‘Who Benefits?’ Inside the EU’s Fight over Scanning for Child Sex Content | Hacker News Reader

‘Who Benefits?’ Inside the EU’s Fight over Scanning for Child Sex Content

balkaninsight.com

120 pointsVinnl107 comments

Calling it "scanning for child sex content" is a mistake. Finding CSAM is just the claimed initial intended use. Call it what it is, not what it's allegedly for:

"Mandatory submission of all private communication to the government" (either govt. employees, contractors, or AI systems running on your device but answering to someone else).

> to the government

Well, to some international private organization with a completely opaque system that claims to answer to the government.

It's not exactly any of the classes of people on your parenthesis. It's much worse.

It’s true that in most cases a private international organization will be doing the scanning. But part of the proposal is that it’ll be compulsory for online service providers to report any communications that are flagged up as suspicious to the EU, which is a governmental organization (both are pretty bad tho)

The thing is, the EU won't have the power to oversee that entity.

- It this a false positive or The Scanner is exfiltrating confidential information?

- Is The Scanner selling all the information to a 3rd party in another country?

- Did a ad actor pay The Scanner to they can get exemptions for their content?

- Alternatively, is The Scanner persecuting somebody through false positives?

The EU won't be able to answer any of those or probably even arrange to investigate it. There is no practical overseeing over that entity.

When the government does something, it imposes some strict rules over the people working on it so that kind of question can be answered. A private organization with no fixed country allows for no oversight at all.

Who is actually doing the scanning?

I thought the private institution just provides image hashes from a database of known CSAM?

The law is being creates in a way so that the organizations sending those millions of euros to the politicians will be the ones everybody is required to hire to run the scanning.

What would be a better solution to prevent the spread of this material?

Assuming there is no better solution, do you still think we should be compelled to share every written communication with a government agency?

I do not, but Facebook and Instagram already police the content of DMs, don't they?

I can choose not to use Facebook and Instagram. The idea being discussed is to compel me to share private communications.

> What would be a better solution to prevent the spread of this material?

If a solution is bad enough, it doesn't matter.

Also there's a vast list of things law enforcement does right now, and most of those are better options.

Improved education at all levels, improved access to quality mental health services, a culture that encourages open and honest discussions about mental health, sex and seuxality.

Classic police work? Social engineering, infiltrators, targeted surveillance, teachers/doctors/social services reporting to the police signs of child abuse (that's what we're actually trying to prevent, not jpegs)? You are implying that the current approach isn't a "solution" because it doesn't catch everything.

Plenty of people are convicted of CSAM possession/distribution/production without mandatory government scanning of all communication. Unless your tolerance for CSAM/murder/rape is literally zero, in which case we will all live in solitary prisons because that is the only way "solve" this "perfectly".

You can keep asking "what is a better solution", for any crime, until we have literally no rights left.

Not that I disagree with you, but you're allowing the narrative to shift away from "government involvement in private correspondence is a hallmark of totalitarianism" and instead go towards "government involvement in private correspondence may be the most effective way to combat CSAM".

IMO, the correct answer to this question is "do you think it's appropriate to spy on everyone to fight crime?"

They already spy on everyone. Private companies that gather information, such as through embedded ads, will sell it to anyone, cell phone towers triangulate your location, gather call metadata, license plate readers track where you drive, facial recognition on the off chance you're not in your car and without your cell phone, etc etc..

This is about taking away your right to even try to evade even more intrusive spying, despite how much better their ability to spy even without such laws has gotten (instead they publicly claim there's a "going dark" problem).

Yes, we're on the same page :)

It's important to be precise - this is not an expansion of government capability, this is a prohibition on how citizens may act to protect their privacy.

I think I was fairly precise. I just think the question that we should focus on is "do you think this is appropriate behavior for a government?" Your distinction between adding a new capability vs prohibition is captured in that quesetion.

How are they going to prevent people bypassing it though? The only way I see that can work is a complete ban on open general-purpose computing.

Bypassing what, sorry?

The on-device scan of course.

It'll have to be embedded in the OS so it means you won't be able to run FOSS as you can simply remove the spyware then. Or, if it's done in each app, they'll want to forbid you from sideloading. Ironically that's exactly the thing the EU is forcing Apple to enable now.

Most likely they'll do some kind of evil attestation before you're allowed online, the same way Google is planning to put in Chrome with WEI to stop adblockers.

