The NSA's mandate concerns sigint, so that's what they do. Other entities (eg the PCLOB and federal courts) can constrain it, and the NSA constrains itself proactively to avoid embarrassments. The current result is a tradeoff between surveillance/security and privacy: NSA policy is that they can listen to foreign suspects' conversations, including if Americans are on the call. Metadata is collected on calls two "hops" from a suspect. Whether it's the right tradeoff is an interesting debate.
The article uses innuendo to suggest that nonconsensual videos were very popular on the platform and that its proposed policies will improve performers' conditions. These questions are not seriously examined, but the article is focused on sensational stories and big numbers while skipping context and consequences.
"Do you think all violence is wrong, or only murder?" Of course there are degrees. I don't really see the gotcha here -- if you found out your favorite anime or Pixar movie was animated by slaves, would you still be able to enjoy it?
It wasn't supposed to be a gotcha. Coerced work is bad, especially so if the work is damaging to the worker. My point is that this isn't specific to sex work. Products produced by workers under wage slavery can be avoided using supply chain management, while promoting ethical labor practices that permit workers security and independence. A tradeoff exists between reducing risk of nonconsenting work while enabling consenting work.
Similarly, policies are available that can enable safe and consensual sex work. Supposedly "well intentioned" policies that reduce workers' social and financial support system are moves in the wrong direction: abuse is enabled by isolation and marginalization.
I didn't advocate for any policies though. As I said, it's a "moral argument against consuming" (or buying) sex work. If you want to run the risk of r-ping someone, or getting off to r-pe videos, that's a choice made by many; I just think very few are honest about it.
that you don't give to sex work because "you just don't know".
We never know, but odds are the best way to know is by encouraging workers to report abuse. Something the tech industry has institutionally failed upon over the deacdes to do despite being shown as "honest, intellectual work".
>if you found out your favorite anime or Pixar movie was animated by slaves
There are degrees, apparently.
But for the sake of reducto ad absurdum: If there was an entire sweatshop of talented slave labor making Toy Story, I'd be impressed first, and then mortified. But I guess my brain just ticks differently in that regard. Maybe I've just seen/heard enough evil that these "revelations" are surprising but not taking me completely off guard.
Bodies are used commercially all the time, such as in manual labor, physical therapy, disability care, security, policing, military service, athletics, dancing, commercial modeling, ...
The problem that's particular to sex work is legal systems that fail to prevent coercion. This is exacerbated by religious advocacy groups that try to make sex work harder without making it safer.
It seems that you equate sex to manual labour, when it is one of our important biosocial functions (if not the central) that involves much more complex reactions and distortions at all sides (a prostitute, a client, an aware neighborhood/society) than kicking a shovel into the dirt or massaging a muscle. It’s always baffling how some people try to render it as just a mechanical process akin to workout and/or blowing a nose. If it’s kind of the same, why hiding it from kids and not serving clients right on the squares, like hotdog stands do.
gp: The more that is normalised, the more it damages all women - not just prostitutes
I’d argue it damages society as a whole. Even if prostitutes and all women could be fine and safe by some magic mean, distorted concepts of a “succesful social woman” hit men back as well.
I don't equate sex to manual labor, they are of course different. But it won't do to reduce manual labor or disability care to "kicking a shovel into the dirt" either. Each of the physical occupations I listed plays a critical social role and involves the mind and body of its occupants in a unique and significant way. See Metaspencer's critique on this point, "what is a knowledge worker".[1]
Much of the criticism of normalizing sex work seems to be masking a motivation based in religious morality which considers sex shameful. I believe that adequately protected professionals can be successful in sex work, just as they can in other fields.
>It’s always baffling how some people try to render it as just a mechanical process akin to workout and/or blowing a nose.
at the end of the day, that's all it is. There will be people who put more thought and care into the action and treat it as an intimate ritual to be done on special occasion, and then there will be people who treat it as another biological commodity to manage like food or air. People do so regarding various other activities after all.
I don't think either viewpoint is invalid. it comes down the individual like every other action in our lives. but the argument here that it "damages women" arguably harms both of the described behaviors. One for feeling the action "binds" them to people that may otherwise be (or have become), incompatible or even toxic to them. But they were inside so they gotta stick around. And the other for making it increasingly difficult to perform an activity they enjoy.
> It’s always baffling how some people try to render it as just a mechanical process
I am equally baffled by people who try to render it as some supernatural mystical magical soul-corrupting[0] process ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
[0] unless done between a married man and woman in the missionary position with the lights off for the sole purpose of reproduction and neither of them enjoys it, of course
I think parent means "paying somebody so that you can physically use their body".
Clearly, paying somebody to use their own body to e.g. pitch hay for you isn't much different from paying them to use their own body to do any other kind of physical labour for you.
