Addressing the distribution of illicit sexual content by minors online
cyber.fsi.stanford.edu
cyber.fsi.stanford.edu
>Telegram implicitly allows the trading of CSAM in private channels.
You might as well say, "Private unmonitored housing and properties implicitly allow the trading of CSAM."
So...what about addressing the distribution of illicit sexual content by minors offline in the same way? Are we going to start saying that all inhabited spaces should be monitored by government cameras? Should all mail/packages be opened and read/scanned? Why are online spaces different than offline spaces? I'd argue it's because the people writing crap like this depend on FUD and ignorance to push their agendas and they have a monetary incentive in applying FUD to all digital spaces.
>Gift card swapping and exchanges, such as G2G, are a critical part of the monetization of SG-CSAM, allowing anonymous compensation for content.
Going to ban cash then too? This article is shallow, ignorant self promotion of their dept. to get more funding. It's almost offensive how they're exploiting chldren's safety for this purpose.
"Americans under the age of 30 stand out when it comes to 1984‐ style in‐ home government surveillance cameras. 3 in 10 (29 percent) Americans under 30 favor 'the government installing surveillance cameras in every household' in order to 'reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity,'"
>Going to ban cash then too?
"Interestingly, more than half (53 percent) of those who support the United States adopting a CBDC are also supportive of government surveillance cameras in homes, while only 2 percent of those who oppose a CBDC feel the same,"
https://reason.com/2023/06/07/why-are-so-many-younger-americ...
There might be a very worrying ideological shift in how people view their own privacy.
Combining youthful new ideas tempered by the wisdom of experience is the ideal situation. The young person needs to accept that the older person may have already tried what they are suggesting, and the older person needs to accept that the younger person is capable of coming up with new interesting ideas that may be different than what their experience was.
I’ve found some folks view transferring power to benign government seems like good idea, but I think they fail to realize getting that getting that power back won’t be so straightforward if or when it doesn’t work out that government is no longer working for them or supporting their ideals, but the government is instead ruling them.
We have had to pretty good lately tbh in the US compared to some though honestly the could be questionable also depending on the values one has.
If the thought of your political adversary having a specific power makes you shake in your boots, it's not safe for your own side to have it either.
From a practical point of view, they will be sleeping in that bed far longer than the older generations, so maybe “we should let them do their thing” and hope and pray that we won’t have to spend too much time in that bed. But then history and near-history call to remind that many instances of future generations almost cursing the lack of forethought of their predecessors when affecting fundamental changes. Those generations too have a claim in this sort of radical societal changes. Would a future generation trapped in a full-blown 1984 society think it “clever” of their grandparents that they have now put an end to “domestic violence”?
The overall red flag for me of this sort of remedy —- total surveillance to insure 100% compliance — are their absolute guarantees and promises of immediate results. Let’s take domestic violence as an example. Beyond pathological cases, in the main this is an area where we can aim for generational advancements in anger management, positive channeling of psychological stresses, and addressing other socio-economic conditions that contribute to engender this type of behavior. We won’t see immediate results but eradication seems in reach within a few generations. In the interim, there remains the possibility of social intervention via various legal and institutional channels.
This doesn't even cover the half of it. The problem with adding more central authority to any situation is the increased opportunities for confused deputies. In other words, abusers adapt their behavior - both conforming their behavior to the system's rules of what is considered acceptable, and leveraging those rules (and thus the power of the central authority) against their victim.
How about a compromise? If you want to do crime you can turn the cameras off for an hour a day. /s
Homes are already filled with cameras and mics that they don't ultimately control. All it would take is a change in policy to begin using these against you.
The original survey data is at https://www.cato.org/blog/nearly-third-gen-z-favors-home-gov... (I'd also note this post is from the libertarian Cato Institute, so it's important to understand where their motivation comes from). The exact question was "Would you favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household to reduce domestic violence, abuse, and other illegal activity?" It's not hard for me to think that younger people, many of whom just went through years of "Zoom school" and essentially had governmental authority piped into their homes, would just focus on "sure, reducing domestic violence and abuse is a good thing". Alternatively, you see that minorities, particularly African Americans are much more in favor than white Americans (33% vs. 9%). It's possible some people are coming at this from the point of view of "yeah, this would be like police body cameras ensuring that I'm not the victim of false reporting."
