Aren't most child sexual abusers (90%+) close to the victim and half of them are from family?
Odd for government to go after chat apps and online encryption when they can't stop child sexual abuse in those places where it happens the most.
Odd for government to go after chat apps and online encryption when they can't stop child sexual abuse in those places where it happens the most.
No, its totally consistent with the State's MO; using the 'Helen Lovejoy' argument [1] is entirely specious reasoning when even the most superficial analysis on the perpetrators of said crime is done... but its not meant to appeal to reason, rather its meant to create a knee-jerk reaction when someone tries to refute it before being coaxed down the collectivize population's throat.
It's so easy and simple to say 'what, do you want pedophiles to use this tech now?' and end any semblance of coherent logical discourse on the matter: and that's the aim, to end any discussion or counter arguments before its enacted and further erode privacy and civil liberties.
When I really started to delve into the 'why and hows' of cryptocurency I came to the conclusion that after Wikileaks/Assange got cut off from the legacy system in 2010 that we were already in the 2nd Crypto War (Julian is a key target and is shows [2] as he's been treated like a POW) that followed after Zimmerman's PgP project succeeded and ended the 1st.
I'm a Signal user and I'm not entirely sure what that 'dumping the US Market' would entail, will they pull Signal from an app store? Meaning I could just compile it while accessing it from a VPN, or compiling it myself on PC?
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RybNI0KB1bg
2: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/apr/9/australian-p...
Yeah, it's decidedly weird turn of phrase since it is (a) open source and (b) they don't try to monetise it.
> will they pull Signal from an app store?
I don't really see what the app store has to do with Signal - it's just a way of distributing it. It's not like you need the app store to avoid compiling it - there are other avenues.
The risk for them is they or their servers come under some pressure from the US Law Enforcement Agencies. Given their programmers and servers are based in the US, that seems like it could be a real risk. Withdrawing from that would involve moving themselves and presumably families out of the US. It sounds like an almost impossible ask.
You're right. It's usually a teacher, neighbor, pastor, uncle, etc. "Stranger danger" is mostly BS unless you live in a really dangerous neighborhood, and there the risk is more likely to be simple robbery with incidental harm to the child.
Child sex abuse is also under-prosecuted and under-sentenced. Your average child rapist serves less time than people convicted of selling small amounts of drugs. It's really bad if the abuser is wealthy and can really put up a fight. Google Jeffrey Epstein's original indictment and the non-punishment he received.
If they really cared about child abusers they'd prosecute them more aggressively and sentence them more severely.
Did you mean to compare this to racial biased drug sentencing?
In 2014, Aslan and Edelmann [1] undertook “a comparison of sex offenders convicted of possessing indecent images of children, committing contact sex offences or both offences” and, while expressing caution about the “contradictory findings” of previous studies, examined a data set of “230 offenders who had been convicted either of possessing indecent images (Internet offenders n = 74) or committing actual direct abuse of children (contact offenders n = 118) or committing both offences (Internet-contact offenders n = 38).” They found:
> There were significant differences between the three groups of offenders in the way the victim was found. Internet-contact offenders (45%) were more likely to target their victims online and use downloaded indecent images to help recruit their victims … Only 15% of Internet offenders initiated online contact, grooming their victims then requesting indecent images without physically coming into contact with the victim. The majority of contact sex offenders (87%) were known to their victims … Internet-contact offenders were more likely to target stranger victims than contact offenders.
[1] https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14789949.2014.884618
This data reflects the offences that are detected and prosecuted, so you could read it as suggesting that law enforcement (in London) is focusing on internet offending at the expense of contact offending. It’s hard to say. The data also says nothing about whether anti-encryption laws are needed. However, it does indicate that there is a substantial amount of internet-enabled child sexual abuse and that law enforcement bodies should use some of their finite resources to address it.
What is proportionate is certainly debatable. There is often a fundamental difference of values between civil liberties advocates on the one hand, and victims’ advocates and law enforcement on the other, with respect to the seriousness of internet-based non-contact offences, including the possession of child pornography. When these offenders are counted among child sexual abusers, the proportion who are known to their victims is much less than 90%.
This doesn't excuse the government trying to destroy security for everyone else. One of the biggest problems highlighted by the NYTimes is insufficient funding leading to an inability to apprehend culprits, not the widespread use of end-to-end encryption.