Paying people to be physically intimate with you is definitely different. But it's worth considering cases that don't involve sex: carers dress you, they wash you, including your sex organs and your arse, and they clean up after you.
All that is definitely physically intimate - arguably much more intimate than a 15-minute bump-and-grind session with a person that despises you.
If the two parties consent to the action and transaction, there's no business difference. governments have just decided one action is illegal while the other not.
I don't think that distinction is useful on this question. Lots of non-sex physical work involves just being present, and lots of sex work involves skill.
I agree the perpetrators are to blame for violence and the poverty/abuse to blame for victims' inability to obtain redress. But the legal system has a role to play in ensuring noncoercion and empowering workers, which it's currently failing at.
That said, OP's claims on the concealed religious motivation and the negative effects of current sex work policies on consenting workers are essentially true.[1]
The president of the Adult Performance Artist Guild has written about the negative consequences of MasterCard's restrictive policies for performers ("I have received numerous reports of workers being removed and having no way to pay the bills because their income was taken away").[2]
Unfortunately sex work research shows that closing sites like Backpage does reduce the capabilities of sex workers: "the financial situation of the vast majority of research participants has deteriorated, as has their ability to access community and screen clients".[3]
Groups seeking to eliminate sex work often present misleading information and advocate policies that make sex work harder but not safer. There are policies that can improve safety and consent without harming consenting sex workers, but those policies need to be created with context and measurable consequences in mind, not sensationalism.
The four women I quoted are pointing out that workers prefer to have safer venues for doing business, more community connections, and better legal support for their business. To avoid cases of exploitation, improving social welfare is a good response.
Sex work by itself is neither liberating nor exploitative, just as any other domain of work isn't. That determination applies to the circumstance of the work, not the domain. Better policies can improve protections for sex workers and prevent coercive abuse as they have done in other industries.
In which other industry is a massive subset of workers r-ped each day?
There were children working in Industrial Revolution factories that ended up perfectly healthy. You and I recognize the practice as immoral (I assume?) because the exceptions don't matter
Forced labor and violent abuse are common in many industries eg [1][2]. That said, abuse in the sex industry is more widespread and horrible than I realized. Knowing what I know now I would've responded differently.
Controlling children's social environment to direct them into emotional dependence on corporate stimulation is really harmful. Unfortunately MasterCard doesn't seem to be working on that problem.
Conservatism runs on the assumption that young girls and women are natural property of men (the father, then the husband) and so for many people, these are innocent daughters lost on OnlyFans. But no political faction is active on the issue of social media's damage to children since no one[0] is making the connection between Instagram and the uptick in suicide (and other results) in young girls. And I doubt many conservative fathers really care if their kid learns to wife from TikTok rather than Barbies
[0] with any power, that is -- there have been plenty of op-eds, but they exist to drive clicks from worrying parents, not to advance any call for material changes
A lot of the attacks against amateur porn and sex work are by religious groups masking their actual motive by focusing on consent verification. Verification raises the barrier and makes performers much more vulnerable since their legal identities are attached to their work.
I’m of the impression that consent is a legitimate problem? Lots of pornography is wrapped up in sex trafficking never mind revenge porn, or so I’ve heard.
Consent is a real issue. The problem is advocates apply pressure to eliminate sex work even under clear consent, because safety isn't their actual goal. See OnlyFans, Craigslist for example.
So what? There are legitimate arguments to having consent verification, and the things they prevent are about as far from victimless crimes as you can get- what happens on the internet, stays on the internet, leading to a lifetime of re-victimization.
Just because people you don't like are for something does not mean that you must automatically be against it.
I don't think we should expect a policy to serve the stated purpose when the people driving it have entirely different reasons for pushing it.
For example, when states strengthen regulations on abortion clinics with the stated goal of improving patient safety, but the driving forces behind the legislation are anti-abortion groups who know that rural abortion providers will have to close, creating large unserved areas... will those laws help or hurt the safety of women who want abortions?
Likewise, we should be wary of consent verification laws that are pushed by groups whose supporters are opposed to legal pornography.
In both cases the goal is not to protect women. The goal is to take something morally wrong and make it seedy, underground, and dangerous, like morally wrong things are supposed to be.
So yes - motivation is important. The identity verification requirements for performers on porn sites are at least partially driven by actual victim complaints.
"but the driving forces behind the legislation are anti-abortion groups"
This is the definition of an ad hominem, which is what the whole separation of church and state discussion is, since neither church nor state are involved here.
We arent discussing regulations, we are discussing payment processors choosing to not do business with video hosts who cannot prove legal consent was obtained from all involved.
If you ran a business, would you want to make money off of rape and child pornography? The payment processors chose "no", and that is their right.
