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0 pointsgnfargbl2y ago0 comments

> Most child abuse comes from family members (which must be solved at the source)

Yes. Since becoming an abuser is a process and not a moment, part of the solution must be making access to CSAM much harder.

> And no, we are not 'condoning' it when we declare E2EE an overall good thing.

Agreed. I'm sorry if I worded things in a way that caused you to see an implication which was not intended. To be clear: E2EE is a good thing. Championing E2EE is not equivalent to condoning CSAM.

What I did say is that in failing to try and provide any meaningful solutions to this unintended consequence of E2EE, the industry is effectively condoning the problem.

> This is a standard utilitarian tradeoff

If that's the best we can do, I'm very disappointed. That position says that to achieve privacy, I must tolerate CSAM. I want both privacy and for us not to tolerate CSAM. I don't know what the solution is, but that is what I wish the industry were aiming for. At the moment, the industry seems to be aiming for nothing but a shrug of the shoulders.

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pseudalopex2y ago

It is not clear if access to child pornography increases, decreases, or has no significant effect on child sex abuse.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relationship_between_child_por...

autoexec2y ago

We have all this AI now, maybe give the people who want that stuff realistic enough victimless content and we can see if cases drop? It seems like we're approaching a time when the technology makes it possible to test the theory and get an answer anyway.

danbruc2y ago

That position says that to achieve privacy, I must tolerate CSAM. I want both privacy and for us not to tolerate CSAM.

Not true, you can have privacy and at the same time not tolerate child pornography, those are two perfectly compatible positions and arguably the current state. What you can not have - by definition - is privacy on the one hand and on the other hand no privacy in order to look for child pornography. You can still fight child pornography in any other way, but when it comes to privacy, you have to make a choice - give people their privacy or look through their stuff for illegal content, you can not have both. If you have enough evidence, a judge might even grant law enforcement the permission for privacy violating measures, it should just not be the default position that your privacy gets violated.

salawat2y ago

...Now that, is a well conceived viewpoint, but I still argue policy-wise, that no penalties can conscionably be assessed for failure to engage in said activity without spreading the taint of deputization, which de-facto unmakes your stance. As a government deputy, you don't have that privacy. If you are not compelled to act as a deputy of the State, I can accept you escalating to NCMEC, but we also have to accept there is no recourse for providers who turn a blind eye to the whole thing.

Failure to recognize this perpetuates the fundamental inconsistency.

Manuel_D2y ago

> Yes. Since becoming an abuser is a process and not a moment, part of the solution must be making access to CSAM much harder.

This is a very big assumption. Sexual abuse of minors has existed long before the internet, and long before photography. The notion that less availability of CSAM leads to less real-world abuse is not at all clear.

> If that's the best we can do, I'm very disappointed. That position says that to achieve privacy, I must tolerate CSAM. I want both privacy and for us not to tolerate CSAM. I don't know what the solution is, but that is what I wish the industry were aiming for. At the moment, the industry seems to be aiming for nothing but a shrug of the shoulders.

As other commenters have pointed out, the solution is to prevent children from being abused in the first place. Have robust systems in place to address abuse, and give kids effective education and somewhere to speak out if it happens to them or someone they know.

BLKNSLVR2y ago

> Since becoming an abuser is a process and not a moment, part of the solution must be making access to CSAM much harder.

In my opinion CSAM is a symptom, not a cause.

It's difficult to "stumble across" that kind of material unless you're already actively looking for it, which means some amount of "damage" is already done.

I also highly doubt that someone with no proclivities in that direction would 'turn' as a result of stumbling across CSAM. I'd guess they'd go the other way and be increasingly horrified by it.

tstrimple2y ago

> It's difficult to "stumble across" that kind of material unless you're already actively looking for it

It's entirely likely that borderline cases (15-17 years old) are seen by millions of people without them realizing it. Pornhub is a popular "mainstream" porn website that has issues with CSAM and routinely removes it when found. It's entirely possible for "normal" consumers of pornographic material to stumble into CSAM in places like that unknowingly. When you're talking about obviously prepubescent children, I'm in full agreement that it's almost always restricted to folks who seek it out explicitly.

Guvante2y ago

Your logic is flawed fundamentally.

Should we disallow encrypted traffic between machines because that encrypted traffic could be CSAM?

Saying "X is bad so we should be rid of it" requires a method to get rid of it.

Obviously giving up privacy and allowing more surveillance can reduce something but that isn't necessarily the right choice.

Like what do you do if they start sharing in files the user encrypts?

phpisthebest2y ago

>>That position says that to achieve privacy, I must tolerate CSAM. I want both privacy and for us not to tolerate CSAM.

I want to have more money than Elon Musk..... sometimes life is not fair and we can not always get what we want...

Any "backdoor" or "frontdoor" in encryption is a total failure of encryption. That is a immutable truth, more fixed in reality than the speed of light is in physics.

dimmke2y ago

This is the part that's really infuriating to me that I've seen in several comments - this implication that the onus is on programmers or people who work in technology to somehow figure out a way to do this impossible thing, as if nobody has tried. And then they have the gall to say something like "I want both privacy and for us not to tolerate CSAM." without proposing any kind of theoretical solution.

If you can't even propose a hypothetical science fiction-esque way of achieving this, much less one that might actually be implementable now or in the near future (like, 5-10 years), you shouldn't get to have that opinion.

dmvdoug2y ago

Come on, now. People are entitled to have any opinion at all. Even exceptionally ridiculous ones.

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