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Comment by eddsh1994 | Hacker News Reader

eddsh1994

It allows criminals to do bad things, common examples would be CP or terrorism.

Which always makes me wonder, what is the extend of the child pornography problem? How big is the nail compared to the proposed hammer? If I had to guess, I would guess this is hammer affecting 80+ % of the population to go after a group constituting a fraction of a percent of the population.

That's a very good question: how to quantify child suffering to one of the worst crimes imaginable? I am not saying I am for or against. I am just trying to point how really difficult is to quantify both sides of the equation.

This will do a grand total of nothing to reduce CP, though. It's probably not even going to be an inconvenience. They're already breaking the law and probably jumping through hoops to get access to it.

I disagree that it will be nothing. It will be something larger than 0. First question is how to predict the impact. But more interestingly when we have the impact analysis how to quantify the suffering that will be reduced in comparison with reducing security and how to quantify even that and put these into comparison. (Again I am not on either side just pointing how hard it is to quantify these things)

I don't think you can quantify it in neat charts and numbers. But I suggest that the depraved individuals who consume such materials are already used to being outliers and willing to go to extremes to procure such materials, so in most cases they'll just use whatever dark web crap will serve it. They aren't all as thick as Gary Glitter unfortunately.

Meanwhile 99% of innocent people will be hugely inconvenienced by weakened security, not to mention the amount of suffering caused by data breaches and impersonation, then the loss of jobs and economy for many business wasting resources on downgrading their products for compliance.

Not a great trade IMO.

It is more likely that "only pervs use encryption" is a pretext to appease lazy police or spooks, who just want to hit buttons and get people arrested. I have this suspicion because actually helping children who are exploitable this way is a much more difficult problem than breaking out the banhammer.

But I suggest that the depraved individuals who consume such materials are already used to being outliers [...]

The perception of those people also has to change. I would guess most of them will not have made a conscious choice to be attracted to children in the same way that most homosexuals will not have decided to be attracted to the same sex. So they have to deal with a desire that they can never fulfill without doing something really bad and many of them would probably benefit from professional help. But thinking about those people as if they are the personified evil and considering them almost inhuman, is probably not what will encourage them to come forward and seek help.

That's valid to some extent, for people who want to change. Not all of them do.

Also, sometimes the most strident voices of condemnation are seeking to draw attention away from their own criminality. A couple of months ago a guy in Southern California was arrested and charged with not just possession but production of CP and other sexual offenses. He had a private room on his business premises that he used for these crimes. In 2021, he had hosted an anti-child-sex-trafficking rally in the parking lot of the same business location.

Likewise, think of the numerous cases of moral crusaders against fornication/ homosexuality/ whatever that turn out to have been engaged in the same behavior that they regularly denounce. Dishonest people see no problem with being a pastor or community leader and bilking the suckers foolish enough to donate to them.

I would guess that there are, to a first approximation, two groups of people - those consuming child pornography and those producing it. The consumers are probably the much larger group and to a certain extend one could maybe even call them harmless, at least ignoring the risk that they will go further in the future and that they are driving the demand. I don't know if this is actually true, but in the discussion of prostitution you regularly come across the argument that it is a way to satisfy a desire that might otherwise be satisfied through rape or other sexual abuse. In the same way consuming child pornography might prevent a certain group of people from themselves abusing children directly. When it comes to the producers, things might be much more bleak. They are the subgroup you really want to go after. Some of them might even do this just for the money without themselves being interested in children.

There are two such groups, but the overlap is significant. A lot of CP is acquired by trade rather than sale. I don't think there's much evidence either way for the proposition that consumption prevents further harm.

Anyway, my point was that some of the most strident condemnation is actually performative & deceptive.

Another example literally just popped up in my news feed: https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/local/maryland/library-va...

doesn't have to be neat chart but you kinda quantified one side: 99% of people will be hugely inconvenienced by weakened security. Now the question is how much child suffering is worth to inconvenient 99% of people? Let's say it would be 1 child that could be saved would you say it's worth the inconvenience? What if it's 2,10,100,1000? I am genuinely curious where would you draw the line (And that line is your neat chart with numbers)?

As an analog: at some point in the past we decided cars didn't have to go at 15mph with a guy with a flag walking in front for safety. We accept a large number of road deaths a year for the convenience of shorter journey times.

"how to quantify child suffering" is already the wrong question. The focus of efforts like this are usually much more about the pictures than helping the actual children.

To add to this, there is probably a huge spectrum, from people secretly taking pictures of naked children at the beach which you might never even become aware of to yearlong abuse and rape. And one should not lump them together to get to get a big number of cases and then pretend they are all of the worst kind.

Also the decision is not a dichotomy between complete surveillance of all communication and doing nothing at all, there are other measures that can be taken additionally or alternatively. So the proper measure is the additional utility of banning end-to-end encryption over all the other things you can reasonably do, not over not doing anything at all.

> the decision is not a dichotomy between complete surveillance of all communication and doing nothing at all

The problem is that from a security perspective, it sort of is all or nothing.

You misunderstood me, I did not want to say that you can have some partial end-to-end encryption, I meant that not outlawing end-to-end encryption does not mean that you do or can do nothing against illegal content, i.e. there are other ways to fight this problem besides outlawing end-to-end encryption.

Oh! Hah. The exact opposite of what I thought you meant, then :)

The human race is doomed. We never learn from even the most common tropes used to do harm to innocent people.

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