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Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

> Child safety experts, policymakers and law enforcement have argued encryption obstructs efforts to rescue child sex-trafficking victims and the prosecution of predators. Privacy advocates praised the decision for shielding users from surveillance by governments and law enforcement.

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.

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Could it possibly be that encryption does legitimately aid predators and it’s also useful for legitimate security needs?

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.

> Could it possibly be that encryption does legitimately aid predators and it’s also useful for legitimate security needs?

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.

You're ignoring the lengthy article before the part they quoted. They spent several paragraphs describing how there's a real problem that's hurting children.

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.

Infinite number of things are possible. This article is about Facebook and Instagram, where people make public posts, can be found by searches, and absolutely nothing is end-to-end encrypted. Law enforcement has complete and total access to every single message ever sent over those platforms, which even provide them with an API to query on essentially an honor system trusting that the warrant document LEO submits is legitimate.

It would be equally irrelevant if the Guardian instead of encryption started talking about criminals are aided by guns and explosives in this article.

Isn't Messenger now end-to-end encrypted?

It's opt-in per DM.

Ah got it.

Hypothetically, any privacy of any sort whatsoever aids wrongdoers. The issues are that (1) governments sometimes go la Terreur, (2) there seems to be some sort of ethnic cleansing program every century or so without necessarily any warning and (3) governments regularly go off-the-rails and bring the hammer down on random small time people doing nothing much wrong all the time.

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.

> to give government agencies control over one more aspect of life to make things better.

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.

> ...that is in many ways democratically accountable...

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.

Encryption aids everybody's privacy, in the same way that roads aid predators to steal away with your children, and food aids predators by giving them nourishment. Ergo we need to ban encryption, ban roads and ban food. Anyone who doesn't want to ban food (and let me snoop on all their messages) is an evil predator - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNYZo5yRVNk

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.

I've been having a difficult time explaining why E2E encryption is, well, almost a moral imperative...

Your metaphors, etc.., have made it easier. TYVM <3

Everything is a double edged sword. Pointing that out isn't arguing in good faith. The question is the ratio of good to bad. Food and roads have an overwhelmingly positive good to bad ratio. Detractors are arguing that encryption on social media platforms have a worse ratio than food and roads. See, this is why I hate metaphors. It allows you to completely bypass the argument being made by comparing apples and oranges. Muddying the waters of the discussion with this rhetorical sleight of hand. Address the actual argument.

> Everything is a double edged sword. Pointing that out isn't arguing in good faith.

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).

The people who are closest to the problem of children’s safety online come to a different assessment as to whether the larger risk is predators or hackers stealing… their identities? Their credit card numbers? Just generically “reading their messages?”

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 of children’s safety online come to a different assessment as to whether the larger risk is predators or hackers stealing… their identities?

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!".

You think just “parents” are the people with the strongest grasp on the issue of CSAM?

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.

> You think just “parents” are the people with the strongest grasp on the issue of CSAM?

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.

Child predator gets caught. Authorities see metadata or have other reason to believe he’s been exchanging material with dozens of other predators. Unfortunately they cannot see who any of those people are due to strong encryption.

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.

Child predator gets caught. Authorities tell child predator that the best way to minimize the number of years he spends in prison is to tell them what other predators he has been in contact with. Child predator gives them the information.

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 someone dealing with this problem up close might be extremely highly motivated to solve it.

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.

Firstly, do you think a child predator is going to comply with "encryption's illegal you know?"

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!"

I'd find it interesting to ask the opponents of E2E encryption what their feelings are on cash. Cash is also an untraceable form of interaction. Yes, cash is a medium of exchange for drugs and sex crimes, but it is also a bulwark against overreaching local and federal governments.

How much personal choice and freedom should we give up?

Children also have legitimate security needs. Just wait for a massive service hack where all private information and racy texts/photos teens have been voluntarily sending to each other are made public for all to see. If server can't read messages, it can't leak them.

The Guardian lost any credibility from me when they started boogeyman'ing aspartame[0] and put out a slanted scare article about how folks in the food industry are responsible for developing nutritional guidelines[1].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37176555

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/oct/06/us-governmen...

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