I don't mean to whitewash the differences, and as someone who thinks the idea of government installing cameras in your home is the absolute definition of "the end of the free world", I don't mean to minimize it. But I think you might get very different responses if you just asked "Would you favor or oppose the government installing surveillance cameras in every household?" without the rationale behind it. I also think that if you dug into it and asked people follow up questions (e.g. "Where should these cameras be installed") you would get more agreement.
I guess my overall point is that I think the differences in responses have more to do with how people interpret the question (though it's certainly fair to be concerned about that) than more fundamental differences around "comfort with government in my bedroom" that the Cato Institute's interpretation might lead one to believe.
I agree that zoom school and body cams might be responsible for this shift in mentality. But that doesn't make it a good thing. All you've done in your rebuttal is state the reasons why attitudes towards government surveillance have shifted - you don't actually dispute that the difference exists.
Simple example that could at least explain some of the difference. Younger people and poorer people (and, it the US, there is a strong correlation between economic status and race) are much more likely to live in communal setups, e.g. dormatories and apartment buildings, compared to older and more affluent people. So it's possible one group is thinking about this more as "There are already cameras in our hallways, why not hook them up to stop abuse?" while the other group is thinking "You want to put cameras in my bedroom."
That is, any pollster knows you can give extremely different responses solely based on how you word the question. I'm arguing that you could likely word this question differently and you would see responses that didn't nearly differ as much.
More than that, though, I totally agree that "'to protect people' will absolutely be the reasoning used." But I think even then it's important to understand the real underlying fears people have, and then point out that there can be other solutions that are much less intrusive and open to abuse, rather than completely discounting those fears to begin with.
re: gift cards, yeah, gift cards are kind of lame. But attacking people's means to transfer value in the new digital living spaces is bad. Even if they're sometimes used for bad things.
As Ben Franklin said: Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
I agree with you about facial recognition but you're absolutely wrong to apply that principal to speed cameras. I'm all for privacy but as a user of the road you have a responsibility to use it safely, and speeders are not safe users of the road. They should get ticketed as much as possible.
Nor do they accomplish much that a speed bump doesn't accomplish more effectively.
they also ticket the owner of the car regardless of who is driving it, which is not very popular, to say the least.
They're the one's actively interested in influencing our lives to give them more money.
I am talking about who is incentivized to employ intrusive surveillance to influence our lives. Which are corporations.
For example look at this "free" 55" TV:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/home-entertainment/telly-offers-fr...
While U.S. Government does have a lot of competing interests that makes the management and control of such a costly surveillance apparatus highly unlikely (I am not talking about just listening to communication traffic but actively trying to run private American lives). That is, there isn't a way for one party to hold control over that operation and keep it hidden to such a degree as to not risk losing that power when different people get elected.
Compared to PRC there's already enough concentrated power to do an operation like that.
Answer me this question: If the U.S. government had a secret national surveillance system to have control over our lives, what would they actually be influencing us to do?
> That is, there isn't a way for one party to hold control over that operation and keep it hidden to such a degree as to not risk losing that power when different people get elected.
If different people get elected. You asked what people would use a surveillance fielded by the US government to do, and the answer is: take out the competition, or try to. I’m not judging whether it would be successful, that would come down to the actual facts and circumstances of such a surveillance program and the people behind it, but with such a surveillance program in place you have a much better shot than without one at holding power long enough to take out the competition. And while you’re at it, why not change the rules of the game? And then once you’ve changed the rules of the game, why not change the entire system in which the game is played?
America is not exceptional in a way that would make the American public immune to this, but we are very resistant, as you have alluded to, to the US government trying in part because there is enough of us that are by disposition so extremely skeptical of anything the government wants to do for good or for ill that yeah, it wouldn’t be an easy operation to clandestinely pull off. But if someone did, they would use it to take out the competition.
Hence why I am more concerned about Corporate surveillance than I am over Government influencing our lives.
Corporate surveillance is by comparison much easier to deal with in your own home: stop buying and using crap that surveils you. If you don’t trust that something won’t surveil you, don’t allow it into your home. Now I say this is easier, but it’s still not easy, but at worst a corporation will get me to spend a little bit more money with them (probably not, I hate buying things). The worst a government can do is legally kill me with no repercussions to the people who pull the trigger or the ones who ordered them to.
