Ashton Kutcher’s non-profit, Thorn, supports EU plans for CSAM scanning

From your description he seems very irrational and led by emotion. His goal is noble but that's where it ends. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Without actual numbers and rational arguments, this is so subjective it is moot.

People arguing against this aren't against fighting child sexual abuse or even sexual abuse in general. But the entire thing is so riddled with "what ifs" and more, that it's a hard sell to justify another step to the road of potential total control.

Every parent wants their children to have as many lifelines as possible in case something bad happens, to let them experiment safely without predators lurking. What we should be asking is how much we're willing to give up for each lifeline, and at what point we have to accept nature (or in this case, society) just isn't going to be fair.

Once the emotional tearjerker arguments have been used to support those things, the cynical bureaucrats and autocrats that make policy later use these tools for so many other sinister things. If Kutcher has more brains than emotion, and is serious about a genuinely better world, he should be aware of these other important fundamentals too and base his proposals for fighting exploitation on them.

A) There's no shortage of people make that argument unironically

B) If you just change "ban" to "tax to the point that the common man finds another solution" (which is the same sort of "some animals are more equal" situation that dragnets with selective enforcement create) the number of those people increases by an order of magnitude.

I would argue that he's just trying to make money. Lobbying politicians so that a requirement for a product becomes enshrined in law, while your organization just happens to be providing that product? For a fee, of course. This is just plain old greed in a wrapper of virtue signaling. Yuck.

Giving the government or some other entity access to all of your media is not analogous to the physical reality of children being at more risk due to being around more moving cars (especially since those cars have increased in height and have reduced visibility).

It is objectively true that children who grow in up a village without cars are safer while playing outside by themselves than a village where large cars are zipping by at 40mph. Whether or not the benefits of cars are worth the loss of free movement for children is a different discussion.

No, because content like CSAM will immediately switch channels and you cannot really ban encryption.

For instance, "cars kill X number of kids per year, let's ban cars!"'s mirror framing is "how many children's lives is car driving worth?" It's something to be on the lookout for in these types of discussions if not to avoid then to recognize.

Yes but isn't that already the case? If a government, a three-letter-agency, or even a local detective want to fabricate a case against me for some reason, how difficult will that be to do in practice? Does this CSAM hash list really give them anything fundamentally new?

The question becomes how to control the inevitable proliferation of commoditized mass survelliance.

Privacy in the future will require a level of defense not available via common residential/commercial construction methods. Hell, even a SCIF eventually won't help..

This line of rhetoric doesn't help the conversation.

And then? Generate 100000 false positives per day (which is what will happen); arrest them all until proven innocent? Investigate them all until proven guilty? What? 100000 flagged data streams (videos, documents, sounds, images etc) is serious work to comb through as an AI is just not good enough to ruin someone's life while innocent. This will also happen with the current proposal anyway if executed broad enough.

Saying it's about the children, makes anybody who argues against the point look bad. But once they have successfully slipped that under the door, the continual surveillance will go on to be for any and everything, as it becomes in any authoritarian state. It's just another and sneaky way to get to what is done in China.

That ability hasn't presented itself before now.

You know what happens in my country when you get a big sum of money from crowdfunding or the tax authority thinks you owe them money? They block your bank accounts. Yeah, they actually do that, and then tell you to come and resolve the problem. Which can take weeks to months.

You know what happens in a "normal" country like the UK, Germany, Netherlands or any other with a healthy number of small/medium business? They notify you and tell you to come and resolve the issue asap. If you fail to do that, they can block and check your bank accounts.

In the meantime, you can continue doing business. The punishment for tax evasion/etc is about the same all over.

So why the extra totalitarianism? Anyone with half a brain would never want to deal with that bs. And that's just one example, there's lots more.

You know where big companies come from? Small ones grow into them. Good luck growing much of anything with this kind of approach. Sit there and be envious of Germany and everyone else.

Many things are proposed, very few make it through, meaning the number of people you have to influence has to be extremely tactical or total.

You can see this with the proposal to stop moving the EU parliament and commission to Strasbourg every year (just to move it back again), France says no, therefore it can't happen.

Same is true with sanctions against .pl for freedom of the press violations, Hungary says no and that's all it takes for nothing to happen.

This would mean less democracy. As much as possible should be decided decentralized at a local level. I know where my mayor lives. He can't act against the interest of his own people for too long without some serious consequences. A pan-EU organization can.

I find the complexity of EU actually to be a feature, not a bug. There are drawbacks, but I’ll take them over the alternative you paint.

In which case innocent persons will end up on watch lists or being harassed by intrusive investigations.

I understand that an enterprising young hacker can encrypt it manually, but that's akin to someone becoming a gunsmith. It takes effort and usually the people that go through the training are the types of people we trust with the knowledge anyway.

Now I've personally worked on software to help stop the spread of CSAM, so I have my biases here, but I also understand the dangers of unmitigated surveillance. But just as we trust our democracies with munitions, I think we should do the same with surveillance, provided that courts and the rule of law are strongly enshrined. From what I know, this is the case in my country of Canada.

I want to live in a world that is safe and free. It takes work and discussions to achieve both at the same time, but I have faith that we can do it if we try.

https://www.rainn.org/news/grooming-know-warning-signs

> grooming: manipulative behaviors that the abuser uses to gain access to a potential victim, coerce them to agree to the abuse, and reduce the risk of being caught.

Checkpoints were rampant, but it was both easy to discover their locations as well as avoid them. In practice, I found them to be opportunities to shakedown the population and issue any possible citation that they thought could stick, with drunk driving prevention being the ostensible reasoning to defend what would otherwise be an indefensible violation of the 4th Amendment.

The net result for me personally was a near total loss of respect for law enforcement and our government in general. It demonstrated that the majority conform to our system of laws out of abject terror, or risk being arbitrarily targeted and persecuted under fundamentally unjust laws. No one in their right mind would claim to obey the government out of respect for the system’s righteousness.

That’s not a sustainable way to run a government, so here we are: in the midst of a civil war (being waged in the courts… for now) and on the brink of outright revolution. The current assault on reproductive rights offers yet another glimpse into this now-endemic ongoing conflict, with actual violence occurring almost daily.

Ironically the most accepted replies here are emotional knee-jerk statements.