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Maybe my perception is off, but it seems like there's a huge push by the legislature and some people to do anything and everything to prevent CSAM, yet almost n

by giantg2 3mo ago

Maybe my perception is off, but it seems like there's a huge push by the legislature and some people to do anything and everything to prevent CSAM, yet almost nothing seems to be done to prevent CSA. For CSAM, there's all sorts of monitoring, scanning, identify capturing, etc. But it's all after abuse has taken place, and it seems that many of the people actually arrested are arrested for CSAM and not CSA. This has even extended to fictional CSAM such as AI generated stories and pictures. As an aside, if that gets extended to political speech or other non-CSAM materials that are determined to be undesirable, that's a big concern. I can imagine that a conservative state could pass a law banning all porn because they claim it could encourage illegal activities such as prostitution, rape, or CSA. On the CSA side, you rarely hear about arrests (they happen but less than CSAM). There doesn't seem to be any real push for educating and protecting kids before it happens. Ironically, the groups doing the most to educate and implement protective strategies are the ones who have been involved in abuse scandals in the past (Churches, Scouts, etc). Even then, a lot of it is just getting clearances, which doesnt prevent people who where not caught or were first timers. Offenders get put on a list/map. This is sort of a half approach. If they are still a threat, they shouldn't be released. Yet if you comb the list and see some of the results, they don't all seem to fit with CSA. I personally know of 1 who took a leak across from a playground at 2am walking home from the bars and was put on the sex offender registry because it was within 500'. It seems like these laws are more about peddling to the publicist and lawmakers fantasy of incrementally extreme punishment rather than taking a appropriate, data driven, and level-headed approach that actually protects kids. Otherwise they will just keep pushing ham-fisted low-hanging "fixes" like required scanning and IDs to access the internet.