What if there aren't any options?
Most stores are moving over to self-check outs with facial recognition...
More and more things are requiring smart phones. Job applications. Timesheets to log your hours worked. Digital tracking in equipment and vehicles. Insurance companies lowering rates if they can track your car. etc.
The worst that private companies can do is lobby government to make something innocuous but common illegal with unreasonably long sentences so that they can targetedly lock up a portion of the population and use them as slaves.
Even they have figured out how to work modern technology into their communities in a structured way. What you choose to buy and use comes down to what you value. How you use it is a reflection of how much power you give it.
> Most stores are moving over to self-check outs with facial recognition...
So what? You’re on someone else’s premises at that point. Your loss of privacy vis a vis what goes in the shopping cart is a given. 20 years ago cameras were already pervasive in supermarkets, they were just worse at being cameras than a modern installation. People have been giving up their phone number to get glorified coupons at Safeway since the 90s, which tags your receipt with whatever name you filled out when you punch it in. If you prefer not to do that, you look for the small grocers, or the farmers, or whatever but you structure your life around what you value most. If you value your privacy the utmost, you can have that up in Alaska hunting game with your next door neighbor 200 miles away. If you value a different lifestyle, you’ll have that instead.
> The worst that private companies can do is lobby government to make something innocuous but common illegal with unreasonably long sentences so that they can targetedly lock up a portion of the population and use them as slaves.
So the worst thing that corporations can do in your estimation is beg the government to spare some of the government’s power for their use; in competition with other corporations who might want to use it differently or have conflicting ideas about how the government’s power should be used. In the end it comes back down to the government’s power.
> In the end it comes back down to the government’s power.
Right so it's important to keep government transparent and promote civil participation so that government isn't used by corporate interests to muck it up and prevent us from moving to Alaska or living however we like.
Personally I think that private prisons and draconian laws go nicely together.
"SG-CSAM". Talk about jumping the shark. I don't know if it's possible to demonstrate consent any harder than someone taking pictures of themselves. And to the point that minors might be doing something that they don't fully understand the implications of - that is an issue of age-appropriateness better addressed by parental guidance rather than federal felonies. And the current legal regime is basically the strongest possible set up for parents to avoid trying to engage with their children's activities.
> selling self-generated illicit sexual content
There are at least three things going on here, done by three different entities:
1. Someone creates the material (the “SG-CSAM”). Let’s refrain from nitpicking about the A in CSAM there.
2. Someone operates (usually for profit!) the forum on which the material is transmitted. And some of these forums (accidentally?) help match buyers and sellers.
3. Someone buys (and I guess requests?) the material.
I think it’s pretty clear that #3 is frowned upon and is quite illegal in most jurisdictions.
The article is largely about #2.
#1 is interesting. It’s not the same thing as the usual concept of sexting. The article does not argue that #1 is or should be a crime.
I personally find online content recommendations systems to be deeply problematic, and the (emergent?) behavior of Instagram’s that the article discusses is rather distressing.
I'm right there with you, and have wished for these needless centralizers to crash and burn for decades now. But if we imagine that Instagram/Twitter/etc were out of the picture and these kids were selling their wares on decentralized P2P platforms - it would seem that the main thing that would change would be a lack of possibility to centrally study and police the behavior. In other words point #2 and thus the whole focus of the article would vanish, yet the overall behavior would still exist. Looking at it in those terms, it feels a bit ridiculous to be pinning blame on centralized platforms for having not fully controlled their users, when a fully efficient market just wouldn't have those centralized choke points in the first place.
Online abstracts a lot of the "creepiness." You're going to be less inclined to take Polaroids of yourself to hand off to some sweaty mouthbreather hanging out the back of a panel van than you will taking selfies to send to some faceless internet "boyfriend."
As a quick example, here's a bunch of accounts of online grooming by anonymous females:
https://lolcow.farm/ot/res/303056.html
I don't believe these sorts of stories anymore (too much Munchausen-by-Internet these days), but one common feature is: intended victims panicking once things got physical/"real."
Being offline is a wake-up call. Nobody is mailing shit to anyone. That's not a Thing.
