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Comment by twuopf | Hacker News Reader

I know creating a throwaway to hide your name for an opinion is a bad manner, but this one is one I really don’t want linked back to me

The VAST majority of “CSAM” is consensually created and exchanged by teens. Their future selves and their parents form this pressure group attacking everyone’s liberty and privacy to try to undo the downsides of choices they made themselves with full knowledge of what could happen.

The criminal and disgusting tail end of this type of material deserves the worst of consequences for the perpetrators and all the support in the world for the victims, but these are mostly - you guessed it - poor and unprivileged children from far away places and they certainly can’t put this much pressure on apple

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I think you’re right, but from another angle. In the state where I lived way back when, a state representative put forth a bill to explicitly make e-CSAM illegal. I guess it was already illegal for print media and this covered a gap in the law about cell phone pics, etc. Thing is, it had no allowance for the age of the picture taker, or even whether the picture taker was the photo subject. If a 16 year old girl took a nude selfie and sent it to her boyfriend, she was a felon.

I wrote to the rep and explained my concerns. I wholeheartedly agreed with the intent of the law, but the code was buggy. To my surprise, he wrote back in horror to say he hadn’t considered that and pulled the bill immediately. I’m proud of having done that.

I’m 100% pro yeeting child pornographers into the sun. I still don’t want to throw kids in prison or remove all traces of a right to privacy in our haste to sun-yeet them.

> I still don’t want to throw kids in prison or remove all traces of a right to privacy in our haste to sun-yeet them.

The one messy corner of this is the "strict liability" for this type of material. An underage kid can take a nude photo, send it to an adult, and then the adult can criminally liable for just having it, even if he deleted it as soon as he saw it. Either both parties involved in handing something for which there is "strict liability' need to be held accountable, or "strict liability" has to be changed so a person isn't liable if he deletes or reports the material as soon as he first becomes aware of it. And this isn't likely to happen because it would provide a plausible defense for every one criminally charged.

> has to be changed so a person isn't liable if he deletes or reports the material as soon as he first becomes aware of it

AFAIK that's more or less how it works today as a practical matter. The law recognizes this situation as an affirmative defense, but does not make it impossible to be charged.

To be an affirmative defense it has to be reported immediately or destroyed, constitute three images or less, and not be sent to anyone [other than law enforcement]. Interestingly, NCMEC doesn't necessarily count for that -- if you find yourself in this situation and you want to report something, call your local police.

We shouldn't rely on selective, "practical" enforcement of the law though.

Yep, especially when even an accusation of CSAM can be life ruining.

IANAL, but the notion of "strict liability" horrified me when I first head of it, and I thought it had to be some kind of a misunderstanding. So we're tossing that "innocent until proven guilty" idea out the window, huh?

I'm sure smarter people than me have sussed this out and can explain why it's a good thing, but it sits wrong with me. We can put the subject matter aside for a second: I don't think I could convict someone for having something happen to them, regardless of what the law says. Let's say drug possession was a strict liability law (and maybe it is for all I know). Finding a baggy of meth on the corner of a farmer's lot would mean that, technically, he was guilty of possession and had to prove that it wasn't really is. That's nuts. And looping back to the subject at hand, if the only evidence that someone possessed CSAM was their email inbox, without proof that it was solicited? They want me on their jury.

There should never be a circumstance where someone can't report something that happened to them to the police without a legitimate fear of being arrested. That's bad for the person, and it's bad for society.

But if their hard drive has folders grouped by age or something, prepare the solar catapult.

> So we're tossing that "innocent until proven guilty" idea out the window, huh?

We sure do. Legislators who pushed this "strict liability" thing forward were playing "tough on crime" for the audience of naive voters. Now anyone who tries to change this will commit political suicide and achieve the "pedo supporter" title.

> To my surprise, he wrote back in horror to say he hadn’t considered that and pulled the bill immediately. I’m proud of having done that.

Stories like this give me hope - thank you for sharing

> pulled the bill immediately

This is weird indeed. These bills are mostly put forward in order to appear tough on crime and secure votes of the naive population ("think of the children"). Pulling the bill is detrimental as it may lead to "pedo supporter" conspiracy spreading among the district.

Eh, it's kinda weird that we're against pedos here in the US, then we elect them.

Are there statistics backing up the "VAST" majority claim?

While on statistics, I wonder, are there reliable statistics about child abuse of different types? Studying correlations with other social metrics, like sex education, liberal/conservative, policies regarding prostitution, and others can provide support for/against decisions.