The EU passed NIS2 cybersecurity directive which establishes a certification framework for ICT products and services. This is how they could push CSAM: make it a requirement in the certification process for a certain class of products and services. If a given product or service fails to pass the cert, it might not be legal to sell it in the EU.

https://certification.enisa.europa.eu

This would also stifle innovation, create more bureaucracy and a market for paper pushing consulting companies, raise the bar for small companies who can't afford certification expenses, degrade the time to market of ICT producs and freeze ICT products and services in their current state as to not trigger re-certification.

> IMO, the correct answer to this question is "do you think it's appropriate to spy on everyone to fight crime?"

To answer in the most direct way possible: No. No. NO.

Regardless of the intentions, the violation of personal privacy dictates a totalitarian society wherein ALL "deviant" behavior will be monitored & dealt with. That includes LGBTQ+ activities & ethnic minorities.

To put it to the absolute test: Would you be okay if the German SS was able to use mass surveillance for their own version of "fighting crime"? The answer to this question will dictate the answer to the extreme scenario that the State always trends towards, wherein more & more power is accumulated by the State under the guise of safety & security.

I don't know, what would be a better solution to catching criminals generally than installing police controlled cameras in everyone's houses?

What is the difference between that and demanding to read all our correspondence?

You could stop downloading it, for starters.

Or if you want to claim that you don't, perhaps you should try proving a negative and convince us of your innocence - before you support a standard of everyone being forced to do so.

Why should it be censored?

Saw a giant billboard with something along the lines of "Apple hosts child sex abuse imagery on iCloud. They are complicit."

Really wonder what groups are putting these up and where they're getting their funding. This was in California. It happens every few years, where organizations try to go after encryption or other privacies under the guise of public safety or "save the kids" type stuff, but I've never seen huge billboards like this before.

Pretty jarring.

I saw that and a car driving around with that on it in San Francisco and had the same thought. Who funds that and who is their real target audience? With the tech crowd you might need a bit more nuance.

Could be the CIA launching a propaganda campaign as a way to weaken encryption.

What? The CIA (and every other US agency, except the police, sometimes) are the good guys, the good guys on the good news sites told me so.

Does the CIA need to weaken encryption? Don’t they have backdoors or front doors into each operating system connected to the power grid?

No, lol. They don't. Maybe Windows, because Microsoft doesn't seem to care much about privacy, but Apple doesn't mess around. And if there were backdoors in Linux, we'd definitely know about it, because people are actively looking for stuff like that.

This is just wrong. Apple's public position could differ from its actual one. And Hiding a backdoor (or hiding with the deniability of an innocent bug) in open source is possible. "we'd definitely know about it" is not how security works.

There have been exhaustive third party reviews of the Linux kernel, nothing is impossible, but a government backdoor would be extremely hard to hide from the level of scrutiny that codebase is put under.

I would certainly consider it unlikely enough that any suggestion to the contrary, without evidence, is just a conspiracy theory.

Could there be a backdoor on the hardware level?

I mean, yes, as we have already agreed, anything is possible, but I'm not in the business of believing things without evidence.

"we'd definitely know about it".

Yes, but extremely hard is not the same as impossible. How many security 'bugs' can we be sure were unintentional?

This is not just semantics. Complacency can come from over-confidence.

The CIA's hacking tools were leaked in the Vault 7 leaks from WikiLeaks. They were fairly amateurish. The nearest component was some 0 days for smart tvs to turn them into wiretaps. It seems like the NSA really does get the focus for signals intelligence.

If those were amateur what does professional look like?

Spyware companies would be a good guess. There's a lot of money to be made in helping abusers spy on their partners and/or kids by installing malware on their devices, and of course there's a big enterprise/govt market for that as well whether your goal is to capture dissidents, bust internal unions, or do a little industrial espionage.

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/17056663012161415...

If I was Apple, I would be getting that torn down and suing immediately (or hiring their quasi-police force to tear it down with or without permission). I doubt Apple "allows" it. Apple probably even forbids it in their Terms of Service.

Just because Apple willingly avoids knowing what their users store on iCloud does not mean they are taking the active role of allowing illegal content to be stored.

Thats a striessand effect waiting to happen

There are lots of good reasons for Apple to avoid a defamation lawsuit about this.

(1) Streisand effect (mentioned by another commenter) - it would generate tons of free publicity for their opponents.

