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Comment by zaphar | Hacker News Reader

I am sympathetic to your position. However this sort of low value statement is I think part of the problem. You ask a question that you imply you know the answer to and then you don't give the answers.

What other measures do you actually propose?

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You're right; I didn't offer a solution. The point of my comment was how one-sided and predictable the framing around these measures has become. As you can see by some of the other comments, I seem to not be the only one thinking that.

Let me ask you the apparent counter question: do you not see the value of private communication? If you use Facebook Messenger personally, don't you feel that you have gained something by your messages being encrypted? If not, is your reply simply "I ain't got anything to hide"?

As I said I'm sympathetic. My question was more about effective strategy in countering the push against encryption than it was challenging the utility and value of private communication.

Now I got you. I guess "keep children safe" here means two things.

1. Protecting them from grooming 2. Stopping CSAM from being spread via Facebook Messanger

It's evident that E2E encryption likely doesn't make much of a difference regarding the second point, given that many messengers have already implemented E2E encryption.

So, assuming the communication of the NCA was perfectly sincere, the loss here would be mostly the inability to prevent grooming properly. In this case, I think the question we should be asking ourselves is whether children need to be on these platforms at all. We're seeing so many issues linked to the phone use of children that regardless of protecting them from sexual abuse and exploitation, they should probably just be using phones less.

This is I think a much more effective line of communication. I would also suggest that investing in creating communities where parents are much more involved in their children's activities is also a really effective mitigation. Much of our current communities seem to be trending in a direction where children are isolated and alienated making them much richer targets. Creating communities where the environment is much less target rich for those who would prey on them would I think be a good step. Also making it a community where children are more likely to report the predator would go a long way toward identifying and removing the predator from those communities.

I assume they mean "...more targeted surveillance based on reasonable suspicion".

>What other measures do you actually propose?

If the US really wanted to stop terrorism it could achieve that just by pulling all its troops out of the middle east. Islamists aren't just coming to the US to blow themselves up for the fun of it, they're attacking the US because it has soldiers and military bases occupying most of the middle east.

You left the combatting child exploitation part out. How does pulling troops from ME will achieve that?

I'm sure that's part of it. But a clear eyed reading of their own religious beliefs and proclamations shows that they are also quite intent on converting the entire world over to their religion or else slaughtering. I'm not sure your suggestion is enough. How would you encourage the hard line believers (also most likely to become terrorists) to abandon that belief system?

I'll note that part of their complaint is also that we export our culture via economic methods. Would you also withdraw from all interaction with areas they currently control including humanitarian and immmigration? This would prevent people of that cultural heritage who live here from sending aid to those societies legally. And this only barely touches on just how complicated this all is. The discourse around much of all of this is full of motivated thinking on both sides and a massive amount of oversimplification of the problem.

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