Not that I hope these will impact people's and governments' choices, but I want to challenge my intuitions.

It's probably impossible to get reliable statistics about that given how both groups are trying to keep everything secret. But you can consider how many paedophiles there are vs how many horny teenagers there are. Based on that it would be extremely surprising if he was wrong.

The real question is what happens when a horny teenager sends another a nude. There definitely have been insane cases where they get stitched up for creating child porn. I don't know if that's the normal outcome today though.

That's the fun of it. Try to find out? Straight to prison.

Really sad. I read a lot of psychology. But I've never encountered psychology of child sexual abuse (I know there is if I look it up, but that's my point, it should be shared around, discussed, challenged).

Why would some adults find kids sexually attractive? Is it abusive/aggressive behavior manifesting itself in sexuality? Or is it sexuality channeled in the wrong direction? If it's the second, is it out of desperation, and would happen less if the culture makes it easier for them to satisfy their needs with adults, or would it happen regardless? On the victim's side, are the shy and less social ones more in danger, or the socially active ones? From my social scientist friends I hear a lot that most child sexual abuse is domestic. What are measures that a society can take to prevent these, without turning the society into a surveillance state, which will ultimately harm everyone more, including the children? What can be done to make sure children speak up, so that such behavior is dealt with at the beginning (and maybe while the more terrible things have not happened yet), and not turn into a multi-year childhood trauma?

What are signs (and early signs) on the abuser's side and the child's side? How to deal with these signs?

I can't reply with stats, but I sometimes get in a bit of a loop watching the 'pred vs catcher' videos on social media.

After having watched what would probably be hundreds (across the US and UK), you start to see some patterns on offenders:

- The ones that are obviously mentally ill/brain development issues - they're adults but act and talk like a child. With some of the interactions with this cohort, some/many don't even realise what they're doing is wrong.

- The ones that seem ok from a developmental perspective, but are physically undesirable from societal norms and don't have a legal outlet - whether that's because of looks/weight/age/disabilities etc. This is where you see many old married men - probably not being fulfilled at home.

- The ones that have a fetish for a type and will go to any lengths after not being able to fulfil this legally (this is where, I think, immigrants over-index: they have a fetish for 'white' women, and can't fulfil their desires legally, so try with the most vulnerable)

- The ones that seem mentally and physically ok, but you can glean from their interactions that they are cold-blooded, ruthless, know what they're doing is wrong. These are the ones that take many calculated steps to cover their trails. When caught, they show barely any regret, and when they do, it's only regret because they were caught.

Then obviously I think there's a class of them that don't come up on these sites, but we can get a glimpse of it from the likes of the Epstein files. The rich. The famous. The ones that think they can do whatever they want. How pervasive this is in society is anyone's guess, but it seems like there is a dark underworld for this class. A Netflix documentary comes to mind about two boys who were trafficked by their parents to wealthy elites in the UK.

Obviously what differentiates all of these to people that may sit in one of those cohorts but don't resort to this despicable behavior is some underlying predisposition to predatory behavior.

Thanks, as a software engineer, always a problem solver, who just follows an dreams of solutions to social problems (I've once led a software project for one of these, but not more), breaking down the mega category of abusers into subcategories with mechanics of their actions changes my mindset from useless anger into a problem solving one.

Yeah, I started watching those videos with uncontrollable rage to thinking about how can society change things to avoid/minimize this.

The proposed CSAM scanning used perceptual hashing to try to identify CSAM material known to law enforcement.

It was not a tool to identify private images as being underage. That’s an impossible task.

It's impossible to do with perfect accuracy, but that doesn't mean it isn't done.

Just ask the dad who was investigated for taking pictures of his toddler for the doctor: https://www.koffellaw.com/blog/google-ai-technology-flags-da...

I'd say modern AI tools could probably do this pretty effectively. They're very effective at describing anything else about an image. I have a workflow that churns through large amounts of images, describes them, and then looks for things I specifically want (in my case, auction listings that are not described accurately on the auction website).

I need to process a modest amount of imagery (about 25 million images, and growing) for NSFW content and general captioning/description. About 5% of it contains nudity or partial nudity, and about 10% of that 5% contains sexual activity.

In theory, modern vision language models could classify human nudity and sexual activity very thoroughly. But every model I have tried is reluctant to clearly describe what is notable about sexualized/nude images. The models are deliberately under-exposed to nude and sexualized content during training and further RLHF'd away from generating straightforward descriptions of such images.

