Comment by super256 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by super256 | Hacker News Reader

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I'm with you.

Last week, my favourite German lawyer Udo Vetter made a blog post [1] about parents reporting questionable media in group chats to the police.

He warns urgently to never do this.

If you're in a large telegram group, discord, WhatsApp or whatever, and your phone downloads the questionable media automatically, you're already doing a crime (the mere possession of such media is illegal). In Germany, the minimum punishment for the possession of child porn is one year; a monetary fine is not possible and a dismissal of the case due to insignificance isn't possible either.

According to Udo Vetter there have been cases where "concerned parents have brought printouts of the chat messages to the police so that the things are not distributed further. Criminal proceedings for possession of child pornography were the result."

Further down in the blog post how there were funny cases like the police seizing a mobile phone of a drug dealer, and then finding group chats with thousands of users where questionable images were shared. Which will then start a mass investigation on thousands of innocent people, who weren't even looking at that stuff. No one looks at group chats 24/7, especially in fast-moving chats with like 10 messages/minute.

The issue isn't even new. I remember many times when IRC networks were flooded with such media by troll collectives like myg0t, 4chan and whatnot.

[1] https://www.lawblog.de/archives/2023/05/12/lustiger-gruppenc...

there is a possibility LE is doing it also, not just trolls. there seems to be no better way to shut down an internet location than posting that and the public is vastly on the side of LE here. But this stuff can cause any chat, app, whatever to be immediately shut down and everyone involved be criminally investigated. As an example, see how blasphemy laws in Pakistan are weaponized for political ends https://web.archive.org/web/20230211002446/https://www.latim...

My greatest concern is the planting of this material on political activists' computers. It's by far the easiest way for the state to take their political opponents down. The general public will believe the accusations without questioning it. Russia is known to do this. Live in the UK, speak out about Vladimir Putin, go to jail...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Bukovsky#"Prohibited_...

These laws over image and text possession[1] are complete and utter madness. It is like Islamic fundamentalism. No way this should be happening in the UK or the USA either, especially in this day and age. We are supposed to be past all of this, just as with blasphemy and heresy laws. Something's gone really wrong here.

1. 'Simple' possession, with no intent to distribute.

There's the soft power LE uses also as a result of this issue. This covers things like abolishing encryption and privacy, scanning, liaisons, etc. I believe people self-censor when they know they are being monitored and LE knows that too.

I used to run a web site that focused on British TV shows. A competitor used to call up our hosts and PayPal (we used for donations) and tell them the site was dealing in CSAM. There was nothing of the sort on the site, but it would get us cut off for days at a time until investigations were completed. This would happen every couple of months. There is no protection against such an attack.

And GitHub has added a new "Report Repository" link on every repo now, and it gave me the creeps that there's a very easy way to report CSAM through it. It's listed right there out of the several types of prohibited content. So 4chan, trolls, etc. could quite easily mass report someone's repository. And it frightens me just to contemplate what might happen to someone if they got 100 or 1000 false reports on their repository. So everyone is at risk from being labelled as the modern day version of a witch or heretic, just at the push of a button.

My God, what has the world come to nowadays. All done in the name of protecting us from a so-called widespread threat to our safety. Straight out of a fascist's playbook there. History repeating itself again?

I could easily see some web sites just forwarding complaints of this nature to one of the national CSAM organizations (that are privately held and therefore unregulated and not open) who then add you to their database for future reference, even if the allegation is totally unfounded.

There might be a mandatory reporting requirement, so even if it's unfounded, it still ends up on a NCMEC database. Or that law enforcement is still notified, even if no arrest happens.

Anyway it's all completely overwhelming to comprehend, emotionally. Time to take a break, to pull the network cable out of the back of my computer, and be back to normal, instead of living in Orwell's 1984 world, come true. Thankfully there's so much more to life than the Internet.

Yes, this and the mass surveillance going on, is enough for me to say confidently that we're now living in a police state. That we have severely traded our liberty for supposed safety here. And it's happened slowly over the decades. Is this how totalitarianism begins?

I still can't believe this is going on and that people are being prosecuted for the act of viewing or reading certain things on the Internet. That belongs in dictatorships such as China or Russia, not the free world. My God, how the frog has boiled very slowly indeed.

I think it's the metaphorical canary in the coal mine for much worse things down the line...

Doesn't "possession" refer to "holding the copyright"? If someone illegally downloads (pirates) the copyrighted content, how do they become the possessor?

In this case it means "the possession of a copy". In Germany that means that you have the file on your storage device and are able to retrieve them (put them on a screen, make a copy or send them to someone else. 'Deleted files' are also retrievable until overwritten).

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