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Comment by mitxela | Hacker News Reader

NCMEC won't share that database with almost anyone. I wouldn't be surprised if they denied it to Elon.

They were using it in 2024..

https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/2024-01-31_-_...

It also has a fairly high false positive rate, and due to the nature of the content paying someone to verify false positives is near impossible both legally and morally.

“We can’t fight child porn on our platform because it is less moral to run a scanner that may produce false positives and either accept that this may result in blocking some content that isn’t child porn OR pay someone to look at content and verify whether or not it is child porn, so instead we just do the far more moral thing of allowing and profiting from the distribution of child porn" is an interesting, if not exactly convincing, argument.

In quite a few countries, a false positive can lead to someone getting put in prison, entirely without any human viewing said image.

It's all a matter of 'the image hash was on the database, therefore OP is guilty. 10 years incarceration'.

I wouldn't want to be enabling such a system.

> In quite a few countries, a false positive can lead to someone getting put in prison

That can only happen if it is either (1) used by government, or (2) used by private entities in a process flow that includes reports to government.

"There exist countries with criminal justice systems with weak enough standards of proof that a false positive on a scan alone would result in prison", even if 100% true, is not a justification for a firm not making efforts to block child porn distribution on its networks. (It is, OTOH, a justification for working to reform the criminal justice systems in those countries, but that is rather far from the topic here.)

Intentionally viewing what you think is child porn is a crime, but not catching it is not a crime. If you think it's stupid, lobby Congress to change the law.

> Intentionally viewing what you think is child porn is a crime

The entire argument for why verification was even an issue is that the allegedly the scan is not sufficient reason to actually believe that something is child pornoography. But whether or reviewing such a report may or may not be a crime in some jurisdiction somewhere on Earth, the certainty that arguments like that would detract from the point is the reason that of the two (moral and legal) issues raised in the post I responded to, I only said that one of them was ridiculous, and it wasn't the legal one.

NCMEC is the only organization legally allowed to view child porn. For everyone else, they have no legal way to verify. If you don't trust NCMEC to give correct results, the only legal option is not to play.

The Times reporters don't seem to concerned about being charged with a crime

I worked for a startup almost a decade ago that automated this process entirely (reducing the need for human oversight / comparing).

It worked, no one wanted to pay for it. Or were completely locked into Microsoft or other large companies solutions that half worked.

I'm surprised Twitter didn't implement it earlier (before it was bought and rebranded to X).

Also, is The Times admitting they were in possession of the illegal pictures? Does Freedom of the Press protect against that?

From TFA:

> The Times conducted its own scan for child sexual abuse material on X by writing an automated computer program that searched for related terms without displaying the images, which are illegal to view. Links to the images were sent to a Microsoft service that checked whether they were included on lists of known abusive material compiled by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and other child safety groups. Matches were verified by analysts at the Canadian Center for Child Protection.

TFA is paywalled and the archive link someone else used didn't work.

Thank you for copy-and-pasting how they did it.

Try turning off VPN for the archive link? It worked for me, but I had to turn off the VPN

I think they’re saying Elon is in possession of it, and they were able to verify it via file hashing compared against the national database.

Are you suggesting the national database maintainers are in possession of illegal pictures and should also have their rights questioned?

The national database maintainers are the only people allowed to have the pictures, for the purpose of maintaining the database.

The only people? What about law enforcement?

I just got access to the NCMEC's hashlists for my startup. It was fairly easy.

What did you say to them?

I said that I ran a company that could benefit from having access to that list, and could benefit NCMEC by reporting when we stumbled upon content which shows up in the list. (It's content scanning software for the adult film industry)

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