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Comment by enitihas | Hacker News Reader

I never understood one thing about American Politics. A lot of folks who are fierce advocates for people being able to keep weapons, go quickly up in arms against encryption. As if the guns somehow can't harm the children. Even though the US has had so many school shootings, it seems a lot of politicians are still hell bent on saying encryption harms children, while guns somehow don't land in the conversation.

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Playing devil's advocate, it's easy to say there are far more victims of CSA and child pornography than of school shootings among children.

Personally speaking, I think opponents of encryption and guns are in the same anti-freedom camp. Neither should be banned or regulated because all arguments in favor of those things I find to be dishonest or questionable.

Gun deaths are on a consistent downward trend for the last 30+ years despite record gun and ammunition sales. Plotted on the same chart, you'll find as gun sales increased the amount of gun deaths was decreasing at the same time. This isn't to say they're correlated, my argument is that they're not correlated in either direction (and so a ban argument makes no sense).

> Playing devil's advocate, it's easy to say there are far more victims of CSA and child pornography than of school shootings among children.

Is there any decent data that backs this up? Anecdotally, I have always felt like CSA is a fairly niche issue that is blown way out of proportion, but I don't know how/haven't bothered to confirm or deny this belief.

EDIT: I found this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4311357/ which seems way too high. Then again it's not exactly something the victims would openly talk about in most cultures, so maybe I'm severely underestimating the prevelance of the issue?

Nevertheless, if it is true that 95% of perpetrators are well known to the victim, that doesn't sound like this abuse is happening online. So I don't see how backdooring E2E could possibly help here.

> Anecdotally, I have always felt like CSA is a fairly niche issue that is blown way out of proportion, but I don't know how/haven't bothered to confirm or deny this belief.

I mean, you could say the same thing of school/mass shootings. it's terrible when they happen, but they make up a pretty small fraction of total homicides.

About 1% of the male population has a sexual interest in children. Most of these people will never act on that interest, but some of them do go on to commit offences.

There is a range of jargon, and that makes searching for information a bit trickier.

OCSE = online child sexual exploitation. CSEA = Child sexual exploitation and abuse. CSAM = child sexual abuse material.

Here are some UK stats:

> Law enforcement agencies in the UK are currently arresting around 450 individuals and safeguarding over 600 children each month through their efforts to combat online CSE.

> In the UK alone, it is estimated there are 80,000 people who present a sexual threat to children online.

> Statistics from the National Crime Agency (NCA) show that last year 2.88 million accounts were registered globally across the most harmful child sexual abuse dark web sites, with at least 5% believed to be registered in the UK.

These are good reports, although they're obviously written from a child protection viewpoint.

http://www2.paconsulting.com/rs/526-HZE-833/images/WePROTECT...

https://homeofficemedia.blog.gov.uk/2019/06/25/fact-sheet-on...

https://www.iwf.org.uk/report/iwf-2019-annual-report-zero-to...

>> Nevertheless, if it is true that 95% of perpetrators are well known to the victim, that doesn't sound like this abuse is happening online

But that abuse often gets put online, or is traded to access other images.

How do we know 1% of the male population has such an interest?

How do we know it is often put online? Surely, it's incredibly stupid to upload evidence of yourself committing a crime? How much is happening behind closed doors that does not? Can we even tell?

Well. You can be pro-gun and pro-encryption. Technically encryption is actually considered under the same rules as ammunition by US customs.

Are you sure you aren't thinking of ITAR et al? "Customs" is a bit of a broad statement here.

Maybe! Was referring to this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_...

Is ITAR part of customs or something different?

There are special interests groups on both sides of the issues but that then is a wash, they net out. The difference is that pro-gun, anti-encryption aligns nicely with business (concentrated power), against which you have the interests of average people who are harmed by these two things (distributed power). You tend to see concerted, continuous astro-turfing and the like for the former because their concentration makes them highly motivated. Whereas average people only speak up as aggressively when their awareness reaches a critical threshold, and that tends to go in fits and and starts, it depends on problem highlighting in the media. Businesses can afford to keep their PR departments working every day.

I’ve never heard anyone say they were against encryption.

It was a straw man. Designed to make you think less of a certain group of people.

This is because law enforcement, which is strongly pro gun, is also against encryption, because encryption makes blanket surveillance and evidence gathering more difficult. Politicians from strongly pro gun areas also tend, politically, to be strongly pro military and law enforcement.

Why is law enforcement pro gun though? Shouldn't they be anti gun logically, as it would make their job a lot more easier if there are fewer weapons outside.

They tend to be pro-gun because they tend to be to the Right of the American political spectrum.

this is sort of circular though. the original question was "why is pro-gun consistent with anti-encryption in US politics?".

I suspect there's no satisfying answer to the question, as most people don't logically derive their political positions from first principles. there's no reason to expect them to be consistent.

The children is a smoke screen. The government wants control. Encryption threatens that control, because now citizen communications can not be snooped onto, so nobody knows what those sneaky bastards are up to. The government hates being in that position. So they invent plausibly sounding excuse (which is usually protecting children, because it's politically impossible to be against protecting children unless you're a crazy libertarian and nobody listens to crazy libertarians) to change this. It didn't take long for surveillance which was sold under the guise of fighting terrorism to be abused for every government purpose they liked, from drug war to getting dirt on political opponents. Same will happen immediately with this law, if it gets passed.

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