5 ms·

The Internet Watch Foundation, an organisation funded by almost all of big tech, is already at work pushing for client side scanning next [1], for the children,

The Internet Watch Foundation, an organisation funded by almost all of big tech, is already at work pushing for client side scanning next [1], for the children, of course. [1] https://www.iwf.org.uk/policy-work/preventing-the-upload-of-child-sexual-abuse-material-in-end-to-end-encrypted-e2ee-environments/ https://www.iwf.org.uk/policy-work/preventing-the-upload-of-...

junofan 2mo ago
Interesting. It would be easy to detect hate speech client-side too I’d imagine. My phone already listens for certain words.
- anonym29 2mo ago
  Why stop there? This system can easily be used to target welfare recipients, immigrants, LGBT+ people, black/brown/indigenous people, pretty much any disfavored group of choice! You're just one election away from "that was during the previous term of office" https://media.mullvad.net/web/chatcontrol2_en.jpg https://media.mullvad.net/web/chatcontrol2_en.jpg
  - nekusar 2mo ago
    [flagged]
    - ianm218 2mo ago
      Your comment doesn’t make it clear why supporting this party would interfere with making a point on mass surveillance. If there is a link could you describe it?
    - akimbostrawman 2mo ago
      Pro remigration is a perfectly fine position to hold especially considering most of the remigration would be with people that shouldn't have been allowed to become migrants in the first place like refugees "fleeing" across multiple safe but less well off neighbouring countries who by definition and law should go back at some point but instead got a free ticket to citizenship and all its financial benefits as a results of twisting the definition of this exact word.
xienze 2mo ago
> for the children, of course. Kind of surprised they don't just pitch it as a way to root out Russian propaganda and right-wing extremism. Public opinion would shift overnight. They'd practically demand it!
- bee_rider 2mo ago
  Actually, what are the partisan leanings of the parties actually actively pushing this, since you’ve brought it up? Despite being fairly left-leaning I wouldn’t automatically blame the right for this particular type of invasive nonsense… is this a centrist spawned nuisance, or something?
  - drdaeman 2mo ago
    Aren’t stupidity, shortsightedness, and corruption universal human “values”, well-spread all across the political spectrum?
    - cucumber3732842 2mo ago
      >Aren’t stupidity, shortsightedness, and corruption universal human “values”, well-spread all across the political spectrum? We ostracize and marginalize people for doing all sorts of bad shit that is endemic to humanity because minimizing and eliminating those people's ability to affect society improves society. The fact that people feel entitled to peddle flimsy "for the children" justifications for obvious enabling of authoritarian government (or any other social ill) is the problem. Those people should be as well received as someone who says we need to re-subjugate blacks because 13/50 or whatever. Nobody makes the excuse "cut them some slack tribalism/racism is a universal human value" If we treated peddlers of the former the way we treat the latter we'd have a lot less of this problem.
- cucumber3732842 2mo ago
  >Kind of surprised they don't just pitch it as a way to root out Russian propaganda and right-wing extremism. Public opinion would shift overnight. They'd practically demand it! Because the masses are already pretty damn sick of exactly the demographics and groups that that marketing would garner support from.
slg 2mo ago
I feel like if people wanted to counter this push, the more effective route would be addressing the "for the children" motivations seriously rather than fully dismissing them. You could cut the legs out of this effort by capturing the part of the population that does have an honest desire to protect children by offering an alternative that actually protects children. Instead, that concern is treated as 100% disingenuous which pushes many normal people to the side of wanting to enact these controls. This is a political problem, you need to solve it with politics.
- matthewdgreen 2mo ago
  I know a number of people who have gone down this route, including Senators. For example, here's Senator Wyden's proposal to add $5 billion in mandatory funding to investigate and target sexual abusers [1]. The problem with these efforts is that they're expensive: fighting child exploitation requires enormous amounts of funding. Guess what doesn't require billions of dollars? Mandatory scanning paid for by tech companies, followed by dumping the billions of hits they produce [2] on overworked police and clearinghouses that mostly ignore them. [1] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-eshoo-fitzpatrick-reintroduce-bipartisan-legislation-to-protect-children-from-online-exploitation https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-eshoo... [2] https://www.hstoday.us/subject-matter-areas/cybersecurity/surge-in-online-crimes-against-children-driven-by-ai-and-evolving-exploitation-tactics-ncmec-reports/ https://www.hstoday.us/subject-matter-areas/cybersecurity/su...
  - slg 2mo ago
    Then fund the initiative by taxing those same tech companies. "This problem is hard or expensive to address" does not assuage the desire to fix the problem. There are countless reasons to be against these chat controls, but it's easy for a layperson to understand how they would address their specific concerns. The only way to effectively counter that is providing an alternative that does a better job.
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 2mo ago
paisawalla 2mo ago
> an organisation funded by almost all of big tech Agreed, and this sucks, but what should be done about this? Some NGO called "We Stop Bad Guys" approaches your company with its hand out. You have two choices: 1. kick down some money, get great headlines 2. don't, and then have it known that you don't support stopping Bad Guys -- then maybe write ten thousand never-to-be-read words about how your position is actually quite principled I hate it, but the first is obviously rational?
- account42 2mo ago
  How is it rational? What's going to stop a different We Stop Really Bad Guys NGO from showing up next. Corporations are perfectly capable of not getting involved when they don't want to.
  - paisawalla 2mo ago
    when people say "it's rational" they're invoking this feature of rationality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality in other words, if you see behavior in others that doesn't seem reasonable, there's two possibilities: 1. it makes sense to the subject, using the axioms they're reasoning from, which they've chosen because they have a stake in the outcome 2. an uninvolved, anonymous commenter on the internet knows -- better than the subject -- what's best for them It's not always the case that (1) is correct, but it's the better prior than (2). And this fact being a downvote magnet here doesn't change that.

