Data shows that the EU's CSAM scanning will not have the intended effect
tutanota.com
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According to the DKSB (Deutscher Kinderschutzbund) [1], encryption barely plays a role when it comes to the distribution of CSAM [2]. In short: DKSB is not in favour of this. You know, the people that probably know what they are talking about when it comes to the protection of children, unlike the politicians who are trying to force this through.
The politicians which only really talked to salesmen of surveillance software [3] about this and never really consulted any independent people with expertise in tech, privacy or the protection of children [4].
Because this was never, at any moment, about protecting children.
[1]: https://www.dksb.de/en/home/
[2]: https://www.eu-info.de/dpa-europaticker/316232.html
[3]: https://netzpolitik.org/2022/dude-wheres-my-privacy-how-a-ho...
[4]: https://edri.org/our-work/private-and-secure-communications-...
Source: at my German uni there are many recruitment drives from these entities
e.g.: Crypto AG incident, old phone taps, etc.
I think that's much more of a conspiracy theory than the notion that politicians want control.
As a German minister of defence, she is known as a person who paid half a billion euros to PwC consultants. Also, she renovated a sailing wooden training ship for more than 200 million euros.
And she is accused of removing proofs by deleting data from her phone and “not remembering” anything.
I would trust that person every evil and corrupt thing one can imagine.
It's sad that our EU doesn't let any hope that they do something because they believe it's the right thing to do. It's always big business and foreign government interests before interests of Europeans.
Now, if I only could make my previous comment disappear, like she made her messages disappear, so they couldn't be used as court evidence …
Paying half a billion to consultants to tell you this is.... Kinda the problem.
It's clear now how these Israeli zero-day exploit software power politicians' informational armies against their political adversaries.
UvdL has been mentioned in connection with nepotism before (by the German state radio!):
https://www.dw.com/en/german-opposition-to-probe-defense-min...
After that scandal she failed upwards to Brussels. Politicians that are that unassailable should face extended scrutiny. Who protects her and why?
(Here is an unrelated mask procurement scandal that shows how things work in Germany:
https://www.dw.com/en/german-mask-scandal-unforgivable-viola...)
Might be an understatement?
Sleep tight, eu.
its not about bribery, its about being led on by the nearest grifter because everyone actually working on technology isnt in the same circles as the politicians
But, keep in mind: the government is actively selling out its constituents and creating an environment that enables a surveillance state, even when that may not be the original goal. Slippery slope and all, first it's child pornography - but where does it stop? It won't, because that data set is rich to mine - rich to sell into. We can make up entire product lines that can be sold, via FUD, into our ignorant government friends and force people to buy it even when it's been shown to provide little to no value to the masses.
So, no - not a lizard conspiracy. More like "Dumb and Dumber: Government Edition".
Incentives are aligned, each party acts in their own self interest and this is the outcome. Conspiracy isn't needed to explain it.
People ascribe to government officials way too much competence and way too little desire to consolidate power and rule absolutely
The lizards may be behind the software companies though
With services like Digital Ocean, you can spin up a chat server with pretty much only the most basic of technical knowledge, hell you likely won't even have to touch a command line.
Sure the EU could move to require OSS software developers operating in the EU to backdoor their software but that will be moot too as it will get caught on to in a heartbeat and a fork (sans backdoor) will be made available.
In short, Dutch hoster TransIP had to pause their scanning service. They got hashes that included default images from WordPress.
"Waar het misging, is volgens TransIP-woordvoerder Marco Edelman dat per ongeluk hashes van standaardafbeeldingen van WordPress-installaties en plug-ins zijn toegevoegd." [1] https://tweakers.net/nieuws/182766/transip-pauzeert-hashchec...
If I had to guess, you might have been hitting collisions in a truncated MD5 hash. It's not uncommon to do something like take only the first 64 bits of the hash. Doing this you are quite vulnerable to birthday problem issues.
I have no idea if the database is still somewhere, if so, we can look at the git commit and figure out what the possible UPCs are and narrow it down to a couple of hours worth of time stamps. I have a feeling it would probably be more than 512 bits though. UPCs are can be longish, plus a time stamp with each digit being a byte…
I highly doubt the database exists in any meaningful way though, since the product was shut down years ago.
Right now it was clear because it was an often-used package. What if it's something more niche next time?
Here's how it works. By law, all machines will require networking, or will refuse to boot.
Network stacks will require a key / license. Licence will be verified by an online server, continually, and any OS without this will be fined, and the devs implementing a bypass jailed.
Stop complaining/pointing out flaws, or you must hate children! Or... are you one of them?