Ad hominem is an appropriate form of reasoning in this case, although in context you might pronounce it "cui bono." It's reasonable to expect that when a group pushes a policy, the details of the policy will be engineered to serve their goals, and the policy will be tweaked over time to serve their goals better. Corporations want to make them happy so they can do business in peace. What will make them happy? Will it make them happy if most porn is created by workers who enjoy robust assurances that their autonomy, consent, and medical safety will be respected? Or would they regard that as a nightmare of legitimized industrial-scale psychological harm to women?
In porn as in abortion, prohibitionists are numerous and committed enough to be a force to reckoned with, but they strategically justify their work using reasons that the rest of society finds persuasive. Anti-abortionists believe that abortion is inherently wrong, but they talk about women's safety while they shut down clinics.
The difference is, the groups who care about the safety of women will look at the details and say, the effect of this supposed "reproductive safety" bill is that thousands of women will lose access to legal abortion. Even if it targets shortcomings at poorly staffed, decrepit facilities, they won't support it if it actually makes women less safe. Overall, will shutting down OnlyFans payments make things better or worse for the women on it? People who aren't asking that question don't actually care.
"So what?" as a response to a post explaining how a policy puts certain people at risk, regardless of what the policy is and who those certain people are, makes how you view those people quite a lot clearer than you may have intended.
The person I responded to implied that the arguments in favor of consent verification were made in bad faith because some people might also oppose porn in general.
It is a logical fallacy. The risk of de-anonymization doesn't go away because their consent wasn't verified- tattoos, birthmarks, backgrounds of images and video, etc are still there.
Not only that, but that same risk still applies to people whose videos were posted without consent. What's worse than being raped and having your video put online? Knowing that everyone you ever work with may have seen it, for the rest of your life.
Also, if you read the article the post attached, it literally opens with a woman who had to impersonate a lawyer to get porn of her taken off of pornhub.
"How I view those people" seems to be your imagination, not mine.
Context and quantification are needed, not sensationalism.
Yes there are real accounts of abuse. The problem is that the policies adopted aren't actually directed at solving those problems with minimum harm to people involved; they are directed at eliminating sex work.
How many problems occur, what kind, what protocols would address the problems without needlessly harming performers and consumers?
> What's worse than being raped and having your video put online? Knowing that everyone you ever work with may have seen it, for the rest of your life.
There's no mechanism I can imagine that would make this situation true. HOW would everyone have seen it? Are you aware of just how many porn videos/pictures there are in the world?
You'd be well served to post a stat for how many people have had their coworkers see their rape videos, I'd bet $$$ that it's a negligible number compared to the livelihood issues suffered by onlyfans removing all those creators.
> what happens on the internet, stays on the internet, leading to a lifetime of re-victimization
Nonsense. The odds of you stumbling upon a particular porn photo or video are miniscule unless you are specifically searching for it or it's very popular (which is very hard and not going to happen for unwilling pictures).
Particularly as most sites would take down images of you on request.
No, the logic is that separation of church and state is a red herring.
Payment processors are choosing to not associate with businesses that cannot demonstrate that legal consent was gained from everyone involved in the production of the videos.
This is just a variation of the ontological argument.
You say there's neither church nor state, but then you cite payment processors and legal consent, which are both constructs that are determined by the state. And the content that's in question is sexual consent. The idea that there should be an additional mind (e.g. a legal mind) regulating the behaviors of sexual participants is an old religious conservative idea.
If you still insist that the church in this sense has no meaning, and that this isn't a question of church and state, then you don't believe that there is fundamentally a problem of church and state at all, which in itself is an old religious conservative idea.
> You say there's neither church nor state, but then you cite payment processors and legal consent, which are both constructs that are determined by the state. And the content that's in question is sexual consent.
I don't think many people who believe in the separation of church and state would think that implies that the state doesn't have the ability to make and enforce laws around consent.
I am saying that state isnt involved in the sense that the state isn't compelling payment processors to make these decisions through regulation. Church isn't involved because there is no establishment of religion. I have presented, in several places, non-theological reasons why payment processors may be making the decisions they are.
If you want to count "choosing to not support a business that enables rapists and child porn" as exclusively an old conservative idea, I guess you are missing the mark by quite a lot.
You've contradicted yourself multiple times. You've used the legal categories of rape and child pornography to try to justify the motives of a legal entity. The entire basis of motivation that you yourself have presented is instantiated within the context of a state authority.
The institution of a church in the theological sense has nothing to do with a legally registered organization. The domain of the church, in the sense of "separation of church and state", is in the psychology and interal belief structures of the mass of people. The Enlightenment thinkers who asserted a separation of church and state were not making an assertion about mere legal technicality.