twothreeone 3mo ago
I think it's similar with other liability issues, e.g., when a company happens to "lose" customer data through a breach. They will be on the hook for not having certain audits and certifications at regular intervals. Practically never will anyone be feeling any pain due to absolute disregard for basic common sense precautions to prevent issues in the first place. So usually, the pattern is that issues that can be outsourced to insurance will be handled by compliance departments - which don't care about the actual problems, just that the fallout from them is "managed" accordingly.
- giantg2 3mo ago
  That's actually a little funny. I work in compliance and we regularly work with the teams to improve processes that enhance security. I will say though, that the outsourced work that we send to consultants has the same sort of result you describe.
ribosometronome 3mo ago
One is far easier to prove. If the government could continuously monitor our actions "Is this CSA?" they might very well be pushing for that, too.
- garyfirestorm 3mo ago
  if you wear red glasses...
inemesitaffia 3mo ago
>if that gets extended to If you provide the government a platform to do So, they'll do Y if you wait long enough
- inigyou 3mo ago
  Not everything is a slippery slope. Many things are, but you have to prove each specific case, not cite the general existence of slippery slopes.
  - inemesitaffia 3mo ago
    If you can scan a users device for photos "society" doesn't like, they don't have to compel you to to write new software to scan for images they don't like. There's a user-company data boundary. Keep it.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
rationalist 3mo ago
> ones who have been involved in abuse scandals in the past (Churches, Scouts, etc) And those groups still have lower rates of abuse than Schools which do a lot less training and enforcement of youth protection policies. Children are still safer in Scouts and churches than in schools. Just about every kid goes to school though, so people just prefer to sweep that under the rug and focus on targeting organizations they are not a part of or disagree with because they're easier to demonize and make fun of. I work with kids, and I've had to take the Scouts and Catholic Church's youth protection training. They are both free to take online if anyone wants to check it out.
- fluoridation 3mo ago
  >And those groups still have lower rates of abuse than Schools Is that in absolute terms, or per child who frequents the establishment?
  - rationalist 3mo ago
    > rates So something like 1 per 100,000; which of course is still 1 too many. (The other comments in other branches seem to prove my point. I am not defending any institution by the way. No one should be covering up crimes and/or allowing criminals to victimize people further.)
    - fluoridation 3mo ago
      "Rate" is an ambiguous word. Molested children per year is a rate just as molested children per total children is. >something like 1 per 100,000 What is this? What number are you citing, and where are you getting it from?
      - rationalist 3mo ago
        I've never heard anyone say that a rate is ambiguous. It seems like you're trying to be disingenuous, first with "rate", now with my clearly-arbitrary example of rate. > something like
danaris 3mo ago
The problem is, the things that would actually prevent CSA require things like "giving children rights", "widely mandating effective age-appropriate sex education even for young children", and "admitting that it's mostly not scary strangers doing it." These are utterly anathema to huge chunks of society, especially American society. It's more and more clear, from the scope of the Epstein Files, just how much of American society and government has been influenced specifically to enable easy access to children by rich white men. Even beyond that, the entire right wing would instantly catch fire if we actually required effective sex education. Especially age-appropriate sex education going right down to kindergarten (yes, kindergarten: the better children that age understand what's normal and safe, the better they can communicate when someone is doing things to them that are not that...and I only stop at kindergarten because AFAIK that's the earliest mandated schooling still). Similarly, the right wing desperately wants to have absolute control over their children—treat them as property—so giving children rights that even parents have to respect will get them to oppose absolutely everything. Plus, as other sibling comments have already noted, the real desire here is for ubiquitous surveillance. CSAM is just the excuse they use.
- throwaway89864 3mo ago
  Somehow, even something as simple as "age-appropriate sex education going right down to kindergarten" would tend to end up "special interests education from vocal minority groups."
  - danaris 3mo ago
    To be clear, I recognize that there is zero chance of genuine effective age-appropriate sex education being mandated in the foreseeable future in the US, nor has there been any such chance at any time in the past. I'm merely noting some of the things that would actually be helpful measures in combating CSA if it were possible to implement them. You're absolutely right that, even if such a mandate had already existed, it would've been erased or co-opted by right-wing groups by now.
    - throwaway89864 3mo ago
Hasz 3mo ago
Because it isn't about CSAM, IMO. You see this with plenty of social issues, notably firearms ownership. The claim is we will restrict/license/outlaw xyz for the kids, but really, a data-drive approach would have focused on different things entirely (eg additional behavioral health services for kids, suicide prevention etc) The same technology/access used for CSAM identification can find copyrighted files, materials that don't support current government, etc. Full E2E encryption seriously raises the cost of mass surveillance, and why the US government fights it at every turn going back 30 years.
- mschuster91 3mo ago
  > The claim is we will restrict/license/outlaw xyz for the kids, but really, a data-drive approach would have focused on different things entirely (eg additional behavioral health services for kids, suicide prevention etc) Well, most of Europe simply has banned guns in the hands of civilians instead, so that's some data as well. The only reason why the US is so extremely lax on firearms is because people keep blathering on about how guns are the last line of defense against a tyrannical government - and yet, what do the most rabid of these people do? Vote in and defend a literal tyrant.
  - jaharios 3mo ago
    > Vote in a literal tyrant. Tyrant? You may disagree with him, but he got in through the system. Now if he doesn't get out that is another story.
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
    - mallets 3mo ago
      Being a tyrant has little to do with term limits or office duration.
      - Ntrails 3mo ago
        A couple of dictionary checks suggest some set of: - Ruler who is unrestrained by law or constitution - A usurper of sovereignty - Ruler who uses power oppressively or unjustly Obviously b) is not applicable as per GP. He has also been constrained by the supreme court and others multiple times in this term, which suggests a) is a stretch. c) probably a fair accusation, though I'm not sure I would agree.
guerrilla 3mo ago
In Sweden we're going to literally have Minority Report style pre-crime registries for potential child molesters. We already have one for potential domestic abusers. Fuck this country. I need to get out of here before it gets worse.
- hansvm 3mo ago
  Say what now? What criteria do they use to scan the populace and create a pre-crime registry of any kind?
  - SiempreViernes 3mo ago
    Probably there's only two criteria: "are you in any way foreign" or "do you vote for the left", that's the sort of government Sweden has these days.
- wredcoll 3mo ago
  What? Since when? What are you talking about?
- Scroll_Swe 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - marysol5 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Scroll_Swe 3mo ago
      [flagged]
  - wredcoll 3mo ago
    I have an ancestor who was born there, it's now my country.
    - 3mo ago
manoDev 3mo ago
CSAM is the perfect trojan horse to undermine privacy everywhere. No politician and no company can oppose it on the grounds of protecting privacy before having the reputation ruined. Meanwhile the real pedos are rich people vacationing in well known places.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  Are you sure? Can't they say "yeah pedophilia is fucked up but reading all our emails is also fucked up"?
  - LanceH 3mo ago
    > reading all our emails is also fucked up Why? are you hiding something in your email?
    - inigyou 3mo ago
      Nobody actually believes "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" but it's short for "I don't have the energy to deal with this when it's unlikely to actually create any consequences for me in particular"
      - LanceH 3mo ago
        > unlikely to actually create any consequences for me in particular I was this play out in relation to rules/laws applied to those under age. Like harsher and harsher anti-drinking law. The same people who I know were drinking underage have suddenly seen the light and believe someone's life should be destroyed for also drinking underage. Or drug testing. If using drugs is bad for some group of people, wouldn't it be even worse if the group overseeing them were to be using drugs? Start testing congress first.
Spooky23 3mo ago
The CSAM issue is both very real and abused by politicians. When I did some work with a police agency, it was explained to me that there’s a pattern of escalation with people and they tend to accumulate collections and many escalate to actual behavior. The detectives assigned to this work tend to not last long, and the horrific nature of the crime affects them. Like all rape, it’s a combo of control and dopamine. The church and Boy Scout leaders leveraged their societial influence and power to compel compliance and even loyalty from their victims. Boy Scouts as an organization inserted itself into existing power structures like church, police and other institutions. It’s difficult for a 11 year old victim to make an accusation about a beloved community figure. They also tend to find ways to make their victims feel complicit. Even if people come forward, they are hard cases to try and exposes young victims to public shame. Many of these people plea to lesser crimes to protect the victim. I wasn’t a victim thank god, but a Boy Scout leader at my parish was a serial molester who abused dozens or hundreds of children. I learned about it years later and realized that some of my friends were almost certainly victims — in his case everyone in authority just blew it off
- lstodd 3mo ago
  > When I did some work with a police agency, it was explained to me that there’s a pattern of escalation with people You have been mildly brainwashed. It would be best if that episode lead you to study a bit of psychology but instead you chose to believe. Like any belief it's a combo of control and dopamine. The feeling of belonging to a group and being righteous within that group hits so hard that it takes hard explicit effort to screen your perception of its effects. You are a victim because you failed to accept reality.
- xyz1234999 3mo ago
