Australia eyes UK online bill in fight with tech companies
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
What happens if this goes through? Every picture sent in the country gets scanned for possible child abuse. Will the scanning optimise for accurately detecting it and not accusing innocents? No, it will be optimised to pass the buck as hard as possible[1], because the tech companies don't want to business of taking the blame when some pedophile isn't caught.
Who is the second level of review? Maybe some minimum wage zero-hours subcontractor at Serco or Group 4 Security. But that's probably it - once the image has been labelled 'bad' no-one else will want to look at it.
So, even if you are sending a picture of your own child to your own mother, you have at the very least to have to think about whether it could be mistaken for child abuse by someone you don't know who has about 5 seconds to look at it and is probably from a completely different culture. Quite likely outcomes are that social workers will be sent round to interview lots of innocent parents, who they are primed to suspect are pedophiles, and that there will be an uptick in children being removed from innocent parents.
Yet none of this has been brought up in the media either by tech companies or by privacy activists.
[1] The other option is that the tech companies abdicate completely and just use some black box from the government to scan every picture. Problems with that left as an exercise...
I am totally against the bill, but the government has wanted revenge and it is one of the biggest middle finger to US tech companies as they have been insanely arrogant in the past.
But no, the chief target and victim of this "revenge" is the Australian and UK public. Tech companies wouldn't even be harmed, only their users.
So while I know this isn't really about children, how can they even pretend? It is the internet. You can't stop the big players in illegal industries communicating with encrypted messages. This most reasonable explanation here is that this is targeted at average Facebook users and the authorities want to snoop.
Travesties such as Bindoon Boys Town *, Castledare, Clontarf and Tardun operated in plain sight without any reliance on encryption.
As pointed out in the linked article, traffic analysis with no access to message content reveals more than enough information to focus CSAM investigations on highly probable targets:
“The work that we’re doing to detect behavioural signals on our services is really effective here,” he said in February. “A user who is part of a sophisticated criminal enterprise has different behaviour on encrypted services than an ordinary user.
“Even if we are not able to see the content, there’s some pretty effective work we’ve been able to do to analyse the metadata based on the behaviour of the individuals involved.”
The step after that: audio/video monitoring in private homes, since that is where most child abuse happens.
The step after: a mandatory government minder to accompany families with children on hikes and other excursions away from surveillance. Or maybe just ankle monitors for all.
As a reminder, this comes to you from the country whose Prime Minister said:
“The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia".
Surely that's their ultimate goal.
I wish I could leave Australia for a country that makes better political decisions.
It’s exhausting being constantly outraged by the bad political decisions.
UK? US?
New Zealand is a beautiful country and it's politics is slightly better, I think, but then they did let the US do a US-style raid on a personal residence in New Zealand, so they also have form in licking the boot that's stamping on their face.
It's not perfect, but there's a lot more ability here to live the life you want - just work 4 days a week, or maybe 6 months a year. Out West it's perfectly acceptable for a 20-something or 30-something or 40-something to say "actually, I'd like to go to work less and live more". People are very accepting of that.
So the priority is not simply to work more, but to find a life that is fulfilling and enjoyable for you.
I really like that.
When I was recently in Australia I had dozens and dozens of people confront me and tell me that I need to "get a real job" and all of that. I also feel strongly that somewhere along the line Australia's lost the plot and now the purpose of life is going to work, getting insurance and saving for retirement. I was once told "Australian's don't know how to live, they just die slowly". I've spent a few thousand hours thinking about that, and the more I saw of Australia the more I found it to be generally true.
It was also extremely eye-opening to realize how cut-off from the world Australia is, and how the media & politicians there can basically say whatever they want, and Australian's swallow it down hook and all because they have nothing to easily fact or reality check it against. (I say this as someone who lived 24 years in Australia, studied Engineering at University, etc. etc.)
After spending 18 months in Australia last year and driving all over the entire country, I know for 100% certain I will never live there again.
privacy is good. it comes first, as does the individual, as does the family. privacy is good for children too. it keep the snoops out of your sharing personal communications with your loved ones.
> Today, as extremist groups are expelled from Facebook and Twitter, they migrate to social networks like Gab and encrypted chat platforms like Signal. In the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, anti-government groups like the Oath Keepers coordinated their movements over the walkie-talkie app Zello, for instance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/26/us/louis-beam-white-supre...
> Far-right groups move online conversations from social media to chat apps — and out of view of law enforcement
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/15/parler-...
And how do these govt's prove non compliance, unless they hack these companies, kind of setting a bad example.