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Comment by therealdrag0 | Hacker News Reader

Are you familiar with how much child pornography has ballooned from social media? I hadn’t until I listened to this podcast with NYT investigative journalist. Worth considering how serious the trade offs are https://samharris.org/podcasts/213-worst-epidemic/

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I normally enjoy Sam but found that episode was voiced more by his inner parent than his usual hyper-rational self. Child porn is a scourge that should be destroyed but there was minimal discussion of the following that I would normally expect from Sam:

  - Relative merits of the alternatives to the banning/reduction of e2e encryption, e.g stronger police resources, education and community programs

  - Is there a strong link between the sharing of material and the creation of material?

To demonstrate the seriousness of the issue they cite a study that around 5% of the population have consumed child pornography. My own experience has been that unsavoury images can be posted in public places and none of the viewers intend to see the material. I suspect (and hope!) this is where the 5% comes from. This is not caused or solved by the masses having access to encryption.

I wouldn't be surprised if I was having this reaction just because of my idealogical support of encryption.

Curious what does “reducing of e2e” refer to? What does reduction without elimination look like?

E2E refers to end to end. I imagine he means encryption in transport as opposed to encryption at rest.

HTTPS is transport encryption. It's what keeps your bank account info from being intercepted in a usable state.

Reduction w/o elimination means weakening encryption. The advantage is that it can be easily broken by those who want to see what's inside.

His proposal would allow me (or countless bad actors) to decrypt data captures containing secure traffic, like your bank login. Strong encryption is the minimal method for preventing that.

Presumably like historical encryption, available to the government and the super wealthy. That was what they were attpting when they tried to classify PGP as munitions.

The podcast makes the suggestion that encryption doesn't have to be universal. If most communication were through unencrypted channels then policing would be easier, and the use of an encrypted channel would still be possible for critical communications (although may draw scrutiny).

I use reduced to mean non universal.

>Are you familiar with how much child pornography has ballooned from social media?

What does that have to do with encryption?

Also, sidebar:

Illegal pornography is captured and then hidden in an invisible electronic state, using powerful machines called computers. It's then transported and distributed across vast distances using a network of these powerful machines called "The Internet".

Together they're responsible for a bazillion-fold increase of illegal porn. It's imperative that legislation be passed that sabotages the basic functions of computers and renders them ineffective at performing their primary task.

> what does that have to do with

Well they are currently able to scan media and maintain a fingerprint database of illegal content. If it’s encrypted this is not possible right? That’s a serious trade off.

> Well they are currently able to scan media and maintain a fingerprint database of illegal content. If it’s encrypted this is not possible right? That’s a serious trade off.

No more a trade off than the existence of the internet or computers - which are wholly implicated in encouraging a far worse behavior than the transport of illegal porn. They facilitate it's creation. In this, we have an even more serious trade off.

I mean it was created before internet/computers but sure. I don’t see your point though as we can and do scan media to combat that creation, without nuking the internet... Without the ability to scan, the battle seems seriously kneecapped. If currently reported counts from automation in the US are in the order of magnitude of 100 million (I forget exact numbers, but it was near this) from a small number of companies, there’s just no way to combat that manually with “good old fashioned police work” and I don’t know of other options besides those two..

Here's the greater point no one is talking about. Reread Gates statements. Illegal porn was practically an aside tossed in at the last minute. His point was lies.

Encryption was the enemy because it enabled lies.

The difference between Gates and LEO/Politicians? Gates lacks their dishonesty.

LEO & pols have a terribly long history of leveraging extreme behavior as justification for increasing LEO/Gov power+budgets, along with a corresponding loss of our civil liberties (which translates to increased Gov/LEO power).

re:9/11

All of us remember how tech + new gov powers + gobs of cash were necessary to stop the terrorists (practically in our borders and ready any second to unleash more devastating attacks).

Less remembered is how anti-terror Tech/Power/Cash is being used against low-level offenders (eg: Fusion Centers)

And sickeningly predictable, anti-terror tech is today being deployed against people who criticize cops (eg: protests)

Which is exactly what the history of LEO (Gov,etc) suggested was going to happen (eg: War On Drugs). That same history is now poking at us to realize that we can expect the same from War On Illegal Porn.

At least that's something we could learn, if learning from history is something we wanted to do.

FWIW: I agree with all that

>I mean it was created before internet/computers but sure.

My point was that the creation rate of illegal porn exploded because of computers. Your above statement seems dismissive of that.

>we can and do scan media to combat that creation, without nuking the internet. Without the ability to scan, the battle seems seriously kneecapped.

It isn't and hasn't been. Large tech companies intercept and report billions of images to LEO regularly, which are largely captured before and after transport.

Meanwhile, actual police work is what leads police to people who harm children - the importance of which is being increasingly eclipsed by the obsession with safe encryption.

Sidebar: I don’t understand your flippancy. There literally are children to think about. Is your privacy really more important that children being raped? So yes “for the children”.

Usernames and passwords are just one "privacy" related item that are transported over networks. Without encryption they are trivially easy to retrieve from any number of points along the network.

I've retrieved plaintext usernames/passwords out of network traffic, both intentionally and accidentally as part of larger captures. Encryption ends the ability of countless bad actors to do that.

Such an off beat example, I don’t really understand what you’re getting at. We can still have robust TLS without having e2e encryption that prevents the media servers for scanning for illegal material.

> Such an off beat example

Is that sarcasm? Logging into sites w/ usernames/passwords is literally a thing people do many times a day. That's the opposite of off-beat.

>We can still have robust TLS without having e2e encryption that prevents the media servers for scanning for illegal material.

End to end encryption is primarily about transport encryption. Scanning for content on media servers strongly suggests you're talking about encryption at rest - a very different application than transport encryption.

Source: Day job.

So this is where the miscommunication is. I didn’t know people were attacking TLS, that seems absurd to me. When I hear e2e, I interpret it as no one except the communicating parties can see the data. Facebook messenger DOES use TLS but it does not have e2e encryption.

Glancing at the Wikipedia page, your definition is the original one but in the last 6 years it’s evolved to the meaning I was using.

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