  > there’s a pattern of escalation with people and they tend to accumulate collections and many escalate to actual behavior I was curious about this. I did find some research here: https://www.suojellaanlapsia.fi/en/post/csam-users-in-the-dark-web-protecting-children-through-prevention https://www.suojellaanlapsia.fi/en/post/csam-users-in-the-da... (2021) That paper states > Traditional research on individuals who use CSAM is often inherently biased as it has focused primarily on convicted and known offenders. and appears to be directly trying to avoid that bias, which is good to see. Isn't there still some bias here though? They only got answers from 1. people who were using a dark web search engine with ads, 2. felt the need to click a "Help us to help you" link, 3. were willing to discuss the topic with strangers on the web. Only (3) was (almost) acknowledged in the Limitations section. They concluded that "Many CSAM users are not just viewers" and, while "many" could mean any number, I think readers would probably take it to mean something like 30% (shown in graphs) which isn't indicated by their data. Furthermore, the "not just viewers" conclusion is from a question about "seeking direct contact with children through online platforms". I'm not sure why they didn't more directly ask if respondents took action towards abusing children, with the inspecific "direct contact" qualifier and very specific qualifier "through online platforms". I wonder what the results would have been if they removed "direct" and "through online platforms" from the question. Admittedly I don't know a lot about statistical techniques! Has there been other research, or do you know what the police agency was basing their explanation on?
rootusrootus 3mo ago
> On the CSA side, you rarely hear about arrests (they happen but less than CSAM). Because it is nearly always someone we know. Someone who we just cannot imagine would ever do such a thing, even when the evidence is glaringly obvious. And I suspect that the fraction of the population diddling kids in real life is breathtaking, and nobody really wants to face that head on. Too uncomfortable. I could just be overly cynical today. But given my own experiences and other people I've known throughout my life, I really believe it is very common.
- brabel 3mo ago
  I thought it had never happened around me in my whole life, but my sister recently told me that when she just in primary school, a friend of my dad gave her a lift and while she was in the car, inserted his fingers on her. Like WTF! I really had no idea this could have happened in my environment. I guess it probably happened more than I know to others too uncomfortable to say anything, took my sister 30 years to say something.
  - pixl97 3mo ago
    I've talked to so many women about their sexual abuse that it seems harder to find someone that has not been abused. What's worse is how many people are involved in covering it up, keeping it hidden, and ensuring the perpetrators are never caught.
hn_acker 3mo ago
> There doesn't seem to be any real push for educating and protecting kids before it happens. Before abstinence and birth control, CSA prevention should be the primary goal of sex ed in schools, especially before high school. (Though on birth control [1] and probably STIs as well the US is not doing well.) [1] https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/sex-education/sex-education-laws-and-state-attacks https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/sex-education...
throwaway2037 3mo ago
> yet almost nothing seems to be done to prevent CSA > On the CSA side, ... [t]here doesn't seem to be any real push for educating and protecting kids before it happens. This is a mighty wide brush you are painting with. When I was growing up, from very early (elementary school), we had "health class" where the teacher would teach you things about your body and health. This also included who is allowed to see you naked and/or touch your private parts. They also explained how to get help if someone what touching you inappropriately. That effort seems pretty active to me. > I personally know of 1 who took a leak across from a playground at 2am walking home from the bars and was put on the sex offender registry because it was within 500'. Urinating in public late at night is an interesting category of inprobably CSA-labeled behaviour. It should be treated with kid gloves -- the context matters.
- rationalist 3mo ago
  > This also included who is allowed to see you naked and/or touch your private parts. They also explained how to get help if someone what touching you inappropriately. That effort seems pretty active to me. My school did not cover that (but at least my parents did).
basilikum 3mo ago
To play devil's advocate: child abuse is usually a crime without direct evidence. CSAM is child abuse but the perpetrator films their crime as evidence. Everyone else who obtains and keeps this material also holds evidence against themselves as the possession of it is the crime. Now for real: People often do not care a lot about child abuse. It does not affect them as it happens in private where they do not see it. CSAM however does affect them as it makes the abuse visible and shows something deemed reprehensible. In a lot of ways people see themselves being witness (even indirect by purely hearing about it) to CSAM as the victim rather than the children who are harmed in the making and by redistribution. My cynical opinion is that it is a lot more about social norms and feelings arising from the violation of these norms rather than the harm done through the violation of children.
- skissane 3mo ago
  > CSAM is child abuse but the perpetrator films their crime as evidence This isn't entirely true. In much of the Western world – outside the US – CSAM (or equivalent legal terms such as "child pornography", "child abuse material", "child exploitation material", etc) can include text, drawings, AI-generated imagery, etc, which no child was abused to create, indeed the child depicted in it may be entirely fictional. Canadian law goes so far as to treat material which "advocates or counsels" the commission of CSA as CSAM - which the Supreme Court of Canada insisted (in the 2001 case of R v Sharpe) doesn't include mere political advocacy for its legalisation (as in e.g. the NAMBLA Bulletin), although some will question whether that insistence actually cashes out in practice. Now, as a father of school-aged children, I find the whole idea of groups like NAMBLA rather abhorrent – but, I'm hesitant about the government making it illegal for people to express abhorrent ideas, because there are likely ideas which you or I hold which somebody out there considers abhorrent.
  - throwaway85825 3mo ago
    Not every problem can be fixed by making it illegal.
  - basilikum 3mo ago
    Fictional erotica portraying fictional children is not CSAM. There is no child abuse taking place as there is no child in the first place. Conflating the two is 1. wrong as a matter of fact and ethics and 2. a great injustice to the victims of child abuse. This is exactly what I wrote about in the second part of my comment. People see themselves as the victim of CSAM or proclaimed CSAM through being witness to it. In fictional works there is no child who could be the victim showing very clearly what these people are really about. They are not primarily concerned about children being exploited but they do not like the existence of such material as them deem it offensive to themselves. CSAM is a very real crime; including cases where real children are not physically harmed but get sexualized through the composition of the material. It is a crime because it violates children, not because it is offensive to societal norms.
basilikum 3mo ago
> I personally know of 1 who took a leak across from a playground at 2am walking home from the bars and was put on the sex offender registry because it was within 500'. You might want to look up if that's actually true. It might be. It might also be a lie to hide the real reason why they are registered.
- dijit 3mo ago
  on the flip side, imagine if it's true and everyone immediately suspects that you're a pedophile trying to appear innocent. Talk about tainted for life.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- teaearlgraycold 3mo ago
  What’s up with the cop that cited them for that?
  - dijit 3mo ago
    in my limited experience with the law, they tend to really go for you if you aren't the kind of person who enjoys breaking the law. It's almost like they can spot an easy target. Deal drugs and conduct yourself violently in society, sit with a gang and destroy property... Police seem to have a hard time with you. Push someone over who is threatening to knock your teeth out when you're walking with your wife and kids... that's an assault charge, because naively you explained what happened to the police, and they're going to make sure you see the inside of a court room for it.
    - BloodyIron 3mo ago
      Quotas?
      - dijit 3mo ago
seanmcdirmid 3mo ago
CSAM laws in many jurisdictions include computer generated or hand crafted media that do not pre-require CSA at all. The idea is that deviance leads to CSA, and by cracking down on CSAM, we are preventing CSA.
- teaearlgraycold 3mo ago
  The US constitution should require proof of harm to a living thing as a prerequisite for criminal charges.
- brabel 3mo ago
  This is such a slippery slope. It amounts to thought police. You did not actually cause any harm, but thought of doing something. Where do we stop ? If I fantasize about my pretty coworker without her consent, am I a rapist now? What if I make a sketch of her naked? Is that a crime? What if I ask AI to remove her clothes from a real picture? Even if I just immediately delete it?? I guess that there’s different levels to each “offense”, and at one level it does become criminal, but it’s hard to unequivocally decide where.
  - seanmcdirmid 3mo ago
    I don’t agree or disagree. It is political suicide however, to argue for saner laws in this area even if you think that the current ones aren’t sane.
NordStreamYacht 3mo ago
These laws are a pretext to remove anonymity on the internet and insert backdoors into everything.
matheusmoreira 3mo ago
It's not about children. It was never about children. How many politicians have gotten caught in Epstein's island by now? It's all about surveilling the masses and keeping them under control. Children are merely one of the political weapons they use to make the masses accept any proposed solution, no matter how Orwellian. You're not against protecting children from drug trafficking, money laundering, child molesting terrorists, are you?
nsonha 3mo ago
I don't know how to say this and not sound like a CSAM or CSA offender but CSAM policing sounds too much thought policing to me, if you wanna police CSA just go and do it, don't police what people have in their mind.
BLKNSLVR 3mo ago
The lowest of the low hanging political points scoring fruit will be picked. I make this point on HN each time it comes up: Dealing with actual CSA requires actual people going to investigate actual reports of children's living conditions out in the real world, not "scanning digital files". Seems obvious when you say it like that, but the alternative seems to still score heavily on the political scale. Ironically, spending more money on "scanning digital files" takes away from resources that could prevent those digital files from being created in the first place, so all the additional time, money, and effort towards combatting CSAM is time, money, and effort specifically _not_ working against stopping CSA. It's categorically _not_ protecting the children. Teachers, in Australia at least, have mandatory reporting where any kind of abuse is suspected. The heart-breaking irony is that the resources to investigate the reports are so scarce that they can only respond to reports where the child's life is in immediate danger. Caveat: the above was true a few years ago, I genuinely don't know if it's still true. What I do know is that 'social work' isn't suddenly a high paying job, so I doubt resource availability has changed much. There is no easy answer to this. It's entirely nuance.
- EagnaIonat 3mo ago