(2) Civil discovery - the defendant would get to demand access to Apple's internal e-mails about this issue in order to try to prove its case.

(3) Possibly losing - even though this feels obviously intended to make people believe false things about Apple, a court might accept that there is some interpretation of "allows" and "complicit" that are protected criticisms of the company under some jurisdiction's defamation standard.

Better to use your substantially larger ad budget to quietly outbid them on billboards in a way least likely to generate press on their billboard.

> I doubt Apple "allows" it. Apple probably even forbids it in their Terms of Service.

Encrocrypt and Cyberbunker probably had terms saying not to do illegal things...

What matters is how they respond to problems as they are pointed out. If it would turn out that links to their hosting service keep popping up in child abuse cases, do they respond by deleting them piecemeal or do they put a system in place that tries to identify the content by fuzzy hash and flags it for proactive review? Do they actively cooperate with the countries' law enforcement where the picture got uploaded from? That sort of thing. That has infinitely more impact than "you wouldn't download a car" notices

If in doubt, look towards churches. They're always neck deep in anything involving sex or sexuality, mostly to distract from their own considerable issues.

I find this stuff very alarming. The reporting in TFA about European politics (and the recent Heat Initiative pressure campaign here in the US) illustrate how much unaccountable dark money is flowing into these causes. I don’t think that there are huge pools of anonymous donor cash looking to influence child-safety campaigns for the sake of anyone caring about children, because that’s not typically how altruistic donors donate their money.

Instead I think it’s likely that some commercial interests see a lucrative financial opportunity in this private data (either selling AI-based scanning tools, or mining it directly as a service.) This data is currently locked up with big firms like Apple and Meta, who are (for various reasons) leaning towards encrypting it rather than exploiting its contents, and the way to solve this problem involves passing laws through naive legislatures who don’t understand what they’re doing. And frankly that possibility worries me much more than where I thought we were previously - which was just a boring dispute between government and tech firms.

The first thing that comes to mind is the conservative movements growing obsessions with pedophilia, real and imagined. It has become the visceral hook that seems to emotionally motivate a lot of the far-right, not unlike abortion.

Let's stick with "real" for a moment. There is absolutely nothing about real pedophilia that makes it a far-right-only concern. In fact, with the left's concern about sexual abuse of women, they ought to also care about sexual abuse of minors.

You are asserting that people who are not far-right do not care about the abuse of minors, which is a nonsensical belief with no connection to reality and completely undermines whatever point you're trying to make.

But it is a good example of the over-the-top rhetoric being used around this exact issue.

I am not claiming what you say I am.

You said:

"It [pedophilia] has become the visceral hook that seems to emotionally motivate a lot of the far-right, not unlike abortion."

I am claiming that pedophilia motivates many people, not just the far right. It is beyond me how you could misread that claim into something that would lead you to reply as you did.

[Edit: My use of "ought to" may be the problem. The left, based on their positions, should be emotionally, viscerally motivated to oppose pedophilia. If they aren't, then that is an inconsistency in their position. But I think that they (or at least many of them) are motivated. So, to sum up, I'm not sure why you singled out the far-right in your initial statement.]

"...they ought to also care about sexual abuse of minors."

That implies they do not care about the sexual abuse of minors, but they ought to.

"There is absolutely nothing about real pedophilia that makes it a far-right-only concern"

And implying that anyone, anywhere would think that it is a "far-right only concern" is absurd framing. It's make-believe nonsense.

Yes it's your use of ought to, and no there isn't an inconsistency.

Being "emotionally, viscerally" motivated, to the extent that it's very obvious, tends to make people do stupid and counterproductive things. You shouldn't be demanding that.

> I'm not sure why you singled out the far-right in your initial statement.

Because of their horrible politicized accusations that take attention away from the actual problems.

It's much easier to misinterpret your statement that the left ought to care about paedophilia as a claim they don't (even if that was not your intent) than it would have been for you to interpret the OP about "obsessions... real and imagined" as a claim that paedophilia in general is a far right only concern...

Particularly in the context of the appeal of an ad dubiously associating a California tech co with paedophilia to people who believe stuff like Pizzagate and Q because they're inclined to suspect everybody they don't like is in league with the paedos

I have never met anyone on the left that isn't disgusted by the sexual abuse of minors. Just the perfectly rational acknowledgement that the sexual abuse of women is a more widespread problem.