> The institution of a church in the theological sense has nothing to do with a legally registered organization. The domain of the church, in the sense of "separation of church and state", is in the psychology and interal belief structures of the mass of people. The Enlightenment thinkers who asserted a separation of church and state were not making an assertion about mere legal technicality.
Just pointing out that this seems to be your own interpretation and isn't held in any legal doctrine I've been able to find.
In-fact it doesn't have a lot of historical or academic backing either: Historically, the separation of church and state was about removing the special benefits of state-sanctioned religions so that other churches could exist.
That was explicitly about the legally registered organisation, and you can see this now in how legally registered churches are constantly trying to find ways to legally divorce themselves from linked entities so those entities can receive state funding. That is 100% about the legally registered organisations.
> Let us now consider what a church is. A church, then, I take to be a voluntary society of men, joining themselves together of their own accord in order to the public worshipping of God in such manner as they judge acceptable to Him, and effectual to the salvation of their souls.
Where do you see "legally registered organization" in this defintion?
Of course, within existing legal doctrine, "separation of church and state" could only refer to legal technicalities. And that's the whole point I was making, that separation goes both ways. For you to redefine the idea behind separation of church and state in merely legal terms is itself a breach of that separation.
The idea of separation of Church and State came from the Reformation, and it was explicitly about separation of the legal entities. And they were legal entities - notably under Calvin the Genevan Consistory was the entity in charge of religious life and it was separated to the civil authorities.
You've misunderstood your own sources. The Lutheran doctrine of two kingdoms, according to which the church is not a legal entity but which exists in the spiritual kingdom, was a way to protect the church from the law and other secular authorities. This doctrine was then adopted by Calvinists, one way of which is the way that you're talking about.
> this has nothing to do with consent laws, which are entirely a matter for the state.
That's what I've been saying. And it has nothing to do with my point.
Verification is obviously necessary to prevent revenge porn.
If that inconveniences performers, then that’s their problem to deal with. We shouldn’t be focused on making things easy for performers if that happens at the expense of allowing revenge porn.
Revenge porn is just another form of harassment. The problem isn't it being uploaded to pornhub, the problem is a dickhead sending it to all the victims contacts. It becomes a non-issue with reactive takedowns and going after those who repeatedly upload it as you would any other form of deliberate harassment.
Going after porn sites does nothing really to stop the harassment (they can just send the pic or video directly rather than a link).
Why would they bother? That's a terrible way to approach it.
Just pass legislation requiring in-country datacenters that can be decrypted by thoughtcrime enforcers, like Russia and China are doing. Trying to get this done via a CSAM list that's absurdly closely audited would be a huge waste of time and not provide any significant benefit, and if such a request were ever made public, would likely result in severe political and economic sanctions.
That's what everyone's missing in this argument. There's no need to be all underhanded and secretive when you can just pass laws and conduct military-backed demands upon companies using those laws. Trying to exploit the CSAM process would be a horrifically bad idea, and would result in public exposure and humiliation, rather than the much more useful outcome that simply passing a law would provide.
Without the technology deployed, Apple can (and did) say they don't have the ability to break into users' phones.
If Apple deploys on-phone scanning, governments can just tell Apple to support a new list. It won't be the NCMEC CSAM list. It will be a "public safety and security" list. I wouldn't rule out underhandedness either. [1]
Apple already has technology deployed to perform binary file scans of every file on macOS and iOS, and the ability to at any time release signatures for those scans, that are very difficult for normal users to prevent updates for. They've had that for years, maybe even a decade by now, and so far to date we have seen no abuse of that list.
How is Apple's new CSAM list somehow increasing the chances of Apple going rogue, given that we've all been living with that risk for the past X years?
Each system is closed source, provides a mechanism for checking content signatures against files on disk, and is thought to report telemetry to Apple when signatures are found.
How is CSAM scanning new and different from those existing closed-source systems?
I'd say the primary differences are that the CSAM scan is a perceptual hash rather than a regular file hash, and that the technical infrastructure of the CSAM system is designed from the ground up to be used against (rather than for) the user and report them individually to authorities for violation.
Do you have an alternate design in mind that is both "used for the user", and is also effective at reporting CSAM content being uploaded from the device, without allowing CSAM abusers to opt-out of that reporting? I haven't been able to come up with anything myself, but maybe you've had better luck.
China forced Apple by legislation to implement new iCloud algorithms for assigning China-region user data into China-hosted datacenters. Most countries, unlike the US, are not constrained by a requirement to only exercise previously-built mechanisms and not create new ones, in response to government demands. If China decides to require Apple to censor non-CSAM content on-device, they will do so whether or not CSAM content fingerprinting exists. That China has not done so is because they benefit greatly from Apple's manufacturing and sales and do not wish to create a diplomatic incident with Apple.