  > Seems obvious when you say it like that, That's exactly what happens. CSAM has two parts to it. The first is the known and most horrific videos of CP out there. These aren't shared, instead only hashes are used to determine if the image/video matches. It's next to impossible to get an mis-hit on that. The second is nudity and age detection AI. Apple has this on their devices, but warns the user before sharing not reporting. It normally takes more than one hit to get flagged for investigation. At that point law enforcement are informed and take over. The majority of investigations are children sending naked pictures of themself to their friends. So it is absolutely being used as the purpose to protect children and it's amazing how many people don't realise how it works when they are very transparent about it. Of course it is not without its issues that need to fixed. For example providers will just ban the person before it's determined if they broke a law or not.
  - basilikum 3mo ago
    What you are describing is indiscriminate mass surveillance. There is absolutely nothing stopping Apple or whoever maintains that listof hashes from putting things other than child abuse on there, like dissident memes for example. It also requires devices to run this spyware without a way to disable it. The natural consequence of this is to ban everything but government approved, restricted OSes and to outlaw devices capable of running anything but these. Mandatory CSAM scanning is part of the war on general computing and privacy.
sneak 3mo ago
It’s nothing to do with CSAM and all about surveilling who has which files and when, and who they send them to. Even ADP in iCloud sends the hashes of the plaintext to Apple, non-e2ee. This allows them to see who has unique files, and when, and the networks of users to which they spread, and when.
superxpro12 3mo ago
Yeah DUH. its a trojan horse to eliminate any privacy in the populace, except for the government and elites, of course. They get privacy. You dont. How else are they going to maintain control over the populace?
Kalibr 3mo ago
Arresting for CSAM is easy and brings in a lot of money. It’s a slam dunk case for just possession. Investigating and prosecuting people for CSA takes a lot of manpower and time for single case and not nearly as profitable. As usual, follow the money.
one33seven 3mo ago
It is not about CSAM, it's about scanning our data. If it were about kids safety there would be lots of people in jail
Cthulhu_ 3mo ago
Theory besides what others have said: remove the supply and you affect the demand. That's the theory anyway, I'm not sure it works like that; to make a parallel, punishing drug users didn't affect dealers/supply networks.
elil17 3mo ago
My thought is that many different stakeholders have reasons to focus on CSAM: - Prosecutors want to go after it because it is much easier to prove than CSA. - Authoritarians want to go after it because it gives them a chance to get things like ID checks accepted by the public. - People who genuinely want to prevent CSA focus on it because a large amount of CSAM is made by serial abusers - so capturing producers can prevent future abuse. Additionally, they believe (with good reasons) that CSAM consumption is a gateway to CSA and CSAM production for many people. Further, finding CSAM can be a way to identify and rescue children from abusive situations. - CSA survivors may advocate for it often feel traumatized not just by the abuse, but by the fact that people might be continuously viewing that abuse. - Going after it winds up creating digital forensics specialists and task forces, which creates a special interest group within police departments which wants to continue focusing on CSAM but is not set up to do anything about CSA. I would recommend the podcast Hunting Warhead to anyone interested in learning more about this.
benj111 3mo ago
I'd like to know the link between availability of csam and CSA. There seems to be an assumption that the former causes the latter. That's not to say it's acceptable if illegally produced. We have issues in the UK. So far they've banned 'rape' porn. And now they're talking about 'barely legal' None of this seems to be based on any statistics showing this is actually harmful in any way.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  If they ban "barely legal" the next thing will be "barely not barely legal" and they'll ban that, and they'll have "barely not barely not barely legal" and so on...
miki123211 3mo ago
CSA doesn't neatly fit into a narrative. If there's a person committing abuse against a child, usually a family member in their own household, there's no story there. They (hopefully) get arrested, get a minor mention in the media if that, and life moves on. If, on the other hand, they send CSAM using a platform, device or protocol, then clearly the makers of that technology failed to uphold their sacred duty to protect the child. If most CSAM cases happen using a few major technologies (and they will, because societies tend to standardize on what technologies they use for communication), the technologies get blamed for the problem they supposedly enable. If you dislike the technology for other reasons (the distrust of corporations from left-leaning politicians, censorship allegations on the right, a moral panic about the impact of smartphones on children's mental health), you can use people's misunderstanding of statistics to exaggerate the CSAM problem, blame the tech, and gain some notion of control over it in a way that is politically palatable to citizens. It's worth saying explicitly that centralization doesn't have much to do with this. We've seen similar stories play out with bicycles, Walkmans, pagers, AI, heavy metal and Uber rapes. They were different moral panics, but the mechanic was roughly the same. I think the situation wouldn't change much if we all used PGP-encrypted email over personal mail servers to communicate. An exception that proves the rule is the moral panic over CSA in primarily-catholic countries, notably relating to abuse committed by catholic priests, which are statistically no more likely to commit it than anybody else. As the influence of the Church on government policy is a hotly-debated topic in those countries, CSA is suddenly an issue that people can use to further their political causes.
- 0dayz 3mo ago
  Sorry but I'm intrigued, what was the moral panic about bicycles and Walkman?
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    And pagers?
    - miki123211 3mo ago
      https://newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/the-forgotten-war-on-beepers https://newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/the-forgotten-war... https://pessimistsarchive.org/cat/bicycle https://pessimistsarchive.org/cat/bicycle https://pessimistsarchive.org/list/walkman https://pessimistsarchive.org/list/walkman
setgree 3mo ago
First, I think it’s likely that you hear more about one than the other because you read websites like Hacker News and are not (I assume) an FBI agent or someone else who works on this stuff. A public defender I know would say that child abuse of all sorts is ever-present and relevant to their work, unfortunately. Second, detecting CSAM leads to its producers who are by definition abusers. Here’s a nice article in Wired about the digital forensics of cracking down on a CSAM ring with some interesting details about the role played by crypto, and abusers’ misconceptions about it: https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-video-crypto-anonymity-myth/ https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-v... With that said, I agree that a lot of political concern for this is a smokescreen for a creating more surveillance. “think of the children!” has the flavor of a rhetorical trump card.
KaiserPro 3mo ago
> yet almost nothing seems to be done to prevent CSA. for the UK, there has been a massive shift to prevent this kind of stuff. anyone who even volunteers with children or vulnerable adults needs to be screened. Charities are required to have policies for dealing with vulnerable people safely. but to the point, Apple halfarse CSAM reporting. Whatsapp which doesn't do "CSAM scanning" reports in one hour more CSAM than apple does in a year. From memory meta (instgram, facebook and whatsapp) reported millions of cases of CSAM for 2021, compared to apple's ~250 (not thousand, just 250) for facebook its automated scanning, but for whatsapp, its just design. its really obvious how to report a message/image. in imessage, its impossible, there is no mechanism to long press/select/other a message. Now, Facebook are bastards in virtually every way, but for whatsapp at least, they have made GUI changes that have real positive impact on CSAM protection. Apple has not. They made some noise about hashing, but thats invasive and ironically noisier than having user reports.
- john_strinlai 3mo ago
  >anyone who even volunteers with children or vulnerable adults needs to be screened as far as i am aware, that is common practice in many countries. the problem is that screening is typically a quick check of "has this person been suspected or arrested for something involving minors already" and perhaps a few questions on a piece of paper. its not like they give everyone volunteering for a fieldtrip an extensive 1:1 with a psychologist and an mri. any predator who has not previously been caught will easily pass screening. >From memory meta (instgram, facebook and whatsapp) reported millions of cases of CSAM for 2021, compared to apple's ~250 (not thousand, just 250) easy enough to explain. instagram and facebook are social media with billions of public posts. whatsapp is in a similar enough boat, with large (up to 1000 participants?) facebook-like groups of otherwise strangers and a lot of marketing and inertia for social-media-like use. i imagine instagram is a majority of it. it's disgusting on there. on the other hand, apple is not a social media company nor facilitates large group chats (imessage goes up to 32 participants). i doubt adding an easier UX for reporting would make a material difference in the number of reports apple submits because you're typically already talking with people you know when using imessage.
  - 3mo ago
summerlight 3mo ago
There is a pretty simple yet disappointing reason. CSAM is much easier to investigate and prosecute. You got evidence, you prosecute. Almost guaranteed conviction. You can even enforce big tech to implement proactive monitoring systems. Compared to this, CSA is much harder. Every case is different. You have to do due diligence. And it is extremely hard to proactively detect them. Careful criminals will destroy all evidence. The number of case itself is smaller. And there is a good chance to lose in the court and for prosecutors this is a clearly risky move. Good ol' criminal investigation is expensive. There is a structural reason not to prioritize them. The whole incentive structure is broken. The only thing to fix this is external pressure, but even it does not work these days. Exposing CSA is a rare event but media needs constant, sensitive headlines so they tend to treat CSA and CSAM like the same thing. Hence external pressures do not work, and even worse those work in a wrong way. This creates a bad feedback loop.
gradschool 3mo ago
> This has even extended to fictional CSAM such as AI generated stories and pictures. Peripheral to your comment, there is an argument against AI generated CSAM that no one seems to be making so allow me. AI will do the same for CSAM as it has already done for copyright laundering. That is, it will enable its distributors to train their models on real CSAM while obscuring the training material. A legal regime that permits unrestricted distribution of AI generated CSAM incentivizes actual abuse as a source of training material. If one opposes legal prohibitions on free speech grounds, then at a minimum there should be an audit requirement incumbent on AI generated CSAM distributors to document their process in sufficient detail as to establish that they haven't used actual CSAM for training, similarly to the way porn distributors are required to document that their models are of legal age.
marysol5 3mo ago
>yet almost nothing seems to be done to prevent CSA. >that many of the people actually arrested are arrested for CSAM and not CSA So there are, or there aren't arrests? Also you hear about CSA arrests all the damn time. If anything it's underplayed in the media somewhat when they're a specific people.

