't defend themselves, rather than through actions against gigantic corporations that may choose litigation and take years to change their behavior, if they do at all. Governments want to declare something illegal, say downloading a movie, putting racist comments online, ... then catch everyone who engages in that behavior online through mandatory identification, and actually have an effect. To do this, breaking privacy is, of course, a core requirement. This can be introduced into these systems afterwards ("judge X wants to know who authenticated with token <token>, please provide the information"). Without this, government rules will remain totally ineffective online like they have been in the last 40 years. I personally much prefer government rules remaining totally ineffective online.

andrewla 4mo ago
> What these governments want to do I feel strongly that this conspiratorial mind-reading approach to this sort of issue is just counterproductive. What all the governments (and non-governments, frankly, there are many supporters of these things) are asking for is excluding minors from certain websites and services. The problem is that this translates to age verification, which translates to identify verification, which incidentally gives states and other actors a variety of other tools they can use for anti-civil-liberties purposes. In the end their motives are just irrelevant unless there is a clear way to exclude minors from certain services without going down the chain towards identity verification. Such a way does not exist, so we have to fight it here, at the point where the basic ask emerges.

RajT88 4mo ago

Kids shred these schemes. The designers of them seem to forget that the social dynamics of the adult world are completely different - just one kid needs to figure out how to bypass the system, and the knowledge spreads like wildfire. Example: schools banned phones, so kids switched to talking over Google docs: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/hottest-chat-app-teens-google-docs/584857/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/hotte... If we give parents better tools to limit and monitor internet access, kids will just buy a used phone which is unregulated. If their parents even bother to use the tools in the first place (it is my impression most parents do not). There is also a lot of loopholes parents do not even think of (like a web browser on a game console).

raffael_de 4mo ago
having kids fiddle around with alternative means and schemes of communication might well turn out to be an intellectual and academic net positive.
godelski 4mo ago
> just one kid needs to figure out how to bypass the system, and the knowledge spreads like wildfire. I'm surprised this is not obvious to people here on HACKER News. When I was in high school we all learned about proxies and bypassed the school firewalls. You didn't have to know anything technical after a few people figured it out. Hell, even the teachers were in on it. I remember one wanted to know so he could check the lotto numbers lol. It's an eternal cat and mouse game and the mouse is going to win. I agree that the right idea is friction but if people aren't aware that there's no clear win that's going you work even 80% of the time then we'll write the wrong laws and have the wrong idea

somenameforme 4mo ago

This is where social media and other sites' endless datamining and profiling will come back to bite them. These sites already know the age range of users to a very high degree of certainty, and can continue to obtain such in an ongoing fashion. If an underage person is using these sites, it's likely going to be because the store clerk just nodded and winked, instead of because they were genuinely fooled by a borrowed or fraudulent ID. And in that case, the clerk is the one facing the penalties. Put the burden of responsibility on the sites themselves and the number of people that will be able to successfully bypass such restrictions is going to be negligible and largely depend upon ongoing inorganic behavior or being an outlier in terms of behavior/interests.

thomastjeffery 4mo ago

Even more significant than the means are the ends. Why does my government get to decide what is appropriate for children? This sounds a lot like what governance is supposed to be, but there is a critical difference. It's one thing for our society to agree generally on categories that are inappropriate for children, to encode those into law, and to enforce those laws. The difference is, enforce to whom? Children are victims, not perpetrators. Age verification restates a child's role as perpetrator. This is the premise that I find unacceptable.

rstuart4133 4mo ago

> Keep dreaming of a technological solution -- there is none that does not lead to the world that FIRE is warning about, except to accept that we can only make a solution "good enough" and leave it at that, without expanding into full on identity verification. The world that FIRE is warning about already exists in Australia, whose age verification laws prompted the article. I'm an Australian. Our government passed the Assistance and Access bill on New Year's Eve in 2018, without much debate. The law allows them to demand "assistance" (code word for: you shall develop an undetectable spy app for us), and "access" (code word for: you shall silently install that app on the devices of any persons we nominate). Both requests are subject to a gag order. As an example of what's possible, this allows them to demand Google "assists" them to develop an undetectable app that records the phone screen and keyboard usage at periodic intervals, and send it back to them, and then to demand Google installs it on devices owned by persons of interest. The world has continued on. That may be because the tech bros are resisting helping (there were threats by a government head of security implying they weren't getting the level of compliance they wanted). But it may also be because we are a democracy, and blatant misuse of powers like this is likely to get you unelected. I've seen a few cases where it "felt" like the government bureaucracies used this tool against whistleblowers, which made me feel distinctly uncomfortable. But I don't know, and until recently they had a remarkably good track record against local terrorism. The recent exception is the recent Bondi killings, where a completely bonkers father convinced his son to go on a shooting spree. But they managed to maintain complete radio silence during the perpetration stage - I guess it was all planned over the kitchen table. That couldn't be detected by any surveillance network. So for now, it looks like they have used the tool according to the rules laid down in the bill. All spying requires independent judicial orders, which I'm fairly sure they obtained. (To put that into perspective - when the threshold is "the person broke the law" and you get to write the laws, the threshold is not quite as high as it might appear - particularly for government whistleblowers that pissed off the incumbents.) But for most of us, whose "crimes" are at most indulging in naughty pleasures, the bill offers pretty good privacy guarantees. If the government doesn't follow its own laws all bets are off, of course - and yes, this very scenario is playing out in another Five Eyes country. But if the government does follow its own rules, then any government-backed zero-knowledge proof scheme that includes a snitch code that can only be unlocked by a judicial order is going to be fine. TL;DR: for the scenario FIRE is worried about, the horse bolted 8 years ago in Australia. The current alternative of being forced to hand over photos, identity documents, and god knows what other PII to random web sites is far worse in terms of privacy than a zero-knowledge proof of age issued by the government - even if isn't truly private.