Microsoft are slowly baking in this concept into Windows 10/11 to become more like an XBox at least for the home version. I envision a future version of windows will operate very closely to the method you described. I suspect all of the OS vendors want an app store in front of everyone whenever possible and telemetry to see what needs tuning to keep interaction with the app store as high as attainable. I do not believe it would be a stretch to see a future home version of windows not allow login if their authentication servers can not be reached or if ones cached remote credentials expire.
I could even see this eventually happening with Linux. The latest version of the Fedora desktop F36 interacts heavily with admin.fedoraproject.org and they have an app store. AFAIK Redhat/IBM have not yet implemented any centralized authentication servers with corresponding default client configurations to utilize them and I do not know if they intend to.
I disagree. It might happen to some flavors of Linux like Fedora, Ubuntu and others that are backed by companies. But because the source is open, there will always be distributions that do not have such a restriction.
In addition the EU is also working on an online ID so a website can request your real identity and verify it. This would link in with that, validate the user as well as their hardware.
Right now? No. But I could see it happen in 10 years. Especially once CSAM is no longer the scapegoat and they have admitted they want the data for a lot more surveillance. I can already see the posts of people that think they have nothing to hide.
The desktop OSes are heading there too but they're still a bit afraid of pissing off their legacy users. Besides the lock-in they're all aiming at that sweet 30% app store commission.
Why isn't that better than catching none of the abusers?
These measures are only likely to lead to the arrest of a small portion of abusers, while opening a massive avenue for government overreach across the entire population.
I would assume that very few to none of us on here are pedophiles, and we're aware this is going on. It stands to reason that the pedophiles are also aware that this is going on, and the vast majority of them are going to adjust their behavior to avoid this scanning. Doubly so once a few arrests are made.
The balance of those issues is subjective, though.
That's just one argument on "even if everything works exactly as intended, it's still a terrible idea".
Then add malicious use of such a system once in place. We know such systems are misused ALL the time. So I would bet good money that someone, somewhere, will instead use it to neatly collect CSAM material.
Not to mention other malicious use of surveillance whereby you just add some hashes for files completely unrelated to CSAM. I'm not talking about the slippery-slope of "let's include some gay porn in the mix", but rather stuff related to political opponents, and what not.
It's a false dichotomy to suggest the trade-off is "catch some abusers" vs "catch no abusers". It's a "catch some abusers" vs "violate privacy of minors | remove e2e encrypted communication | etc"
But I agree with the parent comment, the vast, vast majority of distributors doesn't know how to work with encryption. The audience here knows, but compared to the average user, the audience here has much more technical knowledge.
To be very clear, I think there are ways to design applications around encryption to prevent the active abuse on platforms. For example, disabling encryption on minors accounts, limiting messages from people outside of your social circle, allowing opt-in so parents can read messages from their kids, AI models to display a prompt to the child that something may be harmful and they should seek their parents etc.
The biggest disappointment I had with Apple about this CSAM scanning business, is that they were not talking about or taking steps in preventing the active abuse of children. I would love to see regulation put in for the design of apps when a minor uses them. A small part of me is worried about poor regulations, but then we have things like Kik.
You can also just have your kid not use encrypted apps or not allow them to message internet strangers. That is probably the wrong thing to do - blanket bans are a bad way to teach life skills - bit you as a parent can do so. You don't need government help.
I know a fair amount of social worker whom sadly report that in a lot of child education place they know about A LOT of abuse, and a non negligible (and mental burden inducing) part of the work is to do triage, because they know they get (the number are made up) 50 report per week, but they only can 'investigate' about 20, and even if the 20 are really worrying, they can only launch action for 3 to 5, any more would overflow the dedicated services.
And that's not they are lazy, investigating is really complicated (and often not even worth, the main goal is to help the victim, no chasing culprits) and acting worse. You are pretty sure some girl in bad social context is being abused ? with whom do you send her living ? the maybe abusing father ? The probably violent alcoolic uncle or the nice but drug dealing older brother (who maybe is not ready to support her education even with a little financial help) ? That can seems parodic but I've seen real conversations like that.
The idea public services who cannot aldready read all the professionally redacted reports will suddently became omniscient because they can read my discord server private channel is funny.
Hope some representative will jump on the occasion to request more social worker founds to treat the case we aldready know about.
This move is all about surveillance and has nothing to do with keeping kids safe.
I think Australians and New Zealanders get the same, confused for each other. And us Dutch are confused a lot with Germans too. Not that I wear a flag for it though :)
Source: Shared a house with a bunch of Canadians :)
And I am German.
NB there have been several other similar scandals but Rotherham is the most famous.
Since then the scandals regarding islamic rape gangs have become public, and it has since become clear that he was trying to say "islamic rape gangs", not "muslamic ray guns". It was an issue which exclusively affected deprived areas and working class people. They knew what was happening but could not articulate it in a way which could be taken seriously by the establishment. He is owed an apology.