by giantg2 3mo ago

twothreeone 3mo ago

I think it's similar with other liability issues, e.g., when a company happens to "lose" customer data through a breach. They will be on the hook for not having certain audits and certifications at regular intervals. Practically never will anyone be feeling any pain due to absolute disregard for basic common sense precautions to prevent issues in the first place. So usually, the pattern is that issues that can be outsourced to insurance will be handled by compliance departments - which don't care about the actual problems, just that the fallout from them is "managed" accordingly.

giantg2 3mo ago
That's actually a little funny. I work in compliance and we regularly work with the teams to improve processes that enhance security. I will say though, that the outsourced work that we send to consultants has the same sort of result you describe.

ribosometronome 3mo ago

One is far easier to prove. If the government could continuously monitor our actions "Is this CSA?" they might very well be pushing for that, too.

garyfirestorm 3mo ago
if you wear red glasses...

inemesitaffia 3mo ago

>if that gets extended to If you provide the government a platform to do So, they'll do Y if you wait long enough

inigyou 3mo ago
Not everything is a slippery slope. Many things are, but you have to prove each specific case, not cite the general existence of slippery slopes.
- inemesitaffia 3mo ago
  If you can scan a users device for photos "society" doesn't like, they don't have to compel you to to write new software to scan for images they don't like. There's a user-company data boundary. Keep it.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

rationalist 3mo ago

> ones who have been involved in abuse scandals in the past (Churches, Scouts, etc) And those groups still have lower rates of abuse than Schools which do a lot less training and enforcement of youth protection policies. Children are still safer in Scouts and churches than in schools. Just about every kid goes to school though, so people just prefer to sweep that under the rug and focus on targeting organizations they are not a part of or disagree with because they're easier to demonize and make fun of. I work with kids, and I've had to take the Scouts and Catholic Church's youth protection training. They are both free to take online if anyone wants to check it out.

fluoridation 3mo ago
>And those groups still have lower rates of abuse than Schools Is that in absolute terms, or per child who frequents the establishment?
- rationalist 3mo ago
  > rates So something like 1 per 100,000; which of course is still 1 too many. (The other comments in other branches seem to prove my point. I am not defending any institution by the way. No one should be covering up crimes and/or allowing criminals to victimize people further.)
  - fluoridation 3mo ago
    "Rate" is an ambiguous word. Molested children per year is a rate just as molested children per total children is. >something like 1 per 100,000 What is this? What number are you citing, and where are you getting it from?
    - rationalist 3mo ago
      I've never heard anyone say that a rate is ambiguous. It seems like you're trying to be disingenuous, first with "rate", now with my clearly-arbitrary example of rate. > something like

danaris 3mo ago

The problem is, the things that would actually prevent CSA require things like "giving children rights", "widely mandating effective age-appropriate sex education even for young children", and "admitting that it's mostly not scary strangers doing it." These are utterly anathema to huge chunks of society, especially American society. It's more and more clear, from the scope of the Epstein Files, just how much of American society and government has been influenced specifically to enable easy access to children by rich white men. Even beyond that, the entire right wing would instantly catch fire if we actually required effective sex education. Especially age-appropriate sex education going right down to kindergarten (yes, kindergarten: the better children that age understand what's normal and safe, the better they can communicate when someone is doing things to them that are not that...and I only stop at kindergarten because AFAIK that's the earliest mandated schooling still). Similarly, the right wing desperately wants to have absolute control over their children—treat them as property—so giving children rights that even parents have to respect will get them to oppose absolutely everything. Plus, as other sibling comments have already noted, the real desire here is for ubiquitous surveillance. CSAM is just the excuse they use.

throwaway89864 3mo ago
Somehow, even something as simple as "age-appropriate sex education going right down to kindergarten" would tend to end up "special interests education from vocal minority groups."
- danaris 3mo ago
  To be clear, I recognize that there is zero chance of genuine effective age-appropriate sex education being mandated in the foreseeable future in the US, nor has there been any such chance at any time in the past. I'm merely noting some of the things that would actually be helpful measures in combating CSA if it were possible to implement them. You're absolutely right that, even if such a mandate had already existed, it would've been erased or co-opted by right-wing groups by now.
  - throwaway89864 3mo ago

Hasz 3mo ago

Because it isn't about CSAM, IMO. You see this with plenty of social issues, notably firearms ownership. The claim is we will restrict/license/outlaw xyz for the kids, but really, a data-drive approach would have focused on different things entirely (eg additional behavioral health services for kids, suicide prevention etc) The same technology/access used for CSAM identification can find copyrighted files, materials that don't support current government, etc. Full E2E encryption seriously raises the cost of mass surveillance, and why the US government fights it at every turn going back 30 years.

mschuster91 3mo ago
> The claim is we will restrict/license/outlaw xyz for the kids, but really, a data-drive approach would have focused on different things entirely (eg additional behavioral health services for kids, suicide prevention etc) Well, most of Europe simply has banned guns in the hands of civilians instead, so that's some data as well. The only reason why the US is so extremely lax on firearms is because people keep blathering on about how guns are the last line of defense against a tyrannical government - and yet, what do the most rabid of these people do? Vote in and defend a literal tyrant.
- jaharios 3mo ago
  > Vote in a literal tyrant. Tyrant? You may disagree with him, but he got in through the system. Now if he doesn't get out that is another story.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
  - mallets 3mo ago
    Being a tyrant has little to do with term limits or office duration.
    - Ntrails 3mo ago
      A couple of dictionary checks suggest some set of: - Ruler who is unrestrained by law or constitution - A usurper of sovereignty - Ruler who uses power oppressively or unjustly Obviously b) is not applicable as per GP. He has also been constrained by the supreme court and others multiple times in this term, which suggests a) is a stretch. c) probably a fair accusation, though I'm not sure I would agree.

guerrilla 3mo ago

In Sweden we're going to literally have Minority Report style pre-crime registries for potential child molesters. We already have one for potential domestic abusers. Fuck this country. I need to get out of here before it gets worse.

hansvm 3mo ago
Say what now? What criteria do they use to scan the populace and create a pre-crime registry of any kind?
- SiempreViernes 3mo ago
  Probably there's only two criteria: "are you in any way foreign" or "do you vote for the left", that's the sort of government Sweden has these days.
wredcoll 3mo ago
What? Since when? What are you talking about?
Scroll_Swe 3mo ago
[flagged]
- marysol5 3mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Scroll_Swe 3mo ago
    [flagged]
- wredcoll 3mo ago
  I have an ancestor who was born there, it's now my country.
  - 3mo ago

manoDev 3mo ago

CSAM is the perfect trojan horse to undermine privacy everywhere. No politician and no company can oppose it on the grounds of protecting privacy before having the reputation ruined. Meanwhile the real pedos are rich people vacationing in well known places.

inigyou 3mo ago
Are you sure? Can't they say "yeah pedophilia is fucked up but reading all our emails is also fucked up"?
- LanceH 3mo ago
  > reading all our emails is also fucked up Why? are you hiding something in your email?
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    Nobody actually believes "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" but it's short for "I don't have the energy to deal with this when it's unlikely to actually create any consequences for me in particular"
    - LanceH 3mo ago
      > unlikely to actually create any consequences for me in particular I was this play out in relation to rules/laws applied to those under age. Like harsher and harsher anti-drinking law. The same people who I know were drinking underage have suddenly seen the light and believe someone's life should be destroyed for also drinking underage. Or drug testing. If using drugs is bad for some group of people, wouldn't it be even worse if the group overseeing them were to be using drugs? Start testing congress first.