Child sex abuse is more common that it ever should be, but it is not the epidemic of child abuse that the right characterizes it to be. Accusations of pedophilia are extremely commonplace on the right, even when there is absolutely no evidence, largely because it is the most horrifying thing you can accuse another person of doing, and because the moral panic you can instill in your supporters if you convince them is a highly effective political weapon.

If anything, the people who scream about pedophila the loudest are the ones showing their apathy towards actual real-world child sex abuse, because they are doing so in bad faith, not to protect actual children, but to score political points through slander. If anything that helps obfuscate and enable child abusers, since the focus is now on conspiracy theories and targeted defamation.

Look, as a liberal-turned-conservative parent, many of us have simply had enough with the gaslighting.

For decades the lesson was "don't talk to strangers online," yet every kids' app has a social component that encourages their doing exactly that. The channels by which this could possibly be supervised are rendered deliberately opaque. No supervision is possible by MITM.

Then you get the influencer crowd. The kids flock to innocent unboxing videos on YouTube, because ooh shiny. Because there are no broadcast decency standards on the internet, they're free to follow it up with "hey kids now let's check out my animal dildo collection."

Then there's Discord, on which even the fucking FBI is putting out advisories about pedophiles grooming kids from Roblox. The feds are 3-5 years late to every party, so in time that problem is going to prove way worse than anybody realized.

It's not an "obsession with pedophilia;" the idea that there needs to be a culture of "child sexuality" at all is distasteful enough to elicit strong reactions. We don't encourage kids to smoke or get facial tattoos, but we're forced to support their decision to be castrated based on ideas put in their head by Tumblr and the virtual environments they take part in, grooming them in the very games they play. Fire up Splatoon 3 and see how many names and profile images have something to do with yaoi, yuri, gayness or countdowns to HRT. There are none to be found that have anything to do with heteronormative sex, and most games banned sprays depicting such years ago. To each their own, but saturating kids with this stuff explicitly teaches them that transgressive sexuality is how you fit in. It's not for everyone, so they end up miserable, castrated, sexually assaulted, and dragging everyone else down with them and killing themselves, their families or their classmates. Thanks, Big Tech.

It's a visceral hook (and an appealing one) because it appeals to collective frustration. Everything parents try to do gets undermined by Big Tech. They do nothing to help us, and deride us for poor parenting where we fail to keep up with their tactics.

I'm just one guy burdened with a day job, trying to fend off teams of experts who each spend 40+ hours a week inventing efficient ways to sap as much of my kids' attention as possible while replacing their values with ones more friendly to pedophiles and advertisers.

The whole thing can burn to the ground for all I care. It's an entirely emotional reaction on my part, and I'm not alone in feeling this way.

There are a number of objections to specific points in your comment, as well as your overall perspective, but I think the biggest one is that your kids don't need to be using YouTube, Discord, or other apps.

I know several people in transition (and post) and the one thing that stands out is how carefully it is done. You don't go to the doctor and order a sex change like it's a Big Mac. There's a whole support trajectory of psychological evaluation and support and transition is the last option. Of course they know gender dysphoria is often a temporary phase.

No kid will get "castrated" just to fit in. Actual gender change operations aren't even done until adulthood, only puberty blockers are sometimes used which are reversible. And only if the child's dysphoria is so extreme it really impacts their quality of life or endangers them (think self-harm). In this sense it's entirely "for the children".

Also 99% of trans people have no regrets. The system works. I think it's amazing that we live in a world where people can decide their own life and body. And I don't really get the whole hate against trans people. It's not like they're harming anyone.

Yeah there's a strong "castration" thing being pushed by right-wing media but it's not a thing. Kind of cool in a way to watch it spread like a virus across social media and general society though, but also a little horrifying.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/detransitioned-boy-castrated-b... (Note the total lack of sourcing)

https://www.factcheck.org/2023/05/scicheck-young-children-do...

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/mar/05/viral-imag...

Yeah and I think the whole "rise" in transgender cases is better explained by considering that it was a huge taboo until recently and there's now actual operations available and accessible (insurance) to people that weren't before

People forget also that the parents have the final say in these matters until the child matures. Nobody is coming to castrate your kids :P

> And I don't really get the whole hate against trans people. It's not like they're harming anyone.

Tell that to all the lesbian women who've had their social and dating spaces overrun by men pretending to be women. Or to the female prisoners forced to share cells with such men. Or indeed to any woman who's had to deal with one of these men invading a female-only space for his own selfish delight.

