It's bizarre to end this by denouncing encryption. "There's been this long lasting problem on Facebook, but a large part of it is something introduced last month."
Seriously. They're practically mocking "privacy advocates" as criminals trying to evade law enforcement, whereas the other side of the argument is supported by a veritable gathering of paragons. I did not expect this kind of naked emotional appeal from The Guardian, but maybe that's my fault. And note that this is not an op-ed.
Edit: I meant op-ed, not editorial.
Mentioning the former doesn’t make it an appeal to emotion. The emotional reaction you (and others) have to it is because it’s a legitimately emotional subject. Doesn’t make it less real.
I never stated otherwise.
> Mentioning the former doesn’t make it an appeal to emotion.
No, mentioning that concept does not constitute an appeal to emotion. I described the specific language in the article that was an emotional appeal.
They then used the emotion that built up to attack something tangentially connected to that problem. That's what makes it an appeal to emotion.
It would be equally irrelevant if the Guardian instead of encryption started talking about criminals are aided by guns and explosives in this article.
It is baffling to me that some people can - in 3 breaths - condemn police violence, opine the the current/next US president is attempting to bring down democracy and then conclude that we just need to give government agencies control over one more aspect of life to make things better. The compartmentalising people are capable of is something to behold.
We need a system of protections in place to slow down government overreach. There are things in the world much scarier than small-scale harm to children, it is likely to come out of the government and privacy is a key plank. Besides, we all read through the Jeff Epstien thing. Enforcement of this stuff is already a bit corrupt; I expect the people responsible for this system would be abusers themselves. The most systematic of abusers are almost certainly going to be involved in these spying programs. Some authoritarians are probably good people. A lot just get off on abusing their own power against weaker people. These are not the sort of people we should want going through our mailboxes.
Often but not always, it's not a tradeoff between government having control, and nobody having control.
It's a tradeoff between a government that is in many ways democratically accountable having this control, and some rich guy who's not accountable to anyone having this control.
Society abhors a power vacuum.
But in this case, the plan is to remove encryption so that officials can monitor everyone's messaging. And it has to be all mail, otherwise fairly obviously the horrible people will go use secure communication.
So them being democratically accountable appears to mean they can just poke their nose into whatever they like and there isn't anything much voters can do about it. Using taxpayer money to enforce everything I might add.
Some random rich guy couldn't do this. He can't force anyone to divulge their mail, and he can't force the people being targeted to fund it.
And this idea of democratic accountability is a bit sus. The Nazi's were the plurality party when they took over (as far as I recall, anyway), the Communists were popular enough to win a war when they took over China. Popular support for a terrible idea doesn't change the nature of the idea, we're much better off with actual technical protections to give everyone time to figure out they're making terrible mistakes.
Anything in the same sentence as "aids predators" throws context out the window and marks it as a vile and awful thing to anyone listening. Don't use that language, and don't let someone lead you by the nose into using that language.
Instead, talk about how end-to-end-encryption improves the safety of all users, including children, because it gives them control over who sees their messages, and shields them from criminals who would gladly snoop and steal their personal data. Banning or breaking encryption will not make children safer. What will make them safer is parents supervising their young children's internet usage, and teaching them how to protect themselves online when they're older - how they should avoid giving out personal information (e.g. to Facebook or Instagram...), how to lock down access so only their verified friends can talk to them, etc.
Your metaphors, etc.., have made it easier. TYVM <3
The GP did much more than just point that out. The GP gave arguments for how encryption helps keep children safer, rather than detracts from that.
> The question is the ratio of good to bad.
But that is not something that can be judged in a vacuum, or by a single authority. Everyone's circumstances are different, and any policy dictated from the top down is going to do the wrong thing for a non-trivial number of people. That is why freedom is a better option: give people the tools they need to make their own individual decisions. That applies to people protecting their children as much as anything else.
> Detractors are arguing that encryption on social media platforms have a worse ratio than food and roads.
No, they're arguing that encryption in general is just bad. They're not recognizing any benefits to encryption (such as the ones the GP described).
And no, “they” aren’t arguing encryption in general is just bad. For example, I specifically mentioned that that’s not the case. Battling the strawman is your own rhetorical choice.
The people who are closest to the problem are the children's parents. Are you saying they would rather not have encryption?
The people who are against encryption, from what I can see, are not parents. They are businesses who don't want to have their access to data curtailed, and politicians who favor those businesses. I have not seen any real arguments against encryption from them, just FUD about "protect the children!".
I mean, maybe you’re just looking for weak versions of the argument. There are a ton of people who dedicate their careers to monitoring and combatting child abuse imagery. As far as I can tell, they’re unanimous in the view that E2E encryption is a huge, huge help for predators. I’m sure they’re not unanimous on how to level that fact with another distinct fact that E2E encryption is also useful for lots of other things.
Calling a real problem FUD doesn’t make it moot. That’s just a way for you to avoid addressing the argument.
That's not what I said. I said parents are closest to the issue of how to protect their children from predators.
> There are a ton of people who dedicate their careers to monitoring and combatting child abuse imagery. As far as I can tell, they’re unanimous in the view that E2E encryption is a huge, huge help for predators.
E2E is a huge help for predators to hide from Big Brother surveillance, yes, of course, that's obvious.
What is not obvious is whether Big Brother surveillance actually helps protect children from predators. Asking the people whose salaries depend on Big Brother surveillance whether that surveillance actually helps protect children does not strike me as a good way to evaluate that question.
Is this a hard to imagine case? Seems completely obvious what the claim is here and that it has a basis in reality, and it’s obvious why someone dealing with this problem up close might be extremely highly motivated to solve it.
Sure, this is an imagined case, just as yours is. Is it any less plausible? I don't think so. And so we have two plausible imagined cases that give opposite answers to how useful banning encryption would actually be to law enforcement. In other words, imagined cases are of no help whatsoever in actually evaluating this issue.
What we, as members of the public (or for that matter concerned parents, for those who are), need in order to evaluate whether we should agree to banning encryption is open and transparent data on how well law enforcement does this job with vs. without encryption. Also data on how many child predators and other nefarious actors actually use encryption, given that it is easily available now. Child predators existed before encryption was available on consumer devices, and indeed before the Internet itself existed, so there should be plenty of historical data to use. Has anyone done such an analysis?
It's obvious why law enforcement wants to ban encryption, sure--it means they have an excuse for not doing the actual hard work of gathering human intelligence about child predators and other nefarious actors, and shutting them down the old-fashioned way. Which says nothing at all about whether they actually can do the job better using Big Brother surveillance than they could the old-fashioned way.
Secondly, if your imagined case only succeeds because of poor predator opsec, your police are shit, and it's not a good argument for wrecking the security of everyone else in the world.
Allow me to remind you of how Ross Ulbricht, operator of the drugs website The Silk Road, was taken down. Law enforcers infiltrated the site, got chummy with admins and learned more his operations. They seized servers. They did good investigative work to narrow down who the operator was, and when they found him, they surveilled him, and grabbed him in a way that stopped him shutting his laptop, which would have immediately encrypted the contents.
If you hate child predators (and you should), then call for competent police to handle the case and catch them red-handed, don't give me the old "gosh darn it, if only everyone had to go around naked and write postcards, no letters, strip them completely of their privacy. I couldn't solve any cases otherwise!"
How much personal choice and freedom should we give up?
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37176555
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/oct/06/us-governmen...
https://web.archive.org/web/20210522003136/https://blog.nucy...
"Think of the children!" is a classic argument when you have an agenda to push. This isn't anything new.
"But think of the children" that ends with "oh noes the encryption."