Spooky23 3mo ago

The CSAM issue is both very real and abused by politicians. When I did some work with a police agency, it was explained to me that there’s a pattern of escalation with people and they tend to accumulate collections and many escalate to actual behavior. The detectives assigned to this work tend to not last long, and the horrific nature of the crime affects them. Like all rape, it’s a combo of control and dopamine. The church and Boy Scout leaders leveraged their societial influence and power to compel compliance and even loyalty from their victims. Boy Scouts as an organization inserted itself into existing power structures like church, police and other institutions. It’s difficult for a 11 year old victim to make an accusation about a beloved community figure. They also tend to find ways to make their victims feel complicit. Even if people come forward, they are hard cases to try and exposes young victims to public shame. Many of these people plea to lesser crimes to protect the victim. I wasn’t a victim thank god, but a Boy Scout leader at my parish was a serial molester who abused dozens or hundreds of children. I learned about it years later and realized that some of my friends were almost certainly victims — in his case everyone in authority just blew it off

lstodd 3mo ago
> When I did some work with a police agency, it was explained to me that there’s a pattern of escalation with people You have been mildly brainwashed. It would be best if that episode lead you to study a bit of psychology but instead you chose to believe. Like any belief it's a combo of control and dopamine. The feeling of belonging to a group and being righteous within that group hits so hard that it takes hard explicit effort to screen your perception of its effects. You are a victim because you failed to accept reality.
xyz1234999 3mo ago
> there’s a pattern of escalation with people and they tend to accumulate collections and many escalate to actual behavior I was curious about this. I did find some research here: https://www.suojellaanlapsia.fi/en/post/csam-users-in-the-dark-web-protecting-children-through-prevention https://www.suojellaanlapsia.fi/en/post/csam-users-in-the-da... (2021) That paper states > Traditional research on individuals who use CSAM is often inherently biased as it has focused primarily on convicted and known offenders. and appears to be directly trying to avoid that bias, which is good to see. Isn't there still some bias here though? They only got answers from 1. people who were using a dark web search engine with ads, 2. felt the need to click a "Help us to help you" link, 3. were willing to discuss the topic with strangers on the web. Only (3) was (almost) acknowledged in the Limitations section. They concluded that "Many CSAM users are not just viewers" and, while "many" could mean any number, I think readers would probably take it to mean something like 30% (shown in graphs) which isn't indicated by their data. Furthermore, the "not just viewers" conclusion is from a question about "seeking direct contact with children through online platforms". I'm not sure why they didn't more directly ask if respondents took action towards abusing children, with the inspecific "direct contact" qualifier and very specific qualifier "through online platforms". I wonder what the results would have been if they removed "direct" and "through online platforms" from the question. Admittedly I don't know a lot about statistical techniques! Has there been other research, or do you know what the police agency was basing their explanation on?

rootusrootus 3mo ago

> On the CSA side, you rarely hear about arrests (they happen but less than CSAM). Because it is nearly always someone we know. Someone who we just cannot imagine would ever do such a thing, even when the evidence is glaringly obvious. And I suspect that the fraction of the population diddling kids in real life is breathtaking, and nobody really wants to face that head on. Too uncomfortable. I could just be overly cynical today. But given my own experiences and other people I've known throughout my life, I really believe it is very common.

brabel 3mo ago
I thought it had never happened around me in my whole life, but my sister recently told me that when she just in primary school, a friend of my dad gave her a lift and while she was in the car, inserted his fingers on her. Like WTF! I really had no idea this could have happened in my environment. I guess it probably happened more than I know to others too uncomfortable to say anything, took my sister 30 years to say something.
- pixl97 3mo ago
  I've talked to so many women about their sexual abuse that it seems harder to find someone that has not been abused. What's worse is how many people are involved in covering it up, keeping it hidden, and ensuring the perpetrators are never caught.

hn_acker 3mo ago

> There doesn't seem to be any real push for educating and protecting kids before it happens. Before abstinence and birth control, CSA prevention should be the primary goal of sex ed in schools, especially before high school. (Though on birth control [1] and probably STIs as well the US is not doing well.) [1] https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/sex-education/sex-education-laws-and-state-attacks https://www.plannedparenthoodaction.org/issues/sex-education...

throwaway2037 3mo ago

> yet almost nothing seems to be done to prevent CSA > On the CSA side, ... [t]here doesn't seem to be any real push for educating and protecting kids before it happens. This is a mighty wide brush you are painting with. When I was growing up, from very early (elementary school), we had "health class" where the teacher would teach you things about your body and health. This also included who is allowed to see you naked and/or touch your private parts. They also explained how to get help if someone what touching you inappropriately. That effort seems pretty active to me. > I personally know of 1 who took a leak across from a playground at 2am walking home from the bars and was put on the sex offender registry because it was within 500'. Urinating in public late at night is an interesting category of inprobably CSA-labeled behaviour. It should be treated with kid gloves -- the context matters.

rationalist 3mo ago
> This also included who is allowed to see you naked and/or touch your private parts. They also explained how to get help if someone what touching you inappropriately. That effort seems pretty active to me. My school did not cover that (but at least my parents did).

basilikum 3mo ago

To play devil's advocate: child abuse is usually a crime without direct evidence. CSAM is child abuse but the perpetrator films their crime as evidence. Everyone else who obtains and keeps this material also holds evidence against themselves as the possession of it is the crime. Now for real: People often do not care a lot about child abuse. It does not affect them as it happens in private where they do not see it. CSAM however does affect them as it makes the abuse visible and shows something deemed reprehensible. In a lot of ways people see themselves being witness (even indirect by purely hearing about it) to CSAM as the victim rather than the children who are harmed in the making and by redistribution. My cynical opinion is that it is a lot more about social norms and feelings arising from the violation of these norms rather than the harm done through the violation of children.