Plenty of others could and did articulate it better. But it's so much easier to pick out and debunk the most inept of the disfavored side, and pretend they are representative of the rest, while highlighting only the most sympathetic of the favored side.
A very basic and very effective propaganda technique.
However, while I can’t say either way if she’s good at other things or not, the headlines aren’t going to answer that either way — news only covers emotionally charged events, and outside science, tech, and weather forecasts, that in turn makes everyone look bad most of the time.
Go live in the south of Germany and see how conservative it is - no card payments, little online delivery, a huge amount of bureaucracy, etc. And the EU forces that sort of bureaucratic conservatism on the whole of Europe, even though some countries like the UK, Sweden, Netherlands, Denmark, etc. are much more liberal and technologically progressive.
https://ec.europa.eu/food/plants/genetically-modified-organi...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food_in_t...
Indeed, the reason I as a vegetarian can have hard cheese is the use of GM bacterial rennet (not a crop, no idea how that changes the regulation rules).
As for card payments, even in Berlin they are less common than in the U.K. prior to Brexit, but that variance by itself (and the increasingly cashless orientation of Sweden) demonstrates the EU isn’t being held back by German skepticism of non-cash money.
Likewise in reverse (and to show this isn’t just an EU thing), when I visited California, I was shocked by how primitive and backward the payment systems were, especially given California has a reputation for being technologically progressive.
However, even if I were to accept all of your claims, this makes little difference in either direction to my opinion of specifically Ursula von der Leyen, as questions of competence are a separate axis to each of liberty-vs-rules and dynamic-vs-conservative and left-vs-right.
Edit: also, GDPR is in this context basically the same as the UK’s Data Protection Act 1998, it is just that nobody outside the U.K. paid any attention to the U.K. acting alone.
That is a simplification but it mostly works like that.
So, the European Commission is not a democracy, it strictly speaking an oligarchy.
The European Parliament is different. But the BIG money is managed by the EC.
Mind you, there's plenty about the European Parliament itself that could also use some improvement. They're still moving between Brussels and Strasbourg every month, for example.
Still I'm wholly in favor of giving more power to the parliament.
However the real problem is political capital, if parliament wanted to they could just refuse to adopt any law or budget etc unless X member of the commission resigns or Y bill is proposed by the commission. The power is there, and this is essentially how parliaments evolved over history, wrestling power away from the monarchs (or in this case they'd be wrestling power from the heads of government in the European Concil)
But because the EP lacks visibility and people are generally uneducated in how the EU works the MEPs won't take the risk even if they felt it was needed and they will hardly be punished for not taking it because people vote MEPs in based on national politics and not their positions in the EU
There aren't really more powers to be given to the parliament, you could make censure of the commission being 50%+1 instead of 2/3 and letting them officially initiate legislation, but those are minor changes and won't change the underlying awareness problem
Even in this thread on a platform on which you'd expect people to be reasonably educated and capable of googling before commenting half of the comments about what the EU and institutions can do are completely uninformed
Even the article in the submission is attacking the European Commission by discussing claims made by an organization entirely distinct from the EU
(The EC draft is deserving of many attacks but it has enough wrong in it not to require bringing in something entirely unrelated)
For instance this last commission took office in december rather than September/October because there was a huge delay in picking the President and then parliament blocked two/three (don't remember exactly) commissioners so new candidates had to be chosen from those countries.
So would you say that for example....prime minister of UK is not democratically elected? After all, you never vote for them - you vote for the party in parlimentary elections, then the party selects a representative to be the prime minister. How is that different?
There is no citizen vote to form a parliament which then will vote for the EC leader. At all. Not even near. It has nothing to do with a representative parliament, really.
We do not know who, why, from where the next EC leader will be. At all.
At least when you vote for a party (in UK, Spain, whatever), you have some idea what person they will vote for Prime Minister.
Nothing of the sort in the EC.
Again, such mechanism exists in nearly all EU countries - you have comissions proposing laws, then parliments pass(or reject) them. The comissions don't need to be voted in by the populace, because the final say is given to people who were voted in.
That is the trick of the name.
The European Commission "sounds" as the "Commission for highways" in the, say Ministry for the Interior. But it has nothing to do with that AT ALL.
It is the main government branch of the EU, the "executive". Despite its name.
The parliament is just the "legislative".
That is the trick they played on us. And, honestly, part of what made British brexiters mad at Europe (not trying to be on either side, hey).
In the case of the EU the government is usually (always?) composed by members of the winning EU party, which are politically aligned coalitions of national parties.
