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Comment by tsumnia | Hacker News Reader

While I understand the outrage and fully understand it, I'd like to offer another reason why child faces are in use - sex trafficking. My previous research was in face recognition and mostly in artificial face aging algorithms. One of the trouble areas in that domain was predicting how child would look after X years. This is due to the elasticity of child faces. The DOD offered grants for this type of research to help thwart child abduction and sex trafficking.

Obviously this was before all of these types of stories began to emerge, but I like to bring this up as an opposing ethical debate.

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Is the DOD generally involved in civilian criminal investigations?

Not the investigation, research. They fund all sorts.

Is sex trafficking of children really a significant problem? (Yes, everyone has heard of the Dutroux case, but the depths of that won't be plumbed by face aging algorithms.)

Altogether the line of reasoning sounds like the usual hype you put into grant applications. Your line of work is highly strained hydrocarbons, so when you apply to the Department of Energy you say in the distant future you won't synthesize 100 mg, you'll prepare hundreds of tons to put it into a rocket to increase its payload.

> Is sex trafficking of children really a significant problem?

It is if you sell FUD.

I think by now it's pretty much obligatory that any defense of mass surveillance will at least mention one of child sex trafficking, drug dealing or terrorism.

Bonus points are available for combinations.

Relevant: https://i.redd.it/ifb8agngc7dy.jpg

I would think that at least on HN we're more sophisticated than that. Just because child trafficking, drug dealing and terrorism are abused by politicians to excuse mass surveillance, doesn't mean they aren't real problems or that surveillance tech isn't able to help with them. Reasonable people consider trade-offs, and not cast everything in light of "sides" and "defending" yours.

So we should have just a little bit of reasonable mass surveillance? I don't see how to construct a nuanced or "sophisticated" viewpoint about this.

> Reasonable people consider trade-offs

Let's do that:

1. Easy to use and effective encryption for all people, even pedophiles and terrorists.

2. Backdoored untrustworthy encryption governments will almost certainly abuse in order to surveil entire populations.

Number 1 sounds like a very reasonable principle to have. Governments and police forces have more than enough tools at their disposal to fight crimes. WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption and my country's police forces routinely catch child molesters that use it. They do not need and should not have a "show me everything there is to know about this guy" button that they don't even need a warrant to press.

Certain things should be inviolable, even to the state, even with a warrant.

Every article I read about encryption regulation is like this. "Pedophiles and terrorists", every single time. What's frightening isn't the argument itself but how it instantly shuts down any debate. Politicians have found the perfect weapon to justify any law.

I'd say "child trafficking" / "child abduction" are reasonably common terms for parental custody disagreements that cross country lines.

It's not necessarily that the child was trafficked as a child. It could be that the child went missing/ran away, lived on the street or in some other bad situation for a while, and then at some point was trafficked. Or it could even be that the child was sent to a relative in another country to grow up there, the relative never took any pictures of them, they grew up there, and then were conned into some trafficking situation as an adult.

Either way, the goal would still be to identify an adult victim of trafficking by the last available picture of them, which was of them as a child.

There are only approximate numbers available, but most estimates seem to be at least a million or two worldwide, and 100k or two in the US.

> A 2016 study by the Center for Court Innovation found that between 8,900 and 10,500 children, ages 13 to 17, are commercially exploited each year in this country. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/nation-now/2018/01/30...

> In 2001, UPenn released a study conducted in 17 cities across the United States [in which] they estimated as many as 300,000 American youth may be at risk of commercial sexual exploitation at any time. However, the actual number of children involved in prostitution is likely to be much smaller: over 10 years only 827 cases a year had been reported to police departments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_trafficking_in_the_United_...

Estimates differ wildly because many feel actual reports dramatically undercount reality. IMO even one is too many, but exaggerating does more harm than good.

Is sex trafficking of children really a significant problem?

You know I think there's a middle ground between being adamantly opposed to mass surveillance and taking child sex trafficking seriously. I personally know people (plural) that this has happened to and it's pretty irritating to see that issue cavalierly dismissed for argumentative purposes or tech cred points.

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