EU, UK and USA risk of being the most oppressive regimes because those countries actually have a culture and history of being able to enforce laws and rules.
This will never stop with “protecting the children”. Very shortly they’ll start asking why we wouldn’t use the same technology against terrorism. don’t you want to be safe are you supporting terrorists that will say.
The problem with terrorism is that it’s very easy for everyone to be categorized as a terrorist(notice how much many terrorists there is than terror attacks), and this needs very very wide access and total control over the public.
I'd like to advance a more productive argument for pro-privacy tech people. Often the reply is to claim that governments are lying when they try to 'protect children' and the like.
Having at least some experience with international police orgs, I can say that significant resources are dedicated to online crime (including CSAM) and their 'lived reality' is very much expending significant resources because e2e prevents low-cost surveillance.
So the attack line that 'none of this is sincere' is actively unhelpful -- since so much of it is sincere, it comes across at best naïve.
A better line, imv, is this: assume present goverments are entirely sincere. It doesnt matter. We cannot know the intentions of future governments. And we have good reasons to suppose that governments, in general, require extraordinary systems of checks-and-balances to be prevented from abuse of power.
So I'd advise not attacking people who are, very often, actually thinking of the children -- you're just antagonising the people in power. Rather, invite them to help you defend the liberal order of individual human rights that prevent state abuse of power. As a matter of fact, they really arent actually trying to create a secret police.
Enabling state abuse of power has a far far higher negative outcome than marginal increases to the difficulty of policing some crimes. In many cases, police agencies can find ways into criminal networks and can access messages using traditional policing.
A better rhetorical strategy here is supporting policing, providing significant additional tech expert resources to police, significant funding for 'online detectives' -- whilst at the same time explaining the high risk against mass state incursion into all aspects of our lives.
> Having at least some experience with international police orgs, I can say that significant resources are dedicated to online crime (including CSAM) and their 'lived reality' is very much expending significant resources because e2e prevents low-cost surveillance.
Yes, good police work costs money. Considering the importance of child sex abuse this shouldn't be an issue. And how effective do they think this is going to be? Obviously once a few people are caught the pedos are going to find another way of sharing their filth. Either offline or more obscure apps. Meaning the old police work like infiltration will be necessary again. Meanwhile us citizens end up with surveillance forever.
It's not going to help the children, it's only going to make life worse for everyone.
> So I'd advise not attacking people who are, very often, actually thinking of the children -- you're just antagonising the people in power. Rather, invite them to help you defend the liberal order of individual human rights that prevent state abuse of power. As a matter of fact, they really arent actually trying to create a secret police.
I doubt that. The US has done exactly that already since 2001. It's pretty clear to me that Europe just wants to follow suit. The boys want their toys.
And they are antagonising us obviously. What I don't understand is how they themselves want to live in a society where their every word is being monitored.
I don't think the US' overreaction to terrorism and online security threats in 2001 was an attempt to spy on citizens in general. Legal grey areas made that possible, and it is the 'obvious' thing to do when you're setting up a digital security infrastructure.
The first duty of a government is to preserve the existence of the state (incl. society, etc.) -- when faced with apparent existential threats, they often severely overreact.
Very few people's intentions here are to 'monitor' every word of every citizen -- this is really a strange, i think quite naive, misreading of the situation. That might be the net consequence, to some degree, but basically no one involved intends it.
And if you go around thinking this, and accusing people of it, I don't think you're going to be very effective.
Rather each person involved is just laser focused on preventing existential threats to the state. Secret police, and so on, even arent a real attempt to monitor citizens -- theyre just to prevent a rebellion, ie., an existential threat.
Large scale online crime is a threat to the state -- mass organised crime, new digital mafias etc. present a rival to the state's monopoly on violence, and it has a duty to prevent this from happening. Almost 'at all costs'.
If it were ever to be that online life became sufficiently unmonitorable that mass organisation of criminal networks were made possible, we'd really not be talking about 'privacy' at all -- see, for example, developing nations where this is status quo.
I suspect the reality is that we're rich enough to support a basically effecitve police force, and most importantly, not to have large pools of desperate young people with no jobs. This is really what enables us to make these demands for rights.
The logic of state action is basically well-motivated, even if it has to be prevented for the high negative concequences it may have.
Unfortunately arguments like that don't make much political sense since those capabilities already exists. It isn't technical measures that protect rights but laws. A government could be draconian without surveillance technology. This sort of argument mainly appeals to technologist trying to deal with that they are making bank off private information.
Snowden's "turnkey tyranny"-argument is okay but requires specific knowledge and imagines things that haven't happened which therefor is open to interpretation.
I think the only real way to prevent something like this is to provide an alternative but that is also unlikely since it implies responsibility which the tech industry doesn't like.
Alternative to what exactly? Where is detailed methodology of planning CSAM? Where are trusted data that shows how many real abusers are on platforms like those mentioned to be monitored? Where are warrants that those data collection won't be abused by officials?