[0] Not just republics, also constitutional monarchies
[I'm used to Italian politics, but I get the feeling that UK is pretty much the same]
Turns out our system, while based on the same basic principles evolved in a very different way from the UK/Germany etc
For the UK the main difference is that most of their governments are majority governments, due to their electoral system either labour or the tories are going to have (in 90% of cases) an outright majority, so the government (at least the PM) is going to be pretty much known as soon as the election is over
In germany/the netherlands they have more often coalitions so you don't know until after the parties have negotiated post-election. This is closer to what we have in italy, however there are two differences:
1. There are strong conventions about the larger party taking the head of government position, something like what happened with the Conte I government where two parties agreed on a government but had to bring in a "neutral" PM does not happen abroad
2. Governments are more likely to last the length of the mandate, specifically it's quite rare to have governments fall and bring in a "governo tecnico" headed by a neutral PM
So turns out that other countries are much less used to have the PM be someone that hasn't campaigned at all
A third difference, in which italy is quite unique amongst parliamentary systems, is that both chambers have to give their confidence, almost everywhere else it's just the lower house, while in italy also the Senate must agree to a government.
This is similar to how the European Council also has to agree on the EU commission members but very unlike other countries, where the upper houses are at worst symbolical and at best very constrained in their powers
Regarding the Council (assuming you are referring to the council of the EU), that's certainly an institution I would like to see reformed as it is a body with legislative powers composed by executive members.
> Council (assuming you are referring to the council of the EU)
I was actually referring to the European Council, since it's the organ that is involved in the election of the Commission
But agreed on the national executive branches legislating at the EU. That is at the same time the most undemocratic thing about the EU and the least common criticism, which I find baffling
Personally I'd rather the council operated as a parliamentary assembly made up of delegations from national parliaments / national parliamentary committees
I just don't want it to be directly elected too, the US made that mistake with the 17th amendment and I always get the feeling they're worse off for it
As mentioned elsewhere, that's not the case. The PM has always won at least two votes, one in their constituency (winning a local election) and another from their party membership.
What you really mean is, there has been no universal vote on the choice of PM themselves, which is correct. It's not a presidential system. However, that doesn't mean they never won a vote.
In contrast, the EU is run by people who have never actually won a vote. Or, well, technically von der Leyen won a "vote" in the EU Parliament but she was the only candidate who was on the list, so "winning" only meant reaching the quorum threshold.
I do want to say however that this argument about the double election you make doesn't really hold much water in my opinion. It is obvious that the UK institutions have a more developed democratic tradition than the EU ones
But they do not lay in the PM having to be an MP nor in the parties using a primary to choose their leaders
An MP is elected on the basis of their constituents thinking they'll do a good job as their representative, not as a way to find the most capable person in the country to be PM, so it's not a relevant election to gain legitimacy as PM, in the same way UvdL being an MP in the bundestag for 10 years prior to becoming commission president doesn't improve her legitimacy as EC president
As for the party vote, that is a good system and I do wish they'd gone with the spitzenkandidaten (more so we could stop having this conversation than any practical reason or love for Weber), but in this case it'd have been more undemocratic, not less
Weber, much less Timmermans or the Renew people, had no outright majority in the parliament and no majority in the Council, and the council has its own legitimacy even if its made up of (mostly) indirectly elected individuals. Members of the EUCO have more visibility and their actions are under much greater expectations of representing popular will than any single MP or MEP
I fail to see the democratic appeal of a majority of voters (whose MEPs and leaders didn't think Weber was a good fit) having their voices ignored because Weber won a vote within a private organization
But that might also be because where I'm from the expectation is for government to represent a majority rather than a plurality
> "vote" in the EU Parliament but she was the only candidate who was on the list, so "winning" only meant reaching the quorum threshold.
I was under the impression you were from the UK, so I apologize if I assumed familiarity with the parliamentary system in my comments above
In parliamentary systems (which the EU kinda is with some differences) after an election the Head of State consults with the parties to find who would be able to form a government and then once it reaches a decision the individual in question asks Parliament for their confidence and if parliament gives it (so a majority votes yes) then they are "elected"
In the EU's case the only peculiarity is that instead of the Head of State being an individual it's the European Council acting by QMV
Even after reaching the quorum if a majority in parliament had voted No to UvdL she wouldn't be Comission president
I'm not sure they were asked to vote yes/no. They were asked to vote for who should be Commission President, but there was only one name on the list. They could either vote for her or refuse to vote at all.
