“Think of the children” is, as usual, just to get the foot in the door. They use it as a justification, because it works.
Of course CSAM is bad, shouldn’t we do everything in our power to prevent it? If you implement client-side scanning, you will catch some rookies. Some old pervs that don’t know how to use encryption manually, or use Matrix. They will use them to show how effective the system is…
with the exception that it doesn’t work against anyone who knows anything about computers. And I think the regulators know it, they aren’t dumb (imo). It’s, like I said earlier, an excuse to expand the scope of scanning later.
It's so disheartening to follow these. Time after another we hear about some insane Orwellian plot to exploit our deepest secrets. All spun so that the masses will think it's for some noble cause like protecting the children when really it's anything but. And it never stops! Tackle one and it's back a year later in some even more devious form like a fucking Hydra. I'm just so tired I wanna move into a cottage in the woods.
> shouldn’t we do everything in our power to prevent it?
I'm more concerned about the original abuse. The pictures are obviously an issue as they create a market _for_ abuse, but if you're not targeting the original crime, I don't think you stand a chance of actually improving the world by destroying rights.
Are they thinking of the children when they raid dad's home because a picture of a kids genitals went to a physician for tele-medicine?
Are they thinking of the kids when they come for dad when dad really doesn't like his pictures scanned and self-hosts his infra and uses a Linux based phone?
Still flabbergasted how effective the lobbying circles around Thorn have been in recent years. I wish no less than this law getting sent to Spam and Ylva Johansson, the accountable EU commissioner, to be forced to step back.
The EU legislator Martin Sonneborn, member of the German satirist party "Die Partei", is proven he was right when in beginning of the legislature he just enumerated all the criminal and semi-criminal acts of several members of the current EU commission. Led by von der Leyen who also has a horrible track record in German politics. "Europa nicht den Laien überlassen"
It's actually not funny anymore because those people are destroying everything.
Now now, millionaires need hobbies too. They can't swing for the outer edges of the atmosphere so decimating privacy on the Internet will have to do I guess. Ashton's urge to protect the children apparently trumps the privacy of 450 million EU citizens and you would think he'd be able to extend some of that zeal to adult victims of abuse as well but going by his letter to the jury on behalf of Danny Masterson, you'd be wrong.
From my understanding, Johansson is also the Commissioner who, after it coming to light that the Europol had had a little too much fun mass collecting data and gleefully violating EU citizens' privacy rights, stepped into action that resulted in an effort to pass a new law that retroactively made everything the Europol did legal.
I want to see a mockup of the UI that Whatsapp will show for this...
I want to see some quick animation that shows each image sent being inspected for nudity, children, weapons, and a list of other things. I want to see the probability of each item shown to the user. I want the decision thresholds to be shown, and the animation showing the rest of what will happen to them if the threshold is exceeded (ie. "Report to police", "fired from job", "Judge", "Prison").
If whatsapp manage to manage to convey all that in a 3 second animation whenever an image is sent, I think users will baulk and the law will be removed.
In the future sending a WhatsApp text message such as "I stand with Palestine" will have the police knocking at your door with an arrest warrant in hand. I think Germany or the UK will be the first places to implement it. The spirit of the Gestapo and Stasi lives on.
Not specific to this, but can we just rename the "European Union" to "Big Government" at this point? It feels like every month there is something else the EU is trying to be a nanny for and it is starting to feel like they're moving towards becoming something in the vein of what China does to their citizens and internet.
The EU is nothing like China. China is basically a dictatorship, run by a single party, with a single guy on top who can make far reaching decisions. The EU is a huge collection of institutions and political parties. Even if they agree on something in the parliament and the commission, they still need all the heads
of government - from every single member country - to agree before it becomes law. And even if they manage to do that, political activists can and have brought down laws using the European court of justice. These spy laws under the guise of protecting children from sexual abuse from zealot parties have come and gone for many years now, but functioning democracies like the EU have never seen them come to fruition.
This is a fallacy of composition. A hearing to evaluate one proposal in one country is not 'The EU is doing a thing', any more than a hearing in a US state legislature or even in Congress is equivalent to a law being passed.
The thing is the Tech community doesn't have a clear and simple response to CSAM, although CSAM has proliferated with the growth of the internet. Nobody cares about the technical excuses; people care about the absence of any clear effort to reduce its availability and spread. Absent technical measures, people will continue to demand legislative ones.