They're not men pretending to be women, they are women.

And a trans operation is obviously not done to be able to snoop in the women's shower.

> They're not men pretending to be women, they are women.

This reality-defying assertion always reminds me of the Catholic belief in transubstantiation. Their position is that even though the bread looks like bread, tastes like bread, behaves like bread, has all the properties of bread, and so on, it somehow is literally the body of Christ in substance.

Just like how these men are somehow literally women, according to acolytes of the transgender belief system.

It's nonsensical. Why do you even believe this?

It's called respect for people's gender identity.

How about some respect for women who want and need female-only spaces?

> Actual gender change operations aren’t even done until adulthood

This seems to be false according to this article [1] which claims that “In the three years ending in 2021, at least 776 mastectomies were performed in the United States on patients ages 13 to 17 with a gender dysphoria diagnosis, according to Komodo’s data analysis of insurance claims.”

1: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-tran...

In Holland it's forbidden under 18, I don't know about the US. But 776 people is obviously not a lot on the population of the US. That's one in half a million. Don't forget a transgender transition isn't the only reason people have genital reassignment surgery. Some people are simply born intersex and have corrective surgery for this earlier. Dysphoria can be quoted as a reason there too, but there are also more pressing medical concerns.

Edit: According to this article linked below, it's not allowed in the US either under the age of 18: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/mar/05/viral-imag...

You are talking about such a tiny number of people compared to the overall population that many of those individuals could be intersex or otherwise have health or genetic problems that led to procedures at such a young age.

In fact, it's kind of fucked up how the entire anti-trans movement completely pretends intersex people do not exist.

Puberty blockers are not reversible. If used for more than a year or so, they significantly stunt brain development and greatly increase the odds of infertility and other future health problems.

>99% have no regrets

Why is the suicide rate so high then?

Puberty blockers don't make you dumber, they could affect fertility sometimes but it's not a huge issue if the eventual goal is a transition anyway (which it must be for them to be given). As fully transitioned people can't conceive naturally. It's a good tradeoff.

Suicide here in Europe is not higher (in fact it's higher when not carried out die to dysphoria) but I can imagine that in strongly conservative areas bullying is very strong driving people over the edge :'(

That does indeed sound very frustrating. I have consciously chosen to not have children specifically because being a parent seems so difficult.

So while I sympathize with your plight, you chose this bed. Why should I have to sleep in it?

Maybe because the fact that a (presumably) healthy adult such as yourself chooses not to procreate because it "seems so difficult" indicates that there is something very sick about the society that we live in.

Ok, so people have had "child sexuality" since forever. Every time some person is talking about a kid's boyfriend or girlfriend they're talking about child sexuality.

The only change is that now we recognize that bullying and abusing children because they're the "wrong" sexuality is wrong, and homophobes have decided that instead of doing it directly they're going to try the "sex is sin" path of abuse and then say that the only reason for a non-straight relationship is sex, and therefore is adults only.

The fact that you go on an uninformed transphobic rant tells me which camp you're in.

As a soon-to-be parent who is left-leaning but disturbed by what the so-called 'progressive' movement are pushing, I agree with you. It gives me immense concern, knowing what my child is likely to be exposed to online.

The only thing that gives me some peace of mind is seeing the growing backlash to all this nonsense. Seems to me that thrusting this crazy ideology onto kids, chopping body parts off teenagers, celebrating creepy pedophilic men if they happen to align with some bespoke 'gender identity', attacking free speech and attempting to ruin the lives of those who criticize this delusional denial of reality is most likely not a winning strategy after all.

I just hope this is all done away with before my kid is old enough to be affected by it.

Nothing in this article suggested any of the groups or individuals involved were far-right

The comment I responded to was specifically speculating about who was responsible for billboards they saw that relate to the topic of the article. Incidentally, the responses to my comment are indicative of exactly the kind of rhetoric I have seen many times coming from the right on this topic.

These are from Heat initiative. The campaign was covered pretty well when it broke earlier this month[1]

>The campaign is being led by Sarah Gardner, who was

>previously the vice president for external affairs at

>Thorn, a nonprofit founded by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore

>to combat child sexual abuse online. Ms. Gardner raised

>money from a number of child safety supporters, including

>the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation and the Oak

>Foundation.

[...]

