The quandary is that powers that "invade the privacy of law abiding citizens" are also powers "to stop evil."
Pretending they aren't is part of the problem, as it empowers those who would push them to publicly advertise the latter good in a vacuum of silence from the tech side.
Something like 'Personal privacy is more important than maximizing law enforcement efficiency, including of CSAM' is a more honest, complete position.
It's not at all obvious whether stopping CSAM is really the primary goal of some of the people who are pushing these regulations. It seems just like a justification to invade personal privacy.
You are speculating about intents some other people might have.
Let's take the issue in vacuum first. Either you hold your privacy as more important than X, or you are willing to compromise some of your privacy in the name of X-- there's no third option. Eg. in case of airport security or CCTV in some public space suddenly everyone is OK compromising personal privacy in the name of personal life and safety.
Now finally let's get back to those other people whom you suspect of having an agenda to surveil everybody. If they honestly tried to combat child abuse, how do you see them going about it?
"If they honestly tried to combat child abuse, how do you see them going about it?"
Detective work, stake outs, researching who makes this stuff, convicting the actual producers, convicting people who do direct abuse... In general, taking real steps instead of reading everyone's dairy and then doing nothing.
So, physical surveillance. Idk if you are aware but this means physical surveillance on everyone, because with Tor you can't narrow this stuff geographically. Would you rather to be physically surveilled.
> researching who makes this stuff, convicting the actual producers, convicting people who do direct abuse
First it already happened when they used to expose identifying details. Those days are over.
Second, more importantly, what you described does nothing about resellers, aka the people who keep the abuse economy running and make money from it.
And please. Hash matching is not dairy reading.
And on the likely chance my dairy happens to have 1:1 collision with a know cp video, I would not mind if someone being able to look at it if it meant they also can look at the actual thing and identify reseller/perpetrator. How can you think differently?
> Idk if you are aware but this means physical surveillance on everyone, because with Tor you can't narrow this stuff geographically. Would you rather to be physically surveilled.
Presumable the content is actually produced at some specific physical location.
> Hash matching is not dairy reading.
The article is not talking about has matching, though. Quote from one of the Europol officials:
“All data is useful and should be passed on to law enforcement, there should be no filtering by the [EU] Centre because even an innocent image might contain information that could at some point be useful to law enforcement,”
Let's see if you think it's a security theatre next time you fly from Jordan to Israel. Or actually anywhere within the US, where gun carry is allowed...
It is a bit weird in that screening started only after bombing... a useful metric would be to see how many times bookings/hijackings were thwarted. (which I would guess many)
> in case of airport security or CCTV in some public space suddenly everyone is OK compromising personal privacy in the name of personal life and safety.
These are not really comparable. Even without CCTVs you can't really expect that no one will observe you public areas (it's just that cost of doing so would be significantly higher).
Also it's something you have much more control over and it's significantly less intrusive than monitoring personal communication. e.g. an equivalent would be the government opening and reading every single letter you sent or received back in the days when people still sent them (or having the option to, which to be fair is something they probably had it was prohibitively expensive to do at scale). That is not something most people living in free societies found acceptable.
> If they honestly tried to combat child abuse, how do you see them going about it?
By actually directly targeting it as the other comment describes? Instead of using "think of the children!" as a vail to justify unlimited government surveillance.
> You are speculating about intents some other people might have.
Yes. Are you implying there is something fundamentally wrong with that? Do you always accept everything politicians say at face value? If so, perhaps you're on the market for a bridge?
Airport security literally checks the inside of your body (if they want to) through xray or other means. How you consider this not comparable in privacy invasiveness?
> By actually directly targeting it as the other comment describes
Please your own take. That comment didn't contribute anything useful.
> Are you implying there is something fundamentally wrong with that?
I can't believe this is a question. You realize you are putting your own thoughts in another person's head?
> How you consider this not comparable in privacy invasiveness?
How is that comparable to having access to someone's personal communication? What's so particularly private about the 'inside' of anyone's body? Physically checking the outside seems much more invasive. But yeah, overall I agree that compromises can and should be made in certain cases when the potential harm to society might outweigh certain individual rights (I don't see how that might be the case in this situation).
> Please your own take. That comment didn't contribute anything useful.
I don't agree and to be fair more or less the same can be said about your previous comment.
> You realize you are putting your own thoughts in another person's head?
No. I'm trying to infer what thoughts might exist in another person's head when they do or say certain things. I don't really understand what are you implying (that we should never assume that no politicians have any hidden agendas and they they all are perfectly honest?)
Pretending they aren't is part of the problem, as it empowers those who would push them to publicly advertise the latter good in a vacuum of silence from the tech side.
Something like 'Personal privacy is more important than maximizing law enforcement efficiency, including of CSAM' is a more honest, complete position.