The EU is speed running totalitarianism with good PR. What happened to the free market only and the absolutely swearing up and down it would stay that.
This law or proposal is so fundamentally absurd, instead of the EU or member states coming up with a proposal like Frontex but for hosting a centralized CSAM + other horrible potentially illegal images/links/videos hash/identifiers, where anyone with a website can pay lets say 20€ a month to access the API to scan images/links/videos instead it has to be the most dumbest "private market will regulate it" which effectively means, everything and anyone has to be scanned.
I would like to see an open discussion include the people who actually investigate CSAM crimes to talk about the tools they have and their limitations etc. to give people real context about what they might need for new laws.
Not that we should give law enforcement everything they want to do their jobs, but a voice coming from people with actual experience would help.
I get the sense that nearly everyone on both sides of this issue is entirely guessing.
I would like evidence that police actually use the tools and evidence they already have. There are currently more than 25 thousand rape kits in the US alone that have not been tested.
That is the entire answer for "is there any interest in solving sex crimes". If the police do not have the time or the money to do the most basic work possible having already made rape victims sit through the incredibly invasive process of taking the rape kit, why should we think that anything that gives them access to the content of people's devices is going to be used for any kind of sex crime inquiry?
Police do not care about sex crimes. CSAM detection is just their new angle to get unfettered warrantless access to everyone's data. Europol representatives have already explicitly stated that that's what they want this for.
> I get the sense that nearly everyone on both sides of this issue is entirely guessing.
I would hope that people base their political positions on strong evidence and/or the voices of subject matter experts. Alas, political positions are more based on what people want to be true, rather than what is true.
Sometimes I wonder if criminals aren't as lazy and prone to just using what's popular as the rest of us.
How often do communications done through a wide variety of channels that wouldn't satisfy a cypherpunk from email to Whatsapp show up on evidence before court, even if the people involved knew that they could end up in court? Weren't a bunch of criminals fooled by a literal FBI phone?
Most Linux contributions are made by multi-billions companies like IBM/Redhat. They would not risk to contravene to law. For example that it conforms to the law, look at WiFi drivers. There are many requirement by local laws on which band to use, what kind of traffic is authorized, etc. The WiFi drivers (most of them opaque binaries) conform to each country law.
To make Linux not lawful, you would have to create your own kernel with your own altered drivers, except you can't modify binaries.
Even then how could you make you system unidentifiable? How would you have control over booting your modified Linux in a commercial computer that uses UEFI? How would you know that the commercial CPU is not phoning home through the Intel Management Engine?
You would have use a FPGA CPU, your own designed hardware and a trusted OS but at the end you will always rely on the work of thousands people and hundred companies.
Remember, these are politicians. What they do doesn't have to make sense or be possible. All they have to do is pass laws. If it makes everyone a criminal that's good. The law just won't be enforced unless you rock the boat. Much like with the CFAA in the USA or GDPR in Europe.
but you are missing out that the solution is to keep making it inconvenient to let people use linux and other kinds of custom devices
eventually either nobody will use that, or they'll just jump the shark and outlaw such things
I know that for example in Canada, because taxes, ALL restaurants are (were?) FORCED to use a specific sets of devices else they're branded as tax-avoiders and dealt with accordingly
I've already had trouble using banking stuff under linux, I have had to cancel some cards because they became useless without a smartphone app (the real punchline is that I got a new card that's only works on a smartphone. but at least it was like this when I signed up; they didn't change how it works under my feet)
I wonder what will happen if I just refuse. Get rid of apps or phones that scan. What are they going to do, really? I mean really? Am I going to jail? And for how long?
Me a father, hard working, tax paying, I just don’t want my messages scanned, are they going to put me in prison?
All this will do is imperil the freedom of hundreds of millions of Europeans and drive the kiddy fiddlers to services that won't comply with EU surveillance: it is therefore a foregone conclusion that it's going to happen.
I think I'll end up applying a sliding cap to the cameras of my phone, to be sure I count up to ten before taking a picture. God forbids sharing it online.
But what if a friend of mine sends me a handmade meme with a child that is not recognized as safe by the AI?