> You might as well say, "Private unmonitored housing and properties implicitly allow the trading of CSAM."
The issue with Telegram is that they explicitly disallow the posting of "illegal pornography" on public channels, but not privately. We are not calling for any additional monitoring, but private Telegram groups (which are not E2EE, btw) turn out to be a centerpiece of the commercialization of online child sexual abuse.
> Going to ban cash then too?
Nope. The paper makes no recommendations around banning gift card platforms, but we do think they might want to take steps when teenagers are publicly linking to their payment wallets next to a price list that includes bestiality videos or content created when the child was pre-pubescent.
> This article is shallow, ignorant self promotion of their dept. to get more funding. It's almost offensive how they're exploiting chldren's safety for this purpose.
Thanks for reading!
The article is IMO utterly failing to distinguish between what I think are two products that are very, very different. On the one hand, there’s Telegram, which is effectively a private, unmonitored space. On the other hand:
> Instagram's popularity and user-friendly interface make it a preferred option for these activities. The platform's recommendation algorithms effectively advertise SG-CSAM: these algorithms analyze user behaviors and content consumption to suggest related content and accounts to follow.
That is not a private, unmonitored space.
I tend to think that service providers that recommend content should be responsible for their recommendations.
If there were some kind of sensor that could detect, say, physical child abuse and nothing else—no video, no audio, just a binary yes/no is there physical child abuse (assuming an appropriate statutory definition of physical child abuse) you bet there would be lots of demand for that sensor -- and you could have reasonable conversations about false positives, risks of other data getting out, etc.
The difference between Telegram private chats and "unmonitored housing" is that the former has that kind of sensor available, and the latter doesn't.
I'm sort of wondering about how you get to the term: "Self Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material".
This seems near self-contradictory.
In other cases, minors are coerced into producing illicit sexual content, known as sextortion, with a dramatic increase in cases reported by the FBI in the past year.
Plenty of sexually-charged activity happened on sites like Myspace and Stickam, most of it consensual, but not all of it healthy. For example, Person A is 17 and Person B is 19. A sends a sexy pic to B. Is B a predator extracting some manner of "unhealthy" consent, or is it just two teenagers having fun? What's the difference between unhealthy, and healthy but regrettable? It's often impossible to tell what's going on in a situation like that except on a case-by-case basis. Even if you were close friends with the people involved, you wouldn't always know what really happened until much later. I'm sure things are no different on Snapchat today.
Furthermore, things get weird because teenagers tend to be irrational creatures. What happens if A lied about their age and they're actually 15?
Let's also not forget that people mature at different rates: physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Finally, this is all focused on the sharing of media. What if they meet up at a house party, get a little buzzed, and hook up?
Perhaps there's a valid case to be made that, if you can stop even one instance of abuse, it's worth curtailing the freedoms of all teenagers. But I at least wish we wouldn't jump so far as to conclude that all "SG" sexual material is CSAM.
Props to @elonmusk for making this one of their priorities when he let the sink in, and it was quickly resolved. An open question for the reader is "why was this ignored for almost a decade?".
Timeline is:
* Twitter DID have this problem.
* Musk buys Twitter.
* After a couple months, Twitter does not have this problem anymore.
Who do you think was responsible for that?
A. The old engineering team who was 90% gone on a (laughable) tantrum?
B. Ella Irwin, Head of Trust and Safety who had been there for years and resigned after Musk came in?
C. Yoel Roth, Head of Integrity and Safety who had been there for years and resigned after Musk came in?
D. Elon Musk
I'm no Musk fanboy but the answer is evident.
I've been there for 15 years, never saw a single image that didn't pass muster and I've used it very intensively. So, unless you actively went and looked for it I am assuming you would not encounter it. But given the size of Twitter and the fact that any company that hosts images is going to be targeted you can assume that to the degree that it was going on before it is still going on today, only worse because Twitter has far less staff now to take care of these things.
To portray the former Twitter staff as aiding and abetting whilst Elon rode in on his white horse and 'took care of things' is not in line with reality as I perceive it.
And there is some proof that things have gotten worse, not better:
https://9to5mac.com/2023/02/06/twitter-api/
(and many other articles besides).
