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Comment by gnfargbl | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused by what you mean by "morality" here. The only moral position that I am communicating is that child sexual abuse is a real thing that really happens, and it is bad for both the individual and for society. That's it. There's no subtext. There is explicitly no refutation of the arguments against client-side CSAM scanning which, I will say again, are unambiguously correct.

Is being against child sexual abuse really an unusual opinion in the tech industry? Have we really all gone so far along the Heinlein/Rand road that any mention of a real negative outcome gets immediately dismissed with the empathy-free thought-terminating-cliche "think of the children?"

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I don't think anyone would disagree with you that child abuse exists - and if they did, that's an empirical question, and it resolves to you being correct.

The moral part is whether and how much society / the state / the tech industry should invest in combating it, and how the advantages and disadvantages of mandating government access to E2E encrypted communications or people's cloud storage weigh up.

For what it's worth, my own position is that the state should do more about it, and should in principle have more resources allocated to do so. I would support higher taxes in exchange for more police (and better trained police), who could do more about many kinds of crime including child abuse. I wouldn't mind more resources being allocated to policing specifically for fighting child abuse, too. But I could think of a lot of other places besides legislating access to people's messenger apps where such resources could be invested.

I'm still undecided on whether legally mandated backdoors in E2E encrypted storage and communications would be _effective_ in fighting child abuse, which is a question I would need more technical knowledge on before I could take an informed position (I know a fair bit about cryptography but less about how organised crime operates). If it turns out that this would be an ineffective measure (maybe criminals fall back on other means of communication such as TOR relays) then it would be hard to justify such a measure morally, especially as it could have a lot of disadvantages in other areas.

> Is being against child sexual abuse really an unusual opinion in the tech industry?

Nobody said that. You are being manipulative an trying to make it look that people who disagree with you are somehow pro-child abuse.

In saying "Does the tech industry have any alternate solutions that could functionally mitigate this abuse?" you are trying to pain a picture in which child abuse is somehow "tech industry" fault.

You are also trying to paint a complete Panopticon in which every interpersonal communication is subjected to surveillance by the state as somehow the default, that end to end encrypted electronic communication is changing - while the truth is that personal communication was private for hundreds of years, because it was impossible for the state to listen in on everything.

This thread is tending towards flamewar so I'll try to dial back, but I do want to respond.

> You are being manipulative an trying to make it look that people who disagree with you are somehow pro-child abuse.

I am not doing that. You described my position as an "alien morality", to which another poster seemed to agree. I was responding to that by clarifying the actual moral point I was making. For the avoidance of doubt, I am not arguing that you are pro-child abuse.

> In saying "Does the tech industry have any alternate solutions that could functionally mitigate this abuse?" you are trying to pain a picture in which child abuse is somehow "tech industry" fault.

Yes, this is basically a correct understanding of my position. I am stating that the problem has been massively exacerbated by the adoption of E2EE by the tech industry, and that the tech industry therefore has a moral responsibility to deal with the unintended consequences of its own action.

> the truth is that personal communication was private for hundreds of years, because it was impossible for the state to listen in on everything.

The truth is that in pre-internet times, networks of pedophiles could be dismantled by the state, partly through surveillance -- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paedophile_Information_Exchang... for a supporting example.

> I am stating that the problem has been massively exacerbated by the adoption of E2EE by the tech industry

I understand that most information on how the state fights organised crime will be classfied, but if there is any publicly available evidence for this claim that you can share, I would be interested in reading it (and I hope others on this thread would be too). I'm not saying I doubt you - you give the impression you know what you're talking about - please take this in the spirit it's intended, as one of my former supervisors once said "In academia, asking for citations/references is an expression of interest, not of doubt".

It's completely reasonable to ask for evidence. Don't apologise for asking!

I'm not part of any state, and I don't have access to any special knowledge that you can't find on the internet.

I'm also not aware of any study that provides the very direct link you're asking for. Because of the nature of E2EE, I don't know if it would be possible to produce one. What I can do is link to evidence such as https://www.weprotect.org/global-threat-assessment-21/#repor..., which has (to me) some fairly compelling data showing that the magnitude of the problem is increasing.

Most child abuse is perpetrated by family members and close connections. While that may not be true in the future, I think there are better avenues of action than jumping to completely backdooring an extremely valuable tool that allows people to exercise their rights more effectively.

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