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by miki123211 903 days ago
> The workload has flooded,” Raymond told VTDigger. “And I think a lot of it is the availability of it online, obviously, but the other part is just, I think platforms are getting much better at controlling their own environment and finding and rooting that stuff out

A lot of that stuff will be much harder to find out if end-to-end encryption stays legal. Is it still worth it? Very possibly, but it's definitely a tradeoff and we shouldn't pretend otherwise. We're trading off real children being actually hurt against unspecified hypothetical harms in the future. Those harms may be much more significant, or they may not, but we shouldn't pretend like it's all roses.

3 comments

This technology protects everyone equally, and more importantly will exist regardless of whether or not you want it to. Any regulatory attempt to kill FDE will only result in the use of more deniable systems by criminals and the mass exploitation of everyone else who relies on the physical security of their computing devices. The tech isn’t magic. We must simply live with the consequences of the reality we exist in, and adapt accordingly in the hunt for those who prey on children.
The fact that the storage media that this dog can find contain anything but Veracrypt volumes proves that (most) criminals have terrible opsec. Most people who own CSAM are ordinary people, teachers, plumbers, truck drivers etc, not hackers, programmers and IT technicians.

Child abuse is just like everything else, low-friction solutions are going to win over high-friction ones. If you have to get an Android phone and sideload a shady app to get E2E encryption, many people won't even bother. In the world where E2E is banned, half of the shady E2E apps would be police sting-ops in the first place, and the other half could be seized and turned against their users with a strategically placed update. Just like with money laundering, you don't even have to prove that a crime occurred, simply getting the list of all IP addresses of people using E2E would go a long way in putting those people behind bars.

Again, I'm not saying that this is necessarily a good thing, but it's undeniable that many children would be saved here.

Requiring all residential buildings have at least a single camera in every room that’s active 24/7 and is streamed directly to NSA(or whoever) would also save a lot of victims of crimes.

You could have AI detecting instances of domestic abuse and immediately dispatching a police drone to handle it. Technologically this is almost already viable..

You can justify anything with that line of thinking. To anyone paying attention I think it's obvious that AI image generators are going to end this problem. No need to hurt anyone and people can look at all the depraved things they want in the comfort of their homes.
But it’s no unreasonable to assume that demand for CSAM would mean that supply would increase to satisfy it.
...until they get so excited they want to try it in real life.
Does the evidence support that idea? My understanding was that the information we have right now seems to suggest the opposite.
I've not seen any evidence either way, but I'm not sure you'd get an RCT of this past an ethics committee anywhere.

For now, I'm inclined to err on the side of caution and not enable perverts.

Just because it's not possible to study something directly doesn't mean that we can't study it. We could compare statistics in countries with different laws. Or we could look at studies of how pornography consumption influences non-deviant sexual behavior.
do video games make people shoot up schools? did marilyn manson lead to columbine?
Even the “end to end encryption” option for iCloud (off by default, mind you) keeps the raw hashes of the unencrypted file content non-e2ee so Apple/USG can see who has which unique files and to where they spread.