The relevant parts of Article 17 TEU (link below) are:
> the European Council, acting by a qualified majority, shall propose to the European Parliament a candidate for President of the Commission
> This candidate shall be elected by the European Parliament by a majority of its component members
> If he does not obtain the required majority, the European Council, [...], shall within one month propose a new candidate who shall be elected by the European Parliament following the same procedure
There was only one name on the "list" because there was no list, the question was to approve or to send back for a different name (got relatively close actually if 10 more MEPs had abstained/voted against/not showed up she wouldn't have been elected)
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
guess who ended up being appointed leader? someone who didn't take part and wasn't even part of the process
it's a complete farce, and the powerless parliament is only there to give the entire the thing the appearance of being democratic
What makes you say it's powerless? I'm genuienly curious. In my opinion it's the comission that is completely powerless - it can't do anything without the parliment agreeing, and the parliment is under no obligation to agree with them.
If you mean that the "laws"(they aren't laws technically) don't apply anywhere until actually accepted and adopted by the EU member states - then yes, that's very much by design.
yes, that's the point
The EU parliament votes on new EU 'laws' as a part of ordinary legislative procedure. It can reject laws or amend them. But contrast to national parliaments, it cannot propose new laws.
The truth is that even on national level, most laws are proposed to parliament by government, not by MPs.
> If you mean that the "laws"(they aren't laws technically) don't apply anywhere until actually accepted and adopted by the EU member states - then yes, that's very much by design.
That is not true, there are directives and regulations (as EU 'laws'). Regulations apply directly, without any adoption by members states. Directives have to be adopted, but member states are required to adopt them and in some border cases they apply even if not adopted.
Correct. The EU Parliament calls itself a Parliament, but isn't.
1. He had to get elected MP in his constituency.
2. He had to win a vote by the Conservative party membership (anyone can become a member).
Both the big parties in the UK have some degree of internal democracy for choosing their next leaders. It's true that it's not a presidential system, but it's not comparable to the Commission where the commissioners haven't won any votes ever (the GP post sort of implies there's a vote amongst national leaders but we honestly have no idea how vDL was selected - maybe there was no vote at all and it was all some sort of stitch-up).
It is also my understanding that it's purely because they chose to do that. They only need to name a prime minister, how they decide on one isn't defined by law.
>>He had to win a vote by the Conservative party membership (anyone can become a member).
Again, the point is that the PM is chosen not by the general populace, they are selected within the winning party.
>>but it's not comparable to the Commission where the commissioners haven't won any votes ever
The commission is comparable to the House of Lords at best, where the people aren't elected either - both of them only advise the parliment though, neither the EC nor the house of lords can pass any laws by themselves. That's why it's "allowed" - the Comission has no real power because it relies on Parliment(which is democratically elected) to make the final decisions.
This is sort of true but misleading, the PM is the leader of the winning party, and the leader is always chosen before an election, so the electorate know exactly who will be PM when they vote.
[0] although I’ll accept he doesn’t really count because both he and the Conservative party explicitly said prior to that election that if you vote for Blair you’ll get Brown soon after.
No, but that's not relevant to the original point.
The two big parties are big and old because they are stable yet also able to change to reflect the changing electorate. They probably wouldn't have survived so long if they weren't internally democratic. The same is true in the US, the two big parties remain big because they're more like loose coalitions with a lot of internal democracy, hence why party elites are constantly getting upset about 'takeovers' by outsiders like Sanders, Trump, the tea party etc.
"The commission is comparable to the House of Lords at best ... the Comission has no real power because it relies on Parliment(which is democratically elected) to make the final decisions."
You've got it backwards. The EU Parliament is like the House of Lords. Both can propose amendments to legislation and slow things down, but they can't actually propose new law changes. In the UK only Parliament can initiate the process of changing the law, and in the EU only the Commission can. They call this the "right of initiation". The power to amend is also a lot less useful than it looks, because if the EU Parliament amends something in a way the Commission doesn't like, they can just revoke the law change completely and try again. The Commission is never required to accept an amendment.
In practice the EU Parliament usually amends laws to give the EU even more power than it was already writing in for itself. Because the EU Parliament isn't really a parliament, the sort of people who run for election are the sort of people who are content to either cheer or boo from the sidelines. That's why none of the EU level parties have any distinguishable policies beyond "support the EU in whatever it already wants to do" and "leave the EU/slow it down". Most of them are cheerleaders.
I’ll be happy to say the UK also doesn’t count as a “proper democracy”, but counting it as more democratic than the EU feels like arguments-as-soldiers.
My personal take is that the EU is a trade agreement that, unlike most trade agreements, has at least a modicum of democratic accountability. But the foundation of its democratic nature is the member states within the EU rather than the supernational coordination organisation itself, which is precisely as democratic as its members want it to be and no more nor less than that.
And if parliament votes no, the EU Commission can always reintroduce the legislation, perhaps dressed slightly different, until the parliament votes yes. Which is the modus operandi of the Commission as described by Juncker in the past:
> We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.