Well, I guess that there will be thousands of parents under investigation and in the news before I pick my turn from the random distribution of the false positives. It's going to be interesting for the politicians in charge.
No, you're missing the point. It's nothing to do with remotely taking a photo, nor whether or not you publish online.
It's a "all devices need to scan all data and report if anything looks illegal". So yeah, if someone sent you malicious data you could end up being arrested and paraded through the press before silently being release with your life and google search forever tainted.
It's particularly stupid because the government is essentially saying "manufacturers must search your device, and then report the content, and that is probable cause to justify a search warrant", which is obviously absurd.
Never trust a government that claims it supports privacy. Maybe it supports some privacy regulations, just like it supports anti-privacy regulations here or with financial privacy. The thing the EU really supports is regulation and not privacy.
There's a tight relationship between wealth and democracy and we all always assumed that democracy drove wealth but what if wealth drives democracy and as the EU gets poorer we can expect it to backslide
[+] [-] sbszllr|2 years ago|reply
Of course CSAM is bad, shouldn’t we do everything in our power to prevent it? If you implement client-side scanning, you will catch some rookies. Some old pervs that don’t know how to use encryption manually, or use Matrix. They will use them to show how effective the system is…
with the exception that it doesn’t work against anyone who knows anything about computers. And I think the regulators know it, they aren’t dumb (imo). It’s, like I said earlier, an excuse to expand the scope of scanning later.
[+] [-] SgtBaker|2 years ago|reply
Europol wants unfettered, unfiltered access to all scanned data, regardless if there's a crime or not.
And they want to inject all of that into their Police AI (which they also want unregulated).
It's going to be awesome future.
[+] [-] cudder|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akira2501|2 years ago|reply
I'm more concerned about the original abuse. The pictures are obviously an issue as they create a market _for_ abuse, but if you're not targeting the original crime, I don't think you stand a chance of actually improving the world by destroying rights.
[+] [-] garba_dlm|2 years ago|reply
by these two actions combined this anti-freedom garbage (further consolidating and centralizing powers) will work effectively
[+] [-] teekert|2 years ago|reply
Are they thinking of the children when they raid dad's home because a picture of a kids genitals went to a physician for tele-medicine?
Are they thinking of the kids when they come for dad when dad really doesn't like his pictures scanned and self-hosts his infra and uses a Linux based phone?
[+] [-] nforgerit|2 years ago|reply
The EU legislator Martin Sonneborn, member of the German satirist party "Die Partei", is proven he was right when in beginning of the legislature he just enumerated all the criminal and semi-criminal acts of several members of the current EU commission. Led by von der Leyen who also has a horrible track record in German politics. "Europa nicht den Laien überlassen"
It's actually not funny anymore because those people are destroying everything.
[+] [-] anfogoat|2 years ago|reply
From my understanding, Johansson is also the Commissioner who, after it coming to light that the Europol had had a little too much fun mass collecting data and gleefully violating EU citizens' privacy rights, stepped into action that resulted in an effort to pass a new law that retroactively made everything the Europol did legal.
[+] [-] rngname22|2 years ago|reply
any chance anyone can link or give some suggestions of search terms to try to find this?
[+] [-] londons_explore|2 years ago|reply
I want to see some quick animation that shows each image sent being inspected for nudity, children, weapons, and a list of other things. I want to see the probability of each item shown to the user. I want the decision thresholds to be shown, and the animation showing the rest of what will happen to them if the threshold is exceeded (ie. "Report to police", "fired from job", "Judge", "Prison").
If whatsapp manage to manage to convey all that in a 3 second animation whenever an image is sent, I think users will baulk and the law will be removed.
[+] [-] orangepurple|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JoshGlazebrook|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sigmoid10|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anigbrowl|2 years ago|reply
The thing is the Tech community doesn't have a clear and simple response to CSAM, although CSAM has proliferated with the growth of the internet. Nobody cares about the technical excuses; people care about the absence of any clear effort to reduce its availability and spread. Absent technical measures, people will continue to demand legislative ones.
[+] [-] tick_tock_tick|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 0dayz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aaa_aaa|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dragonelite|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colechristensen|2 years ago|reply
Not that we should give law enforcement everything they want to do their jobs, but a voice coming from people with actual experience would help.
I get the sense that nearly everyone on both sides of this issue is entirely guessing.