>Two investors -- Degroof Petercam, a Belgian asset manager, and Christian

>Brothers Investment Services, a Catholic investment firm -- will submit a

>shareholder proposal this month that would require Apple to provide a detailed

>report on how effective its safety tools were at protecting children.

FWIW the picture on the billboard is AI generated

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/01/technology/child-sex-abus...

May be the Catholic investment firm should sort out their own back yard before making demands of any other entity...

I'm not in favor of public scaremongering like spreading half-truths about a random other company on a billboard, but I will say that perfect is the enemy of good. You can say "sort out your own back yard" about virtually anything.

If you believe that what they do is good, it doesn't matter so much if their own back yard is sorted out, it's still good. If you don't, then not, and it still doesn't matter what their own state of affairs looks like.

In the case of the Catholic Church, it’s completely fair to call out their hypocrisy.

In a topical conversation, playing it on the man detracts from the discussion

The comment is topical. It relates to a Catholic investment group that is pushing in morally-ambiguous policies to fight child sexual exploitation.

The Catholic Church has a long history of actively protecting child abusers, and it keeps happening. They then, as one of the richest organizations on earth, set up their organization to allow them to "bankruptcy" their way out ever having any consequences.

Couple that with the catholic church's long standing stance of "anything LGBT or adjacent is child abuse" and you have an organization who's stance on "stopping child abuse" is "we must criminalize anyone or thing that is LGBT, but abusing children is a-ok, and we must make child victims feel like they are the guilty party, and making them aware that telling anyone about the abuse might send them to the 'police' is absolutely something abusers use".

It is absolutely correct to call out the involvement of any such organization in any claimed "child abuse prevention" system, especially a system that has no path to stop actual predators and criminals and by design has no possible mechanism for checks or audits.

I won't even consider trusting the catholic church's involvement in child welfare until they: compensate every victim, publicly report every abuser they have protected and provide all documentation to police, and they send every single person involved in covering up and protecting these child abusers to the police (because jfc they are child abusers), and then we can start addressing the various "schools" for native children that were basically torture centers for children that abused, killed, and raped hundreds if not thousands.

Isn't this sort of a useless line of reasoning ultimately? I mean sure, blah blah everyone is aware of the history of sexual abuse in the Catholic church. But the same issue is just as, if not more, prevalent across public schools in the United States. Would the same argument seem as reasonable if it read "Maybe the federal/state government should sort out its own back yard before making demands"?

It depends. Are the state attempting to cover it up? Is it to the same extent as what has happened in the Catholic Church? Are they offering the protagonists protection and sanctuary? Either way, I’m sure we can all agree that the measures they’re promoting are unacceptable. My point though is that organisations, such as the Catholic Church, and organisations that purport to operate under their auspices, have no moral standing to make these demands of other entities. From where I’m standing, it looks as if they are pointing the finger of responsibility at big tech, instead of the organisation that is covering up child abuse.

Pretty weird. I mean, I guess since SD cards can be used to host it, SanDisk is also complicit. And you can use the open Wi-Fi at the airport to send it, so JFK airport is complicit. Just how many entities are obligated to scan all bits for these illegal sequences of ones and zeroes?

Why not actually focus more effort on the twisted people who create the content by abusing minors and less on a global dragnet for all communications?

Absolutely. We already know why the interest groups focus on the communications, instead of proven ways. Because it is a false flag operation. The topic is used as a vehicle to undermine private encrypted communication.

They should go after the US postal service too. The companies that make fibre cabling. Phone manufacturers. All complicit in their twisted narrative.

That sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

It can't work. Simply becouse they trying to skip over parents and family - which are first and always best protection on mass scale.

Also what they propose is LITERALY equivalent of permament ankle monitor, just for not-sentenced members of society ! "Not guilty until found gilty" anyone ?

And imposibility of controling businesses doing that scaning ?

And of course it's just excuse ! LOL, they just trying to downgrade internet encryption to plain text like 80's and 90's :>

Client-side is only way to have _basic sanity_ of that system but such all-seeing system can be used to stream from kids phones in real time ! Just one upgrade away. Or bug. Which is sure as death.

Pedophiles will voluntire as system operators, as they did with other systems.

Or FBI or other TLA will try some sting operation by allowing system abuse... And "what's once in net then alway in net".

Technical imposibility of abuse is only way to prevent abuse. Do not create such posibility. Actively prevent it ! Pedophiles already are opening bottles...