What we discovered is that, since Musk's takeover, that Twitter's CSAM scanning failed and was not noticed by Twitter. They fixed it several weeks after we notified them, and then shut off our API access to prevent further research.
Really?(!), how's that? It's a direct, verbatim quote from the (your?) blog post.
But thanks for dropping by, could you clarify a few things?
>[...] since Musk's takeover, that Twitter's CSAM scanning failed and was not noticed by Twitter.
What you're saying is that:
1. It was working before Musk was there.
2. It stopped working after Musk took over.
Please answer this in a non-subjective way.
>They fixed it several weeks after we notified them
And, in your opinion, is that a good thing or a bad thing?
It's a bad thing that it stopped working. It's a very bad thing that they didn't detect that it had stopped working. It's a bad thing that it took weeks to fix it. It's a good thing (well, good at best, i'd call it "expected" or "the bare minimum") that they fixed it.
wow, now i think you're just trolling.
The direct quote was this:
>Twitter had an apparent and now resolved regression allowing CSAM to be posted to public profiles [...]
You then went on to make several statements/claims, such as:
1. "@elonmusk for making this one of their priorities when he let the sink in"
2. "it was quickly resolved"
3. An open question for the reader is "why was this ignored for almost a decade?".
Each one of those statements are incorrect readings of the report and none of them are justified by the quote you pulled from it.
On (1): There's no evidence that elon musk made this a priority. Given that it broke after he bought twitter and that they didn't detect that it broke and that it took weeks to fix it when they were informed of it, I think the evidence points to the exact opposite (i.e. it's not a priority).
On (2): weeks is not "quickly", and the "quickly" was your own thing, the report only says that it was resolved.
On (3): as you've been informed, this wasn't broken for almost a decade, it was broken after musk acquired twitter.
I think it is good that they fixed it. That is why we directly reached out to them to help address the issue before we published. I think it is bad that they cut off our API access and are threatening academic researchers with lawsuits.
Twitter problems with CSAM were widely known way before Musk took over [1], so,
>[...] PhotoDNA scanning was working
with due respect and all, I find that statement questionable.
>I think it is bad that they cut off our API access and are threatening academic researchers with lawsuits.
Yes, that truly sucks.
1: https://endsexualexploitation.org/wp-content/uploads/Doe-v-T...
6 days later.
"J-j-just trust me bro ;)"
Anyone knowledgeable about this?
> The appearance of the images on Twitter was striking because they had been previously flagged as child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, and were part of databases companies can use to screen content posted to their platforms, the researchers said. “This is one of the most basic things you can do to prevent CSAM online, and it did not seem to be working,” Thiel said.
Yes. Material flagged by users can be contributed through 'channels' which will result in updates to PhotoDNA's databases. This is somewhat laggy, so your bit about extremely recent content is on point. But if a recipient would flag an image as inappropriate then whichever service you are using should have a channel to LE to pass on suspect images and to take them down pre-emptively.
Reviewing such images is extremely stressful on the reviewers and PhotoDNA does a fantastic job in handling a very large amount of material automatically. I've only once come across one file sharing service that put up resistance against implementing it (for the most absurd reasons) usually parties are very happy to have a good chunk of this nasty aspect of running anything that shares online images or video taken care of.
When I ran Camarades.com PhotoDNA did not yet exist, I would have been super happy if it did. Some of the stuff that came up for review after user flags was just terrible and even 20 years later those images have not left me. We had a hotline to LE and had a laggy log to be able to recover the uploaders. This was also one of the reasons I eventually shut down files.ww.com, the number of jerks out there was just too large to deal with.
One article about this:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/04/facebook-...
I knew one LEO here in NL that was at the forefront of tech and the amount and gravity of abuse it generated, he couldn't deal with it from a psychological point of view. And those are trained and assisted, the likes of FB are much less likely to vet their employees properly because the burn-out rate is so high.
It's always gift cards that enable this kind of terrible stuff. Do gift cards really add that much usefulness to a society that these downsides are worth it?
- Revenue on the books now, almost pure profit until redeemed.
- A substantial portion of them never get redeemed at all, and almost none get redeemed to their full “value”.
Gift cards are a money printing machine for entities that issue them. Short of consumers shunning them completely they’re not going away.