junofan 2mo ago

Interesting. It would be easy to detect hate speech client-side too I’d imagine. My phone already listens for certain words.

anonym29 2mo ago
Why stop there? This system can easily be used to target welfare recipients, immigrants, LGBT+ people, black/brown/indigenous people, pretty much any disfavored group of choice! You're just one election away from "that was during the previous term of office" https://media.mullvad.net/web/chatcontrol2_en.jpg https://media.mullvad.net/web/chatcontrol2_en.jpg
- nekusar 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - ianm218 2mo ago
    Your comment doesn’t make it clear why supporting this party would interfere with making a point on mass surveillance. If there is a link could you describe it?
  - akimbostrawman 2mo ago
    Pro remigration is a perfectly fine position to hold especially considering most of the remigration would be with people that shouldn't have been allowed to become migrants in the first place like refugees "fleeing" across multiple safe but less well off neighbouring countries who by definition and law should go back at some point but instead got a free ticket to citizenship and all its financial benefits as a results of twisting the definition of this exact word.

xienze 2mo ago

> for the children, of course. Kind of surprised they don't just pitch it as a way to root out Russian propaganda and right-wing extremism. Public opinion would shift overnight. They'd practically demand it!

bee_rider 2mo ago
Actually, what are the partisan leanings of the parties actually actively pushing this, since you’ve brought it up? Despite being fairly left-leaning I wouldn’t automatically blame the right for this particular type of invasive nonsense… is this a centrist spawned nuisance, or something?
- drdaeman 2mo ago
  Aren’t stupidity, shortsightedness, and corruption universal human “values”, well-spread all across the political spectrum?
  - cucumber3732842 2mo ago
    >Aren’t stupidity, shortsightedness, and corruption universal human “values”, well-spread all across the political spectrum? We ostracize and marginalize people for doing all sorts of bad shit that is endemic to humanity because minimizing and eliminating those people's ability to affect society improves society. The fact that people feel entitled to peddle flimsy "for the children" justifications for obvious enabling of authoritarian government (or any other social ill) is the problem. Those people should be as well received as someone who says we need to re-subjugate blacks because 13/50 or whatever. Nobody makes the excuse "cut them some slack tribalism/racism is a universal human value" If we treated peddlers of the former the way we treat the latter we'd have a lot less of this problem.
cucumber3732842 2mo ago
>Kind of surprised they don't just pitch it as a way to root out Russian propaganda and right-wing extremism. Public opinion would shift overnight. They'd practically demand it! Because the masses are already pretty damn sick of exactly the demographics and groups that that marketing would garner support from.

slg 2mo ago

I feel like if people wanted to counter this push, the more effective route would be addressing the "for the children" motivations seriously rather than fully dismissing them. You could cut the legs out of this effort by capturing the part of the population that does have an honest desire to protect children by offering an alternative that actually protects children. Instead, that concern is treated as 100% disingenuous which pushes many normal people to the side of wanting to enact these controls. This is a political problem, you need to solve it with politics.

matthewdgreen 2mo ago
I know a number of people who have gone down this route, including Senators. For example, here's Senator Wyden's proposal to add $5 billion in mandatory funding to investigate and target sexual abusers [1]. The problem with these efforts is that they're expensive: fighting child exploitation requires enormous amounts of funding. Guess what doesn't require billions of dollars? Mandatory scanning paid for by tech companies, followed by dumping the billions of hits they produce [2] on overworked police and clearinghouses that mostly ignore them. [1] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-eshoo-fitzpatrick-reintroduce-bipartisan-legislation-to-protect-children-from-online-exploitation https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-eshoo... [2] https://www.hstoday.us/subject-matter-areas/cybersecurity/surge-in-online-crimes-against-children-driven-by-ai-and-evolving-exploitation-tactics-ncmec-reports/ https://www.hstoday.us/subject-matter-areas/cybersecurity/su...
- slg 2mo ago
  Then fund the initiative by taxing those same tech companies. "This problem is hard or expensive to address" does not assuage the desire to fix the problem. There are countless reasons to be against these chat controls, but it's easy for a layperson to understand how they would address their specific concerns. The only way to effectively counter that is providing an alternative that does a better job.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 2mo ago

paisawalla 2mo ago

> an organisation funded by almost all of big tech Agreed, and this sucks, but what should be done about this? Some NGO called "We Stop Bad Guys" approaches your company with its hand out. You have two choices: 1. kick down some money, get great headlines 2. don't, and then have it known that you don't support stopping Bad Guys -- then maybe write ten thousand never-to-be-read words about how your position is actually quite principled I hate it, but the first is obviously rational?

account42 2mo ago
How is it rational? What's going to stop a different We Stop Really Bad Guys NGO from showing up next. Corporations are perfectly capable of not getting involved when they don't want to.
- paisawalla 2mo ago
  when people say "it's rational" they're invoking this feature of rationality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_rationality in other words, if you see behavior in others that doesn't seem reasonable, there's two possibilities: 1. it makes sense to the subject, using the axioms they're reasoning from, which they've chosen because they have a stake in the outcome 2. an uninvolved, anonymous commenter on the internet knows -- better than the subject -- what's best for them It's not always the case that (1) is correct, but it's the better prior than (2). And this fact being a downvote magnet here doesn't change that.