In a parliamentary system the legislature picks the prime minister (executive), therefore the coalition now controls the executive branch too.
Now the executive branch appoints someone to the EU commission. The EU commission holds legislative power in the EU.
EU parliamentary elections pick MEPs. The successful national parties are going to find now success in MEP elections, because they're already successful locally.
This same national party is part of an EU-wide along with other similar parties from other EU nations. The elected MEPs will have EU-party affiliations based on that.
Or in other words, it's the same groups of people in power on all of these levels.
I'd also argue that maybe child abuse in Europe is below the global average, so we may be talking about orders of magnitude wrong, not just slightly.
"Give me six lines written by the most honest man, and I will find something there to hang him"
Cardinal Richelieu, protector of children
https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/chatkontrolle-me...
I cannot emphasize enough that members of the tech policy community must abandon the "think of the children" line of rhetoric to weaken the internet.
I don't want to think about your children. I don't want to interact with your children.
I've met people who have. People who don't just go out onto the internet to be disagreeable, but truly believe what they are saying.
That context collapse of "oh, you're serious?" paired with my sincere view that those folks can get in the ground with Jeffrey Epstein, has been quite the journey.
(I crafted the above sentence after extensive therapy, to make it clear: I will not hurt someone just because of their "sexual preference".)
But there's a Breaking Bad episode that shows what happens when someone who is not your caregiver decides not to interact -- you will choke on your own vomit and die, or otherwise come to some end that wouldn't have if you hadn't been all alone.
(I'm on the autistic spectrum, and a huge prestige TV geek.)
You can engineer society to coerce folks, you can invent ever creative reasons to monitor folks who the data shows have always tried to give folks autonomy to make decisions paired with accurate data, but then... well turn on the news.
You will what you voted for. Power outages because your independent grid minus federal money rotten then got hit with a superstorm. Condos collapsing because no one did the checks. And the bridge the local tech savvy at risk youth called for help from under may literally fall down.
What "civil" society needs to do is believe victims.
Testimony is evidence. Value it as much as... computer stuff.
Or own that if you decide otherwise, there may be civil unrest.
- Greg, from Cub Scout Troop 262.
I imagine there are a bunch of parents that read HN that have their kids in Scouts. So this never happens again to any other kid in Scouting: they should know that the BSA has Youth Protection Training (YPT) which has clear rules that state there should be no private one-on-one contact between adults and children.
If anyone's Pack, Troop, or Crew is not following that simple rule, they need to report it. First start at the unit committee, and if that doesn't work, contact the Council.
Of course if you suspect abuse and not just a violation of the rules, contact the authorities.
Anyone can take YPT (you don't have to be a member of the BSA), just create a "My Scouting" account and take the online training.
Additionally, if the unit is chartered by a church, make sure everyone is also taking that church's version of youth protection training as well (The Catholic Church calls it Safe Haven, the Episcopal Church calls it Safegaurding God's Children, etc).
As a parent, you should make sure every parent and adult volunteer in your unit is trained. When everyone knows the rules, then we can make sure they are being followed to prevent abuse from happening.
The sad fact is that ever since the BSA came out with YPT in the 1970s, children are more likely to be abused in churches and schools than in Scouting.
(I'm an adult volunteer in Scouting, and I take this issue very seriously. I want to help make the future a better place, and that starts with our children.)
https://www.sonomanews.com/article/news/boys-girls-club-sett...
It was up in Sonoma, but the Boys & Girls Clubs of Silicon Valley's CEO is arguably worse:
https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2021/12/02/ebay-ecommerc...
(read the last few paragraphs first, or you might think I linked the wrong story)
I don't have any experience with any other youth organizations (as a youth or adult), but I hope they all have or adopt similar rules.
(I am Eagle Scout, and I still like to go camping and help others, and volunteering with my old Scout troop is a great way to do that.)
The intended effect is a totalitarian surveillance. Children are (ab)used by the EU Commission as a pretext which nobody would want to argue with.
https://www.collinsdictionary.com/submission/23179/safetyism
Is there a way of fighting this trend, without exposing oneself to this very effective way of cancelling you and destroying your life? I feel we're powerless to stop this.
There is lots of opposition to the recent proposal of the EU. This article being part of it. Even Nancy Faeser, the German minister of the interior opposes it[1].
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/chatkontrolle-me...
"Think of the Children" has been the immoral rallying cry after it worked so well in the UK for passing several 5-eyes compatible laws into power will little resistance. The message poltically became that we will accuse you of putting childrens lives at risk if you object to this overly complex law that you as a politician likely don't understand.
