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Comment by WinterMount223 | Hacker News Reader

What’s with the obsession with CP? I agree that it’s morally wrong and should be penalized but why is it perceived as the Ultimate Crime? Why is this tool supposedly for detecting CP only and not stolen bikes for sale, bullying through SMS, etc which are also criminal offenses?

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> why is it perceived as the Ultimate Crime?

Because you can apparently justify any move, no matter how authoritarian, by saying "think of the kids"!

It's politicians and governments exploitating psychology to get away with problematic crap.

It's not the ultimate crime, it's the ultimate justification.

Just like how "security" is often used in the same manner, but I agree that CP is a much more persuasive and emotional argument.

Because it's a good political tool that leverages parental and other human instincts to protect children. Because it puts most people in such a thought terminating blind panic you shut down thought and use it as cover for your true intentions, and give token enforcement funding for it while you direct the majority of enforcement funding for your true goals to politically control your enemies. It's old as politics itself.

It's been known for a while that this is a political technique. It is one of the four horsemen of the infoacopolypse [0] since 1988 after all. Or that “How would you like this wrapped?” comic by John Jonik in the year 2000 [1]. It's the next round of the crypto wars.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/PropagandaPosters/comments/5re9s1/h...

Two thoughts.

1) Good, simple politics. Protecting kids from predators is about as cut and dry an issue as you will ever find. Harry Potter vs Voldemort might be a more complicated moral issue.

2) I suspect that a few very well connected activists in the Bay Area have made it their life's work to get CSAM tools on sites.

Ashton Kutcher and his organization Thorn [0] are probably the best example of this. Thorn is an interesting example because it has been VERY good at making its case in the non-tech media e.g. [1], [2], [3] and in front of congress [4]. It should be said, Thorn makes technology that helps track down child exploitation and has had some great results, which deserve plaudits.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(organization)

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/04/15/7126530...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/opinion/sway-kara-swisher...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/reliable-source/wp/2017/...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsgAq72bAoU

> What’s with the obsession with CP?

It's been the go-to outrage generator for federal law enforcement and spy agencies to use to attack strong device and end-to-end encryption by means of legislation that requires backdoors our outlaws encryption that is too strong.

To see why, scroll down to see the guy advocating for the death penalty for people involved in child porn production.

If only law enforcement showed equal vigor for addressing child abuse in religion, whether it's raping altar boys or using the mouth to clean blood off a baby that has been circumcised (often causing syphilis outbreaks in the process.)

It's almost like it's not actually about fighting child abuse, but about being able to snoop in your devices and communications.

CP is fairly easy to recognize if you see it I'd imagine. I'm sure there are some instances where an adult just looks very young, but there is probably a lot of CP out there with no potential for that.

How exactly does one recognize a bike as stolen from a photograph?

You recognize bikes, and compare it to a database of known stolen bikes.

CSAM only works by checking a hash. Photos of a stolen bike, especially ones that are sold online would probably have unique images taken by the thief.

This is a misunderstanding. The goal here is not to identify new child pornography, based on ML trained models. This is to identify known child pornography, according to a hashed value. The hashed value is generated by an ML model.

So is the proposal a system for identifying known images of stolen bikes? That doesn't make sense because it isn't against the law to have an image of a stolen bike.

No. This system would only work for material that is illegal to possess. If we want to go paranoid, we could see a similar system deployed to prevent computers from having unauthorized copyrighted materials (DRM-free ebooks, academic papers, movies, etc), that’d be a horrible reality.

Well it is a special category of human depravity. In prison the other prisoners don't go out of their way to beat and shank the bike thieves and cyber bullies, or even the run-of-the-mill murderers.

> I agree that it’s morally wrong and should be penalized but why is it perceived as the Ultimate Crime?

Because children are trafficked and abused to create it SMH...

Child abuse is a real problem and should have considerable resources dedicated to combating it, but focussing on banning images depicting child abuse does nothing to prevent a child from being abused. We're close to a situation where it's safer to abuse children than to try and find images depicting child abuse. I'm pretty sure that focussing on preventing abuse and supporting children to report abuse will do a lot more than sweeping the evidence it ever happened under the rug. Of course that would also require you to go after some pretty high ranking people, so it's not very good for one's career.

Police arrest child abusers and traffickers all the time... But as long as there's demand for CP people will create it (like many illecit activities), hence trying to reduce the demand (through making consequences for possessing it).

It's funny, comments on this site regularly demonize all sorts of non-consentual images (revenge porn for example) and rightly so but CP is the ultimate non-consentual image - a child doesn't even understand sexuality, isn't sexually mature, never mind able to consent... And there's comments here downplaying it, borderline condoning it...

There is a vast ocean of difference between "borderline condoning" and "this data must not appear on any storage medium ever". People who possess images of abuse, be it of children or adults, should be forced to delete them and fined appropriately. Additionally there should be an investigation to identify the abusers and punish them accordingly. Beyond that I see no use in sending people who simply possess an image to prison. Yes, the person's rights are being infringed, which should result in some reparations, but I see no use in depriving that person of their freedom.

You cannot remove demand, but you can discourage supply enough that demand would have to be fulfilled by drawings or CGI renderings of nonexistent people.

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