There will always be other platforms that provide secure communication for sharing illegal files. Massive collection of child porn sounds perfect for potential consumers.
Also, most of child abuser's are among people that are not strangers to victims, so they don't even need IM for communication.
It is not sincere because the sincere use case will be <1% of the real use case.
In the case of encryption, when you design it broken, it is broken for everyone.
So when you assume to spy on “criminals” (which could be some gay guy you want to put to death), you need to assume that they can spy on you as well (North Korea looking at Interpol).
I think in this case, those prosecuting the change are not incompetent, or more precisely those prosecuting the breaking of encryption behind the scenes are quite competent. They just believe they can keep a secret, which they can’t.
Those involved with CSAM et al are competent as well in their field, but don’t realize they are the pawn they are.
The politicians though, sure, incompetent. No politician in the United States has an engineering degree, for example. So they are stupid enough to follow what someone tells them. Stupidity and fear and wonderful in others if you have an agenda.
Never attribute incompetence to a professional politics body.
Those people are basically never acting on incompetence, or on competence for that matter. And stop trying to make excuses for people caught in malicious acts again and again.
Precisely. If your job is a legislator, competence (or ability to delegate it) is part of the job description and, if you believe in democracy, a moral imperative. Thus, incompetence IS malice in such cases.
There is such thing as wilful ignorance, as Aristotle condemned it millennia ago, and it is morally reprehensible.
> And we have good reasons to suppose that governments, in general, require extraordinary systems of checks-and-balances to be prevented from abuse of power.
Look up this guy Snowden and the secret surveillance and rubber-stamping courts he exposed. So much for checks and balances lol.
What I don't understand is how career politicians could possibly not already understand how tyrannical governments can take advantage of draconian policies after a supposedly benevolent government is replaced. They 1) don't understand this principle which is absolutely terrifying and frankly implausible 2) understand and don't care, better to save hundreds of children now and let the continent of billions be crushed undet authoritarianism later or 3) they actually are just doing a "think of the children" to get the power they want.
None of those options make me think informing them of the the error of their ways will yield any fruit.
It's not a fallacy if you have a causal mechanism.
I think it's fairly well-evidenced by history that there are many mechanisms by which states 'backslide' into abuse (indeed, that's the term used today).
Human rights are an invention of liberal states, hard won, against state power -- why have any at all?
> As a matter of fact, they really arent actually trying to create a secret police.
Then why aren't they working in the caring for kids who've been abused? THAT's the infastructure that need more resources, and they bloody hell know it. Finding CSAM is not what needs more resources.
We as the tech community have the power to prevent something like this by developing open software and hardware, and an anonymous P2P encrypted communication platform (that doesn't require anything like a phone number for creating an account). Even if they were able to ban people running unauthorized phones/computers, if we reached the point that open devices were cheap/easy enough to self-assemble there'd be nothing they could do to stop it (short of doing deep packet inspection on every single connection to disconnect any encrypted connection, which even China doesn't do as it's extremely impractical).
So the downside of this is that countries are moving to register the radio of the phone again an id.
It's a cat and mouse attempt to identify who is doing what and to "stop the terroists".. it ends up that bad people just end up getting sim mules to register sims.
Why can't we just declare war on this. Find their entry points where they submit the data and just stuff their services until this gets rolled back?
Edit: I know that's a pretty harsh and aggressive thing to say, but it's a protest against an police action that was forced upon people without consent.
I don’t get why we can’t just define let’s say up to 100 people as private and more than 100 people as public when it comes to chat.
The fact that we treat groups with 10.000 people on chat with the same level of privacy as 1:1 or 100 people seems like an unreasonable thing from a harm prevention alternative.
There’s enough nuance in hanging out with your closest friends and acquaintances in private manners but not applying the same to 10.000 people.
From a harm prevention perspective that would slow down the proliferation of material and distribution vectors a lot while maintaining practical privacy for 90% of usecases.
Not just an abstract "the government" that can scan your chats. This implies people all along the chain (from operators to politicians, for profit or power), private companies involved in this, processes (from sophisticated AIs to dumb pattern matching) labelling you, and future governments/policies that may reframe innocent present phrases with future meanings.
Not just sign this petition, electorally punish every party and politician pushing this.
I dont understand what they even want to achieve with this. People supporting terrorism are not even hiding anymore in europe - like literarily displaying their support for terrorist actions out in the open as if it’s some sort of democratic right - and the government wants to monitor _me_ and _my_ chats? Bruv..
This will never stop with “protecting the children”. Very shortly they’ll start asking why we wouldn’t use the same technology against terrorism. don’t you want to be safe are you supporting terrorists that will say.
The problem with terrorism is that it’s very easy for everyone to be categorized as a terrorist(notice how much many terrorists there is than terror attacks), and this needs very very wide access and total control over the public.