Models also occasionally hallucinate WTF captions for ordinary adult sexual activity. I recently ran a baseline test with frames extracted from adult videos and about 1/3000 frames was mis-captioned as involving a child according to Gemma 4 12b.

I completely agree with you, but I do think that these teens do not have good opsec around these photos. It’s like the revenge porn problem but way worse. A teenager sending a nude selfie to a friend who then later shared these images non-consensually is a much bigger problem than if the same thing happened to adults.

I don’t have any ideas for a solution, but I suspect that the heightened focus on CSAM is really compensating for the fact that we don’t have solutions for revenge porn.

There is no good solution to revenge porn. It is impossible to enforce that only a single person has access to an image (physical or digital), and that the person doesn’t redistribute the image.

The only way I can see this working is that people in explicit images need to publicly declare their intent for who can see the images (maybe a hash of the image content and the name of the person who can see that content) and then when the courts prosecute revenge porn the intent can be referenced to see if it was meant to be shared or not. There are still issues in that there is no proof that the person being accused of revenge porn actually distributed the images vs the defendant actually sending the images to other, or the image was leaked by a hack.

I think the best thing we can do is try and educate teens on the dangers of revenge porn like we do on the consequences of having sex. We cannot stop teens from having sex or taking nudes, but we can at least try to educate them as best we can.

Isn't the solution to revenge porn just arresting everyone caught doing revenge porn, same as it is now and with most crimes? The law doesn't work like a computer, it doesn't have to work 100% of the time.

I won't pretend to be so knowledgeable about how so much CSAM is being created, but keep in mind, there are laws against distribution & mere possession, too. Revenge porn is an obvious thing to be mindful of in this context in addition to other types of distribution. Consent to create doesn't imply consent to distribute (probably even to cloud storage) & is completely immaterial to issues of possession if it ends up in some 3rd party's hands. So the scope goes way wider than you're letting on. If you're saying all of these these laws are being abused, like they exist primarily to punish a state senator's daughter's ex-boyfriend, I would ask for something to back that up.

Yes, poor and unprivileged children can't really defend themselves here, but this is the system working to find some legal mechanism to do what it can, as a more powerful force. Protecting people from exploitation is a good use of government. If this was shot down for legal reasons, OK, the system is working and I hope there is a way to expand protections that fits into our system.

Children cannot legally consent to most things in most places, especially until near the end of their teen years.

They can't consent but it does make sense that it's true, I would genuinely bet that more nudes are being shared between 17-year olds than some freak, as this is common to the point where I feel a very large portion of all existing teens have done it.

In the near future, when a 17 year old asks her phone to take a nude selfie, the phone will say "no".

It wouldn't be so bad tbh, would avoid all the leaks and regrets that comes with it. In term of awareness, I would say that a late teen is fully aware of his/her actions but might not calculate consequences properly.

That lack of understanding of consequences is how we get a lot of bad and good things. Like Aaron Swartz downloading JSTOR (relevant today because of the Anthropic fine). He tried to make the world better, he wouldn't have done that if he knew what would happen.

Do you have a citation for that? Sounds plausible, but I'm not sure I've ever seen it stated that way in any of the related media reports on CSAM efforts.

In Germany, the rise in "youth porn" material has been attributed to such kinds of cases where youth send intimate pictures to each other [1].

Our legal systems are not built to deal with that mess, and it may hang around your neck for the rest of your life. Unfortunately, the law is very explicit, leaving barely any avenue for the courts to drag us out of the mess, and politicians - even if they are actually interested in the topic in the first place - won't touch that area with a ten foot pole for fear of getting blamed a pedophile themselves.

[1] https://www.n-tv.de/panorama/KI-treibt-Jugendporno-Fallzahle...

We absolutely have the same problem here in the US. There have been a few (small number) of cases that hit the national or regional news where teens were sharing nudes of classmates, etc.

I'm questioning the parent post's contention that the "vast majority" of CSAM falls into this bucket.

Just by casually glancing at KMP or VoL, you'd find that even the darknet pedo community itself strongly vilifies actual child abuse (known as "hurtcore"). There's truly no place for people who rape children. They are scum of the earth even in the eyes of the scum of the earth itself.

> KMP or VoL

I'm aftaid of putting those terms in my search engine, can you please expand those acronyms?

They must be the names of darkweb child porn sites. Abbreviating the names is done so that people who are familiar with the site will know it, but people unfamiliar with the site will not gain any new information or be able to find it. The same is done with private torrent trackers and other piracy groups.

Okay, nevermind then.

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