skissane 3mo ago
> CSAM is child abuse but the perpetrator films their crime as evidence This isn't entirely true. In much of the Western world – outside the US – CSAM (or equivalent legal terms such as "child pornography", "child abuse material", "child exploitation material", etc) can include text, drawings, AI-generated imagery, etc, which no child was abused to create, indeed the child depicted in it may be entirely fictional. Canadian law goes so far as to treat material which "advocates or counsels" the commission of CSA as CSAM - which the Supreme Court of Canada insisted (in the 2001 case of R v Sharpe) doesn't include mere political advocacy for its legalisation (as in e.g. the NAMBLA Bulletin), although some will question whether that insistence actually cashes out in practice. Now, as a father of school-aged children, I find the whole idea of groups like NAMBLA rather abhorrent – but, I'm hesitant about the government making it illegal for people to express abhorrent ideas, because there are likely ideas which you or I hold which somebody out there considers abhorrent.
- throwaway85825 3mo ago
  Not every problem can be fixed by making it illegal.
- basilikum 3mo ago
  Fictional erotica portraying fictional children is not CSAM. There is no child abuse taking place as there is no child in the first place. Conflating the two is 1. wrong as a matter of fact and ethics and 2. a great injustice to the victims of child abuse. This is exactly what I wrote about in the second part of my comment. People see themselves as the victim of CSAM or proclaimed CSAM through being witness to it. In fictional works there is no child who could be the victim showing very clearly what these people are really about. They are not primarily concerned about children being exploited but they do not like the existence of such material as them deem it offensive to themselves. CSAM is a very real crime; including cases where real children are not physically harmed but get sexualized through the composition of the material. It is a crime because it violates children, not because it is offensive to societal norms.

basilikum 3mo ago

> I personally know of 1 who took a leak across from a playground at 2am walking home from the bars and was put on the sex offender registry because it was within 500'. You might want to look up if that's actually true. It might be. It might also be a lie to hide the real reason why they are registered.

dijit 3mo ago
on the flip side, imagine if it's true and everyone immediately suspects that you're a pedophile trying to appear innocent. Talk about tainted for life.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
teaearlgraycold 3mo ago
What’s up with the cop that cited them for that?
- dijit 3mo ago
  in my limited experience with the law, they tend to really go for you if you aren't the kind of person who enjoys breaking the law. It's almost like they can spot an easy target. Deal drugs and conduct yourself violently in society, sit with a gang and destroy property... Police seem to have a hard time with you. Push someone over who is threatening to knock your teeth out when you're walking with your wife and kids... that's an assault charge, because naively you explained what happened to the police, and they're going to make sure you see the inside of a court room for it.
  - BloodyIron 3mo ago
    Quotas?
    - dijit 3mo ago

seanmcdirmid 3mo ago

CSAM laws in many jurisdictions include computer generated or hand crafted media that do not pre-require CSA at all. The idea is that deviance leads to CSA, and by cracking down on CSAM, we are preventing CSA.

teaearlgraycold 3mo ago
The US constitution should require proof of harm to a living thing as a prerequisite for criminal charges.
brabel 3mo ago
This is such a slippery slope. It amounts to thought police. You did not actually cause any harm, but thought of doing something. Where do we stop ? If I fantasize about my pretty coworker without her consent, am I a rapist now? What if I make a sketch of her naked? Is that a crime? What if I ask AI to remove her clothes from a real picture? Even if I just immediately delete it?? I guess that there’s different levels to each “offense”, and at one level it does become criminal, but it’s hard to unequivocally decide where.
- seanmcdirmid 3mo ago
  I don’t agree or disagree. It is political suicide however, to argue for saner laws in this area even if you think that the current ones aren’t sane.

NordStreamYacht 3mo ago

These laws are a pretext to remove anonymity on the internet and insert backdoors into everything.

matheusmoreira 3mo ago

It's not about children. It was never about children. How many politicians have gotten caught in Epstein's island by now? It's all about surveilling the masses and keeping them under control. Children are merely one of the political weapons they use to make the masses accept any proposed solution, no matter how Orwellian. You're not against protecting children from drug trafficking, money laundering, child molesting terrorists, are you?

nsonha 3mo ago

I don't know how to say this and not sound like a CSAM or CSA offender but CSAM policing sounds too much thought policing to me, if you wanna police CSA just go and do it, don't police what people have in their mind.

BLKNSLVR 3mo ago

The lowest of the low hanging political points scoring fruit will be picked. I make this point on HN each time it comes up: Dealing with actual CSA requires actual people going to investigate actual reports of children's living conditions out in the real world, not "scanning digital files". Seems obvious when you say it like that, but the alternative seems to still score heavily on the political scale. Ironically, spending more money on "scanning digital files" takes away from resources that could prevent those digital files from being created in the first place, so all the additional time, money, and effort towards combatting CSAM is time, money, and effort specifically _not_ working against stopping CSA. It's categorically _not_ protecting the children. Teachers, in Australia at least, have mandatory reporting where any kind of abuse is suspected. The heart-breaking irony is that the resources to investigate the reports are so scarce that they can only respond to reports where the child's life is in immediate danger. Caveat: the above was true a few years ago, I genuinely don't know if it's still true. What I do know is that 'social work' isn't suddenly a high paying job, so I doubt resource availability has changed much. There is no easy answer to this. It's entirely nuance.

EagnaIonat 3mo ago
> Seems obvious when you say it like that, That's exactly what happens. CSAM has two parts to it. The first is the known and most horrific videos of CP out there. These aren't shared, instead only hashes are used to determine if the image/video matches. It's next to impossible to get an mis-hit on that. The second is nudity and age detection AI. Apple has this on their devices, but warns the user before sharing not reporting. It normally takes more than one hit to get flagged for investigation. At that point law enforcement are informed and take over. The majority of investigations are children sending naked pictures of themself to their friends. So it is absolutely being used as the purpose to protect children and it's amazing how many people don't realise how it works when they are very transparent about it. Of course it is not without its issues that need to fixed. For example providers will just ban the person before it's determined if they broke a law or not.
- basilikum 3mo ago
  What you are describing is indiscriminate mass surveillance. There is absolutely nothing stopping Apple or whoever maintains that listof hashes from putting things other than child abuse on there, like dissident memes for example. It also requires devices to run this spyware without a way to disable it. The natural consequence of this is to ban everything but government approved, restricted OSes and to outlaw devices capable of running anything but these. Mandatory CSAM scanning is part of the war on general computing and privacy.

sneak 3mo ago

It’s nothing to do with CSAM and all about surveilling who has which files and when, and who they send them to. Even ADP in iCloud sends the hashes of the plaintext to Apple, non-e2ee. This allows them to see who has unique files, and when, and the networks of users to which they spread, and when.

superxpro12 3mo ago

Yeah DUH. its a trojan horse to eliminate any privacy in the populace, except for the government and elites, of course. They get privacy. You dont. How else are they going to maintain control over the populace?