1. They question the “1 in 5 children are abused” figure. That is fair: it seems tremendous at first sight. But the real figure of 1 in 10 that they reveal is very close and similarly shocking…
2. They emphasize that children know their abusers. But then imply that scanning chat messages cannot help in this situation. There is an obvious retort: abusers can abuse children in their local community and share images of their abuse online. Catching that sharing can identify them and stop them. (I cannot see any statistics on how many, among abusers, actively share things about it online. Intuitively, it would be a low percentage, but that argument is not used.)
3. They calculate that police surveillance orders were only issued for 0.1% of abuse cases, implying that they do it so little because it is ineffective. But the obvious retort is that they do it so little because they have no grounds to do so. “A chat sent from this person’s phone tripped the detector” is a reasonable justification. (I expect there are some much more obvious ways to have that justification which are poorly tapped, like confidential school reporting. But that is not part of the argument.)
The fundamental argument should be that abusers are listening to the EU too. They will gear up. There is nothing anyone can detect in encrypted base64 sent by chat or other means.
Meanwhile, any weakness created by this system will be turned into abuse imparted on the innocents, like sharing to an unwitting victim a zipped adversarial image of a prairie whose pixels were flipped until it triggered the detection.
Overall, that, along with a possibly inadequate false positive rate given the rarity of real abusers 1) actively sharing and 2) doing so insecurely, it is possible that this system would cause more victims than it would help.
A black box detector that similar to a trained drug dog will bark on command. Last time a secret internet block list pushed by von der Leyen was leaked it became clear that they wont limit this stuff to child protection and will do their best to keep the actual criteria used secret. Just mentioning the name von der Leyen in a chat might get you on a list. It is times like these where I would love to have the GDR back, a place where we could just drop of all the crazy Stasi wannabees.
Absolutely. There is never any description given of the required false positive rate, or the way it will be measured and enforced.
A false positive rate of 1% across ~450M people, to find 3M abusers (assuming each abuser averages two victims based on the article’s figures) of which only 1% exchange images insecurely, would mean that 0.8% of detections would be valid.
The police cannot chase 125 dead ends for a single arrest; they just don’t have that kind of budget. They already give up on finding bike thieves even when the bikes are GPS’ed within town, and that would have a much higher probability of success per investigation.
The point is: how many, understood that, decide that's about time to say STOP, pretending immediate arrest and trial for crimes against humanity, attempted coup, high treason, embezzlement etc to our formal politicians and their private-sector shoulder?
For what I see very few. At that point, missing Citizens, we can't have Democracy, so at that point it's perfectly legit morally consider certain level of ignorance like a sort of soft-crime and so pushing toward a new neofeudal society where the cohort of Citizens abuse the crowd of subjects, like our oppressors do, for Citizens interests. Of course it's not easy, but that's is.
* That child abuse is largely familial is irrelevant. It is precisely long-term child abuse which becomes CSAM.
* That 10% of children are abused is a large figure. That, now, c. 70% of CSAM is children generating their own material (using presumably scannable devices), provides a significant justification for scanning those devices.
* That police forces are ineffective at combating both abuse and CSAM is irrelevant. Government's ability to prioritise child abuse in policing is presumably sensitive to its effectiveness, and other policing priorities. If the EU could pass a tech regulation law to cut down a vast amount of online CSAM, then why wouldnt they?
* The government isnt a unified entity, like a person, with some coherent set of priorities. Speaking of it this way will always induce some paranoia. The police's priorities, EU's tech groups, EU states, EU police forces, etc. are all different orgs with different, incoherent, actions.
I think the issue of children now being the major generators of CSAM here is perhaps the key one.... I suspect there's a counter-proposal here which requires children's devices to have optional software on them.
AIUI the proposal is to check file hashes of content against a blacklist of known CSAM?
The linked website is calling this "total surveillance" and saying the EU are lying and exaggerating.
It's total surveillance in the way that looking at the postcode on all envelopes is total surveillance whereby of you send something to a postcode of a known terrorist then it's going to be noticed and may be investigated.
On the OP's serving point, a minor email provider not getting a lot of notifications on alerted child abuse investigations compared to the total numbers of children being abused is because there's not enough resources to investigate more cases. Reducing the resources needed per case by catching low-hanging fruit easily with automated and non-intrusive methods is positively indicated by the OP's evidence here.
What next? Hydrologists admit there's some water in the ocean? Chromatologists discover that the sky is color blue?