And that hollywood mogul will be doing censoring ?? Probably they already hoarding storage...

Let's start with ankle monitor with microphone and camera for Mrs. Ursula and rest of commision and commisaries. And Kutcher and More, no excuse.

Family first for kids protection or you will destroy your own society EU DOT

> Let's start with ankle monitor with microphone and camera for Mrs. Ursula

Really? She erased her phone to hide a contracting scandal.

https://www.politico.eu/article/wiped-phone-puts-von-der-ley...

Minutes after the proposed regulation was unveiled in May last year, Labrador Jimenez emailed his Commission colleagues: “The EU does not accept that children cannot be protected and become casualties of policies that put any other values or rights above their protection, whatever these may be.”

One of the most often-missed problems with the safety vs. rights debate is the claim that the state is best positioned to ensure proactive safety of people by preventing victimization. This claim is probably false, most certainly debatable, and yet the point is almost always ceded.

Whatever these may be! Vote for a party that doesn't sufficiently support protecting children? Grounds to take away your right to vote, we must protect the children. Have a compatible kidney and refuse to donate it? Grounds to forcibly seize your kidney, the children are more important than your bodily autonomy. These people are astonishing.

The Eurobarometer did an insane "survey" on this,

https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/news/strong-support-citize...

https://europa.eu/eurobarometer/surveys/detail/2656

> Europeans indicate clear support for the detection of online child sexual abuse in messages such as e-mails and chat (87%) and in end-to-end encrypted messages (83%).

The questions in the survey were worded in a way where you couldn't possibly say "no", but they're still shaping it to focus specifically on E2E. I didn't see this picked up.

You can't win against: "think of the children" unfortunately.

Weighing privacy and safety is so important but it seems like both sides are not careful with nuance. My understanding is that a non-profit / charity can generate revenue as long as it stays within the organization, feeding back into the cause; so it seems a little disingenuous when this article paints it as profit. Personally, I hope to see advances that can help balance crucially important privacy protection and the safety of children and prevention of the spread of abuse material; for example fully homomorphic encryption or on device scanning.

What is needing is FOSS that you can use a separate program for encryption and for communication (which do not necessarily need to run on the same computer; the service need not care about that, nor how they are sandboxed (on the same computer) or connected (on different computers), nor what ciphers are in use, what language or character set it is written in, picture formats, etc).

This makes me think of the Roman empire.

I'm so glad Ashton Kutcher just recently proved he doesn't give a flying frack about sexual assault victims, he's just in this for the profit and the regulatory capture.

Source?

I think they're referencing the character letter he wrote for Danny Masterson, pleading for a reduced sentence. Pretty hypocritical... to say the least.

I don't think the letter [1] [2] does any pleading. Did Ashton Kutcher claim that sexual abusers don't have a right to character letters; otherwise I don't think hypocritical is an accurate description.

He obviously didn't know his friend very well if he never noticed the drugs his friend had though in all of the time they spent together.

[1]: https://www.legalaffairsandtrials.com/p/ashton-kutcher-and-m...

[2]: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...

Crimes in the US often have a large range of possible sentences (15 years to life in Masterson's case). The court has to figure out where in that range the particular person they are dealing with should be sentence.

Part of that involves trying to figure out how much of a danger the person is to society, and an important input to that is character witnesses (both favorable and unfavorable).

If a friend of mine was convicted of a crime and asked me for a character letter, I would probably write one giving an honest and accurate report of what I personally knew of them.

I don't see how that would be hypocritical, even if the crime they had committed went directly against something I advocated. Everybody deserves a fair sentence, and if someone involved in the case thinks I have useful information that might help with that I'll give it.

https://fortune.com/2023/05/04/ashton-kutcher-vc-fund-ai-art...

> ‘Who Benefits?’ Inside the EU’s Fight over Scanning for Child Sex Content

Companies which sell user data. Apple, Google, Microsoft etc.

A few more years (maybe? Are we already there?) and productive people will be better off moving to China or Saudi Arabia.

You get the same surveillance and totalitarianism but at least you don't get attacked with propaganda designed to brainwash westerner and make them mentally ill and you don't get politician-engineered high level of crime.

I don't think we have a way back from this, but I hope in the next version of society we won't be so dumb to give all this power in the hands of the government, no matter how "democratic" it is.

I'm curious to see if Argentina will be saved or if it will just the nth puppet in the hands of world governments.

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