Kalibr 3mo ago

Arresting for CSAM is easy and brings in a lot of money. It’s a slam dunk case for just possession. Investigating and prosecuting people for CSA takes a lot of manpower and time for single case and not nearly as profitable. As usual, follow the money.

one33seven 3mo ago

It is not about CSAM, it's about scanning our data. If it were about kids safety there would be lots of people in jail

Cthulhu_ 3mo ago

Theory besides what others have said: remove the supply and you affect the demand. That's the theory anyway, I'm not sure it works like that; to make a parallel, punishing drug users didn't affect dealers/supply networks.

elil17 3mo ago

My thought is that many different stakeholders have reasons to focus on CSAM: - Prosecutors want to go after it because it is much easier to prove than CSA. - Authoritarians want to go after it because it gives them a chance to get things like ID checks accepted by the public. - People who genuinely want to prevent CSA focus on it because a large amount of CSAM is made by serial abusers - so capturing producers can prevent future abuse. Additionally, they believe (with good reasons) that CSAM consumption is a gateway to CSA and CSAM production for many people. Further, finding CSAM can be a way to identify and rescue children from abusive situations. - CSA survivors may advocate for it often feel traumatized not just by the abuse, but by the fact that people might be continuously viewing that abuse. - Going after it winds up creating digital forensics specialists and task forces, which creates a special interest group within police departments which wants to continue focusing on CSAM but is not set up to do anything about CSA. I would recommend the podcast Hunting Warhead to anyone interested in learning more about this.

benj111 3mo ago

I'd like to know the link between availability of csam and CSA. There seems to be an assumption that the former causes the latter. That's not to say it's acceptable if illegally produced. We have issues in the UK. So far they've banned 'rape' porn. And now they're talking about 'barely legal' None of this seems to be based on any statistics showing this is actually harmful in any way.

inigyou 3mo ago
If they ban "barely legal" the next thing will be "barely not barely legal" and they'll ban that, and they'll have "barely not barely not barely legal" and so on...

miki123211 3mo ago

CSA doesn't neatly fit into a narrative. If there's a person committing abuse against a child, usually a family member in their own household, there's no story there. They (hopefully) get arrested, get a minor mention in the media if that, and life moves on. If, on the other hand, they send CSAM using a platform, device or protocol, then clearly the makers of that technology failed to uphold their sacred duty to protect the child. If most CSAM cases happen using a few major technologies (and they will, because societies tend to standardize on what technologies they use for communication), the technologies get blamed for the problem they supposedly enable. If you dislike the technology for other reasons (the distrust of corporations from left-leaning politicians, censorship allegations on the right, a moral panic about the impact of smartphones on children's mental health), you can use people's misunderstanding of statistics to exaggerate the CSAM problem, blame the tech, and gain some notion of control over it in a way that is politically palatable to citizens. It's worth saying explicitly that centralization doesn't have much to do with this. We've seen similar stories play out with bicycles, Walkmans, pagers, AI, heavy metal and Uber rapes. They were different moral panics, but the mechanic was roughly the same. I think the situation wouldn't change much if we all used PGP-encrypted email over personal mail servers to communicate. An exception that proves the rule is the moral panic over CSA in primarily-catholic countries, notably relating to abuse committed by catholic priests, which are statistically no more likely to commit it than anybody else. As the influence of the Church on government policy is a hotly-debated topic in those countries, CSA is suddenly an issue that people can use to further their political causes.

0dayz 3mo ago
Sorry but I'm intrigued, what was the moral panic about bicycles and Walkman?
- inigyou 3mo ago
  And pagers?
  - miki123211 3mo ago
    https://newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/the-forgotten-war-on-beepers https://newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/the-forgotten-war... https://pessimistsarchive.org/cat/bicycle https://pessimistsarchive.org/cat/bicycle https://pessimistsarchive.org/list/walkman https://pessimistsarchive.org/list/walkman

setgree 3mo ago

First, I think it’s likely that you hear more about one than the other because you read websites like Hacker News and are not (I assume) an FBI agent or someone else who works on this stuff. A public defender I know would say that child abuse of all sorts is ever-present and relevant to their work, unfortunately. Second, detecting CSAM leads to its producers who are by definition abusers. Here’s a nice article in Wired about the digital forensics of cracking down on a CSAM ring with some interesting details about the role played by crypto, and abusers’ misconceptions about it: https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-video-crypto-anonymity-myth/ https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-v... With that said, I agree that a lot of political concern for this is a smokescreen for a creating more surveillance. “think of the children!” has the flavor of a rhetorical trump card.

KaiserPro 3mo ago

> yet almost nothing seems to be done to prevent CSA. for the UK, there has been a massive shift to prevent this kind of stuff. anyone who even volunteers with children or vulnerable adults needs to be screened. Charities are required to have policies for dealing with vulnerable people safely. but to the point, Apple halfarse CSAM reporting. Whatsapp which doesn't do "CSAM scanning" reports in one hour more CSAM than apple does in a year. From memory meta (instgram, facebook and whatsapp) reported millions of cases of CSAM for 2021, compared to apple's ~250 (not thousand, just 250) for facebook its automated scanning, but for whatsapp, its just design. its really obvious how to report a message/image. in imessage, its impossible, there is no mechanism to long press/select/other a message. Now, Facebook are bastards in virtually every way, but for whatsapp at least, they have made GUI changes that have real positive impact on CSAM protection. Apple has not. They made some noise about hashing, but thats invasive and ironically noisier than having user reports.

john_strinlai 3mo ago
>anyone who even volunteers with children or vulnerable adults needs to be screened as far as i am aware, that is common practice in many countries. the problem is that screening is typically a quick check of "has this person been suspected or arrested for something involving minors already" and perhaps a few questions on a piece of paper. its not like they give everyone volunteering for a fieldtrip an extensive 1:1 with a psychologist and an mri. any predator who has not previously been caught will easily pass screening. >From memory meta (instgram, facebook and whatsapp) reported millions of cases of CSAM for 2021, compared to apple's ~250 (not thousand, just 250) easy enough to explain. instagram and facebook are social media with billions of public posts. whatsapp is in a similar enough boat, with large (up to 1000 participants?) facebook-like groups of otherwise strangers and a lot of marketing and inertia for social-media-like use. i imagine instagram is a majority of it. it's disgusting on there. on the other hand, apple is not a social media company nor facilitates large group chats (imessage goes up to 32 participants). i doubt adding an easier UX for reporting would make a material difference in the number of reports apple submits because you're typically already talking with people you know when using imessage.
- 3mo ago

summerlight 3mo ago

There is a pretty simple yet disappointing reason. CSAM is much easier to investigate and prosecute. You got evidence, you prosecute. Almost guaranteed conviction. You can even enforce big tech to implement proactive monitoring systems. Compared to this, CSA is much harder. Every case is different. You have to do due diligence. And it is extremely hard to proactively detect them. Careful criminals will destroy all evidence. The number of case itself is smaller. And there is a good chance to lose in the court and for prosecutors this is a clearly risky move. Good ol' criminal investigation is expensive. There is a structural reason not to prioritize them. The whole incentive structure is broken. The only thing to fix this is external pressure, but even it does not work these days. Exposing CSA is a rare event but media needs constant, sensitive headlines so they tend to treat CSA and CSAM like the same thing. Hence external pressures do not work, and even worse those work in a wrong way. This creates a bad feedback loop.

gradschool 3mo ago

> This has even extended to fictional CSAM such as AI generated stories and pictures. Peripheral to your comment, there is an argument against AI generated CSAM that no one seems to be making so allow me. AI will do the same for CSAM as it has already done for copyright laundering. That is, it will enable its distributors to train their models on real CSAM while obscuring the training material. A legal regime that permits unrestricted distribution of AI generated CSAM incentivizes actual abuse as a source of training material. If one opposes legal prohibitions on free speech grounds, then at a minimum there should be an audit requirement incumbent on AI generated CSAM distributors to document their process in sufficient detail as to establish that they haven't used actual CSAM for training, similarly to the way porn distributors are required to document that their models are of legal age.

marysol5 3mo ago

>yet almost nothing seems to be done to prevent CSA. >that many of the people actually arrested are arrested for CSAM and not CSA So there are, or there aren't arrests? Also you hear about CSA arrests all the damn time. If anything it's underplayed in the media somewhat when they're a specific people.