[+] [-] olliej|2 years ago|reply
That is the entire answer for "is there any interest in solving sex crimes". If the police do not have the time or the money to do the most basic work possible having already made rape victims sit through the incredibly invasive process of taking the rape kit, why should we think that anything that gives them access to the content of people's devices is going to be used for any kind of sex crime inquiry?
Police do not care about sex crimes. CSAM detection is just their new angle to get unfettered warrantless access to everyone's data. Europol representatives have already explicitly stated that that's what they want this for.
[+] [-] justin_oaks|2 years ago|reply
I would hope that people base their political positions on strong evidence and/or the voices of subject matter experts. Alas, political positions are more based on what people want to be true, rather than what is true.
[+] [-] MaKey|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmikaeld|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bboygravity|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mhitza|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jowea|2 years ago|reply
How often do communications done through a wide variety of channels that wouldn't satisfy a cypherpunk from email to Whatsapp show up on evidence before court, even if the people involved knew that they could end up in court? Weren't a bunch of criminals fooled by a literal FBI phone?
[+] [-] JPLeRouzic|2 years ago|reply
It's far more difficult than that.
Most Linux contributions are made by multi-billions companies like IBM/Redhat. They would not risk to contravene to law. For example that it conforms to the law, look at WiFi drivers. There are many requirement by local laws on which band to use, what kind of traffic is authorized, etc. The WiFi drivers (most of them opaque binaries) conform to each country law.
To make Linux not lawful, you would have to create your own kernel with your own altered drivers, except you can't modify binaries.
Even then how could you make you system unidentifiable? How would you have control over booting your modified Linux in a commercial computer that uses UEFI? How would you know that the commercial CPU is not phoning home through the Intel Management Engine?
You would have use a FPGA CPU, your own designed hardware and a trusted OS but at the end you will always rely on the work of thousands people and hundred companies.
[+] [-] superkuh|2 years ago|reply
Remember, these are politicians. What they do doesn't have to make sense or be possible. All they have to do is pass laws. If it makes everyone a criminal that's good. The law just won't be enforced unless you rock the boat. Much like with the CFAA in the USA or GDPR in Europe.
[+] [-] garba_dlm|2 years ago|reply
eventually either nobody will use that, or they'll just jump the shark and outlaw such things
I know that for example in Canada, because taxes, ALL restaurants are (were?) FORCED to use a specific sets of devices else they're branded as tax-avoiders and dealt with accordingly
I've already had trouble using banking stuff under linux, I have had to cancel some cards because they became useless without a smartphone app (the real punchline is that I got a new card that's only works on a smartphone. but at least it was like this when I signed up; they didn't change how it works under my feet)
[+] [-] wmf|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] c0balt|2 years ago|reply
Either a Matrix Server or even NextCloud chat will do the job just fine. Then just sideload an APK which is rather trivial
[+] [-] teekert|2 years ago|reply
Me a father, hard working, tax paying, I just don’t want my messages scanned, are they going to put me in prison?
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jchw|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] layer8|2 years ago|reply
That might be the best way to get authorities interested in you, once that shit starts going down.
[+] [-] hanniabu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yuptheyfkedu|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xinayder|2 years ago|reply
Normal citizens on the other hand are presumed guilty unless proven otherwise...
[+] [-] theodric|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmontra|2 years ago|reply
But what if a friend of mine sends me a handmade meme with a child that is not recognized as safe by the AI?
Well, I guess that there will be thousands of parents under investigation and in the news before I pick my turn from the random distribution of the false positives. It's going to be interesting for the politicians in charge.
[+] [-] olliej|2 years ago|reply
It's a "all devices need to scan all data and report if anything looks illegal". So yeah, if someone sent you malicious data you could end up being arrested and paraded through the press before silently being release with your life and google search forever tainted.
It's particularly stupid because the government is essentially saying "manufacturers must search your device, and then report the content, and that is probable cause to justify a search warrant", which is obviously absurd.
[+] [-] alphanullmeric|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AbrahamParangi|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rurban|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xinayder|2 years ago|reply
This is the mentality that made Brexit happen. We can't let this Orwellian surveillance happen and then later try to fix the damage they've done.
[+] [-] darkclouds|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] g232089|2 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] gotoeleven|2 years ago|reply
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