But it doesn't help their credibility that they made an entire article debunking the wrong entity
Of the three claims they "debunk" only the 90% of content being hosted in the EU was a claim made by the EU commission, specifically in 2020 by Johansson, the data seems to come from an NGO called Internet Watch Foundation [0] and it does seem unlikely (from a quick glance I think the 90% claim is about content reported within europe, which makes the statement more likely. But in any case it wouldn't matter because for the critical pieces of the legislation it's not a claim that would justify the measures anyway)
But in the other two points the website is constantly referring to this website:
https://human-rights-channel.coe.int/stop-child-sexual-abuse...
and acting as if the Eu commission authored it. The issue is that this website is hosted and authored by the Council of Europe (hence the coe.int domain), an entity entirely disjointed from the EU, of which the EU institutions aren't even a member. This is confusing to people because there are two organizations (European Council and Council of the European Union) which are part of the EU
While the intent of the article is laudable and the scanning parts of the regulation have got to go the "Trumpiest" part of this whole thing is the fact that this website made a whole debunking article based on such thorough research that they didn't even notice they were getting the subject of the debunking wrong
(on the positive side it looks like the german government also agrees, so the chances of those parts going away in amendments increased significantly [1])
[0] https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/news/europe-is-worl...
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/chatkontrolle-me...
I would not believe Frau von der Layen even if she told me 2+2=4.
But nobody tries to assess this because, yes, the aim is not the children. It is power.
Why is that obvious?
I was not referring to relatives living out of home, as they would need some form of communication to set up their encounters, probably.
And that is just a biological fact.
If yes, then women have, in the aggregate, more control over their sexual behaviour than men. And thus men have less control. This does not necesarily imply anything about what the punishment for rape or assault should be.
Note: I am eliding a lot of what the definition of a person is (e.g. everything contained in their skin? Just concious processes? Some form of "natural" baseline that excludes tumors/drugs/etc?) in the above so YMMV.
I recommend using "I agree with the denotation but disagree with connotation/affect" for situations like replying to the grandparent post.
Yes. Sex drive has a lot to do with T levels. Woman's sex drive is at her highest when her T is highest (ovulating).
>More likely to rape
Yes. Rape requires physicality. Most women are incapable of raping a man, without drugs or a gun.
All this to say, I'm not sure what the point of the subthread is.
speak for yourself, coomer
Men commit 97% of murders worldwide. Ironically though it is men that are most likely to find an ideology that deems other cohorts within society as collectively bad and representative of moral decay.
Sexual abuse against men is about 50/50 men and women alone. Even if sexual abuse against women was predominantly male perpetrators, you'd need a far, far higher number of female sexual abuse numbers to get over 90/10. Again, good luck trying to claim that when there are so many social issues masking the true numbers.
That's not to mention a large part of arguments rely on "men in charge", whereas most of the developed world is giving women increasingly more power, at least partially nullifying the former.
>Ironically though it is men that are most likely to find an ideology that deems other cohorts within society as collectively bad and representative of moral decay.
You want to articulate that at all and give people a chance to fight your stance?
Do you think that it's possible that we overlook female predators which assists in padding statistics causing this perception to be somewhat self-fulfilling?
Obviously my anecdote doesn't apply to all places, that's not how statistics work, but it was the case that the grandmother was overlooked, and even when caught did not go into the crime statistics as it was considered a social services matter.
The question is: is gender even related to this? Or is a position of power simply that much less often taken by a woman in a family? Similarly with race, ethnicity, job, and so on.
I'm willing to believe there's a certain percentage of humans in general that simply enjoy hurting others - and that it's a much larger percentage than we'd expect. I also suspect that most of them are unaware of this fact about themselves, and so they don't actively, or consciously, seek to position themselves in a way that would allow them to hurt other without consequences. I would be willing to bet that the percentage of people who both know their nature and actively seek to express it via abuse of power to be vanishingly small[1].
If all of the above is true, then we're left with people who enjoy hurting others, but don't realize this or don't express it without being put in a position of power. When they are put in a position of power, they start expressing their desires. Whether they are men or women, white or not, rich or poor, etc. I think has little significance.
[1] If you understand yourself well enough to know about this, you're also generally intelligent enough not to try doing it on random, unwilling people.
If you give women (relative) safety to commit violence and give them the ability to do so, they end up doing so in about equal rates. If you give them less repercussions than men, they end up doing it more. Teen violence is one which is noticeably weighted "in favor" of boys. Not that difficult to understand why, when boys are taught not to hit girls, but girls aren't taught the same and face little consequence in doing so.
Not that it really matters. Truth is, both sexes are very much capable of violence, and both sexes have more than enough people willing to do so once the "benefits" outweigh the costs.
"Think of the children" seems to be the battle cry of people with bad ideas that won't work anyways.
Ultimately you can't outlaw math. Instead it'll wind up being just the criminals using actually secure encryption and none of this will matter anyway.
[1] https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/satanic-panic
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/31/us/satanic-panic.html
This seems to be the case in most crimes people freak the fuck out about. I believe, for example, kidnapping and abductions in general tend to be from someone the child knows.