Comment by a13o | Hacker News Reader

Comment by a13o | Hacker News Reader

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I understand your position and if you're willing to say the quiet part out loud then that's enough to stop me hounding your position. I just don't want anyone having their cake and eating it too.

I disagree with how you frame my position. First the argument that criminals will always find a way around it is specifically why I think legislation should target VLOPs. Nobody can just build one of those, including criminals. If you want to firm up my position it's not that E2EE is the last battle against CSAM; rather it's that VLOPs proliferate CSAM in previously impossible ways, with a virality factor unachievable by older means. Criminals are of course free to return to Signal or whatever, but it won't give them the reach that Facebook gives them so it's still progress even if we didn't save every single child on the planet.

Moreover, I disagree (again) with your desire to pull my position into a theoretical debate about free speech absolutism. I just don't think two people on HN are going to get to the bottom of that one. But with a little nuance, which yes is messy, we can stop the proliferation of CSAM on VLOPs without constraining individual liberties. Just go do those liberties on anything except a VLOP.

I appreciate the candour, and understand you’d rather these measures be restricted to a very limited number of platforms.

Ultimately, you’re right, our debate here will have little effect on the outcome, given that members of the Spanish government stated in no uncertain terms they would indeed not restrict it to the large social media platforms. I was pointing to the specifics mentioned in the article instead of pulling it in a theoretical debate like you said.

Alas, whether their stated intentions are the true ones, I trust few legislators to nail some platonic ideal state of authoritarianism, even if they’re benevolent. Too much power stands to be concentrated in too few hands for this ever to go our (society at large) way. When we shift the debate to the problem of the integration, we’ve already lost.

This was a delightful read. Two contrasting points of view coming together without a flame war. For a second I had to double check that I was on the internet.

Me, I don’t know where I stand. I think if it eliminated CSAM, terrorism and other such things, it’s a price worth paying.

What I need to be convinced of is the scale of that elimination, because if erosion of privacy is the cost paid, people (as in Joe Public) will want to see returns on that.

What I think it’ll actually do is move offenders away from those platforms and onto ones that are even harder to monitor. I mean, I’d assume that Meta will be able to see who is talking to who even without the content, which puts some pieces of the puzzle together in the presence of other evidence. I’d also assume end to end encryption doesn’t mean much if the app itself has a CVE that leaks information once decrypted, and it certainly doesn’t mean much if authorities have possession of your device (in the UK, not unlocking a device and apps when asked to is itself a punishable crime).

So if all this will do is drive people to platforms that eliminate such things and make the job of law enforcement even harder, it isn’t worth it.

But if there’s more to it than that, it might be. Im guessing it’s feasible that WhatsApp push out an update that sends them your private keys, because I’m assuming the app itself has access to them. If Im right, then in theory the end of E2EE could open up a huge backlog of messages and solve “historic” crimes. If that’s the case, it might be worth it.

Too many variables for me, so Im placing myself firmly in the “I don’t know” camp.

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