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Comment by alaricus | Hacker News Reader

"Protecting kids" is a load of nonsense. It's just a convenient excuse and sounds much better than "we want to read your private stuff".

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I don't quite understand, to what end? This is clearly a good step towards authoritarianism, but then what? People "disappearing" and more population control?

The world sometimes seems so ridiculous I can't believe it.

In the end it may just be about (corrupted) power. Those who are in power can use the data they gather through surveillance to stay in power, even without "disappearing". It's sufficient to be able to identify whistleblowers and have that be known in order for fewer people to blow the whistle.

The only people really thinking of the children are the ones not bound by said law and will not be interfered with...

(In case it's to subtle, the actual child abusers or consumers of said content)

the headline is horribly biased (could we change it to "think of the children!"?) but it seems to me if you want to protect children from pedos that you would need to read both of their email, so I don't understand how breaking privacy threatens children.

Mandating that the takedown go through this agency means states won't be able to hire private companies specialising in takedowns (and faster). Takedowns take way longer, which hurts the children.

>We found that the specialist contractors who take down phishing websites for banks would typically take six hours to remove an offending website, while the Internet Watch Foundation – which has a legal monopoly on taking down child-abuse material in the UK – would often take six weeks.

[...]

>So it’s really stupid for the European Commission to mandate centralised takedown by a police agency for the whole of Europe. This will be make everything really hard to fix once they find out that it doesn’t work, and it becomes obvious that child abuse websites stay up longer, causing real harm.

> which has a legal monopoly on taking down child-abuse material in the UK

So basically a pr stunt from those who left the EU to feel better about themselves?

I would have though that in most (all?) EU countries, there's already laws in place to allow law enforcement to read private correspondence of suspects. From my reading, this law would also "allow the widespread scanning of people’s private communications" (from an article linked in the post https://edri.org/our-work/european-commissions-online-csam-p...), so not necessarily limited to suspects

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