I don't see many people pushing back on the child pornography laws themselves that are the cause of this. I'm stepping into a hornets nest by even bringing this up, because any criticism of the laws on the books makes one look they're a pedo, so I'll preface by saying, child pornography (filmed with actual kids) is vile and disgusting, but it is the production of it that is evil to be fought and suppressed, not the possession of it. Remember in the 90s, we had to deal with the Communications Decency Act I & II, because every time they want to crack down on the internet, the excuse is always "it's for the children!" And pedophilia is the go-to excuse in a lot of circumstances.
The CPPA had bans on virtual child porn (e.g. using look-alike adult actresses or CGI), that was overturned by SCOTUS, and then Congress responded with the PROTECT act which tightened up those provisions. These laws on possession are practically unenforceable with modern technology, peer to peer file sharing, onion routing, and encrypted hard drives.
Thus, in order to make them enforcement, the government has to put surveillance at all egress and ingress points of our private/secure enclaves, whether it's at the point of storing it locally, or the point of uploading it to the cloud.
While I agree with the goal of eliminating child porn, should it come at the cost of an omnipresent government surveillance system everywhere? One that could be used for future laws that restrict other forms of content? How about anti-vax imagery? Anti-Semitic imagery? And with other governments of the world watching, especially authoritarian governments, how long until China, which had a similar system with Jingwang Weishi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingwang_Weishi) starts asking: hey, can you extend this to Falun Gong, Islamic, Hong Kong resistance, and Tiananmen square imagery? What if Thailand passes a law that requires Apple to scan for images insulting to the Thai Monarch, does Apple comply?
This is a very bad precedent. I liked the Apple that said no to the FBI instead of installing backdoors. I'd prefer if Apple get fined, and battle all the way to the Supreme Court to resist this.
There's a reason they always promote the most extreme cases to restrict liberty:
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
— HL Mencken
Relatedly, I don't see much discussion around the nuances of what counts as cp. In my experience, the vast majority of cp people are likely to come into contact with is "consensual" (the definition of consent gets weird here) images taken by teenagers of themselves, not old men raping little kids. So what happens if a 17 year old girl takes pictures of herself, sends them to her partner, they break up, he posts them online as revenge porn, and a site moderator reports it as cp and its hash ends up in the db? Now police come after her because she has 25 similar images in her icloud and she gets treated like a criminal? She definitely did break the law I suppose, but there's so much more nuance there. I really feel like these are the kinds of people who are most likely to get flagged. I (hopefully) don't know anyone who keeps swaths of abusive cp on their iPhones, but I certainly have known a lot of underage kids with intimate pictures of themselves and their friends/partners.
My understanding of the problem is that you are entirely wrong as to the ratio of "accidental" underage photos vs. "evil" photos. CSAM is "Child Sexual Abuse Material" and the abuse part is apparently more widespread than the public knows or wants to know.
I have objections to this tool and have many of the same concerns expressed in these comments, but your example seems like a bit of a corner case compared to the broader "government panopticon" problem.
Sure there’s probably orders of magnitudes more of that content. But that’s not what most people are targeting I think with these laws and tech. I believe when I read some of NYT (Gabriel J.X. Dance?) on this a while back it was explicitly about child abuse not “oops older teens”.
The reason possession is illegal is to try to prevent further production of it and to eliminate continuing abuse to children. The theory is that allowing even mere possession perpetuates a market of “buyers” that would further stimulate production. This is well covered in the Congressional findings associated with 18 U.S.C. 2251. See e.g. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2251 (click the notes tab).
The police already have an incentive to not investigate rape because it makes their numbers look bad which affects funding. Now extend that to children who can't file a police report and you can get an idea of how little the 'think of the children' crowd actually cares about stopping CSA. Pure hypocrisy. They expect us to surrender our fundamental rights while they look the other way (Sophie Long)on CSA.
Something else I haven’t heard anyone bring up: when child abusers are caught, sentences are often a joke. They often spend less time in prison than low to mid level drug offenders.
CP is rape porn. People who produce or knowingly distribute actual rape porn (of children or adults) should be going to jail for 25+ years. I would not rule out life for extreme cases that also involve other forms of abuse.
Yet as far as I know this isn’t what is being pushed for. Instead we get a dragnet to try to catch low level offenders who will probably barely see prison because sex crimes are just not punished much in our society.
Secondly… look into some of the people who have set up fake CP honey pots. These have included both vigilantes and security researchers trying to get a sense of how much CP is on Tor. Turns out most of these people are imbeciles and catching them is easy. Why don’t police do this more? Because… well… as I said sex crimes are just not a priority.
I really feel like the whole argument is in bad faith. If they really cared about the children there are so many other things that would be both easier and more effective.
Indeed. A case in particular was Benjamin Levin who was the Minister of Education in Ontario
> Levin was ultimately nabbed conversing with police officers posing as single moms. He encouraged them to sexually abuse their kids and in some cases shared photos. [1]
> In one case, Levin sent photographs to a New Zealand police officer, one showing a “close-up of the face of a crying child, her face smeared with black makeup.” Levin suggested to her the image was “hot,” according to parole board documents. Another photo he sent showed a young female bound and leashed, with a gag in her mouth and Levin commented, “Mmm, so hot to imagine a mother doing that to her girl to please her lover.” [1]
> On May 29, 2015, he was sentenced to three years in prison. He only spent 3 months of his sentence in jail before being paroled [2]
There are loads and loads of cases like that. If they have good lawyers they don’t even see prison, at least in the US. But we must backdoor everything to catch them so we can slap them on the wrist…?
The CPPA had bans on virtual child porn (e.g. using look-alike adult actresses or CGI), that was overturned by SCOTUS, and then Congress responded with the PROTECT act which tightened up those provisions. These laws on possession are practically unenforceable with modern technology, peer to peer file sharing, onion routing, and encrypted hard drives.
Thus, in order to make them enforcement, the government has to put surveillance at all egress and ingress points of our private/secure enclaves, whether it's at the point of storing it locally, or the point of uploading it to the cloud.
While I agree with the goal of eliminating child porn, should it come at the cost of an omnipresent government surveillance system everywhere? One that could be used for future laws that restrict other forms of content? How about anti-vax imagery? Anti-Semitic imagery? And with other governments of the world watching, especially authoritarian governments, how long until China, which had a similar system with Jingwang Weishi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingwang_Weishi) starts asking: hey, can you extend this to Falun Gong, Islamic, Hong Kong resistance, and Tiananmen square imagery? What if Thailand passes a law that requires Apple to scan for images insulting to the Thai Monarch, does Apple comply?
This is a very bad precedent. I liked the Apple that said no to the FBI instead of installing backdoors. I'd prefer if Apple get fined, and battle all the way to the Supreme Court to resist this.