This is a fallacy of composition. A hearing to evaluate one proposal in one country is not 'The EU is doing a thing', any more than a hearing in a US state legislature or even in Congress is equivalent to a law being passed.
The thing is the Tech community doesn't have a clear and simple response to CSAM, although CSAM has proliferated with the growth of the internet. Nobody cares about the technical excuses; people care about the absence of any clear effort to reduce its availability and spread. Absent technical measures, people will continue to demand legislative ones.
The thing is the Tech community doesn't have a clear and simple response to CSAM
The Automotive community doesn't have a clear and simple response to bank robbery. Nor are they expected to, because they are not a law enforcement agency.
I have never heard anyone blame automative manufactures for the use of getaway cars, nor have I ever heard anyone in that industry vocally minimizing the problem of vehicular crime to avoid some commercial inconvenience. The nearest thing I can think of is manufacturers ignoring the legal requirement for front license plates in their designs.
I have never heard anyone blame automative manufactures for the use of getaway cars
This is exactly my point. Yet we have people trying to get tech corporations to act in the role of law enforcement, which they ought not to be doing and certainly ought not be to required to by law.
nor have I ever heard anyone in that industry vocally minimizing the problem of vehicular crime to avoid some commercial inconvenience.
If you have people demanding that all cars come with government tracking devices under the pretext they could be used in bank robberies and someone in the auto industry notices that bank robberies aren't actually all that common, what should they do? Pretend it to be otherwise?
This is not a matter of commercial inconvenience. The economic cost of writing or installing the code is not the issue. The issue is that this is totalitarianism which once installed would not be limited to enforcing laws against child abuse. One of the reasons privacy is a human right is to protect the public against abuses of the state. It doesn't cease to be a right because the state finds it inconvenient -- the state is meant to find it inconvenient.
Your point is spot on, but I fully expect this to change when (if) self driving cars happen. I see absolutely no chance that automakers arent forced to create government mandated overrides for police or whomever. In fact I think it’s plausible that self driving cars are not allowed on the road without centralized control from the very beginning. Not as some exception, but as a primary feature for controlling traffic as a whole.
That's a single point of failure. The centralized system goes down and your whole country's transportation system is dead. Politicians may want that but it's an extraordinarily bad idea and it's possible that there are enough people who understand that in e.g. the military with the political influence to prevent it.
It also kind of defeats the entire concept of self-driving cars, which is that they can work without that. They have to be able to work in places with bad wireless reception or a power outage in the traffic control system, not only because of the single point of failure but because things like that could happen while the vehicle is in motion.
Meanwhile there is no legitimate reason to make them mandatory because people already have the incentive to use a system that provides quicker routes. There is no law requiring people to use Waze, but they do.
The Automotive community doesn't have a clear and simple response to bank robbery. Nor are they expected to, because they are not a law enforcement agency.
Measures against auto theft are well established to have brought down incidence of robbery, because it makes it harder to get a getaway car. And the auto industry has absolutely been given the responsibility of overseeing that.
Measures against auto theft are well established to have brought down incidence of robbery, because it makes it harder to get a getaway car.
Measures against theft are driven by the market because car buyers don't want their cars to be stolen. Some incidental effect on getaway cars is nothing they had an obligation to provide.
And it's questionable whether that is even true, because anyone could just steal an older car or different make with no such anti-theft features, or use their own car and steal someone else's license plate.
Maybe every car should have a tracker, camera, and audio mic feeding back to the police, just in case someone in some car somewhere is driving drunk and talking about it. Then we can immediately dispatch an officer. Also, it’ll be easy to track stolen cars right? You might even catch other crimes, so it’s like a win-win-win, right?
Does that seem reasonable? If not, then phone scanning probably is not reasonable either.
That's another absurd point about our public debates: No one cares to share some facts. It feels like it's all based on gut feeling and emotions.
As far as I know, we don't have official numbers (at least not shared as part of the discussion). But what we know is, those scanners have a significantly high error rate and will overwhelm law enforcement with false-positives. What we also know is that law enforcement is simply not competent enough, there was a case in Germany where they just removed links in a Forum forgetting to sweep the according link targets to file hosters.
It is the issue under discussion. The justification for prohibiting the material is that its production requires child abuse. But copying doesn't require additional production. It may have even gone down if dissemination of existing images competes with new production, or wider dissemination makes it easier for law enforcement to obtain the images and use them to track down the producers. Whether or not the amount of abuse increased is then quite relevant.
No, the issue is the proliferation of CSAM. Reducing child abuse in CSAM production is only one of the reasons its prohibited. I find it hard to believe that a long time technology advocate like yourself is unaware of the fact that the circulation of older CSAM continues to hurt people who were abused in its manufacture.
Your comment unfortunately exemplifies the problem of tech people trying to define the problem away rather than directly address the harms involved or propose privacy-respecting technical solutions to proactively mitigate it.
Reducing child abuse in CSAM production is only one of the reasons its prohibited.
It is the primary reason that it's prohibited, outweighing any other reason by an order of magnitude.
I find it hard to believe that a long time technology advocate like yourself is unaware of the fact that the circulation of older CSAM continues to hurt people who were abused in its manufacture.
That depends on how they feel about it. If it is the case that dissemination of existing material reduces the production of new material, no one could be faulted for wanting what they went through to prevent someone else from being forced to go through it too, if at all possible.
Your comment unfortunately exemplifies the problem of tech people trying to define the problem away rather than directly address the harms involved or propose privacy-respecting technical solutions to proactively mitigate it.
There isn't any known privacy-respecting technical solution and it may not even be possible for one to exist. You can't tell if someone's secret is unlawful without knowing what it is, but anything with access to all of everyone's secrets is inherently a comprehensive violation of everyone's privacy. Any technological solution that could be used for this could not be limited to being used for this.
Fundamentally what you're asking for is the technology to violate everyone's privacy, so that you can violate the privacy of child abusers. But the technology doesn't care what you use it for. It can't be limited to only being used against bad guys.
There are lots of things you can do to reduce child abuse, the problem is conservatives hate anything that means sex is not taboo. The result is that they block any kind of meaningful sex ed, and make manipulating and abusing children much easier - manipulating children by telling them people will think they're sluts, or their parents will abandon them, or better yet that the victims are responsible are all standard tricks of abusers.
Then you get the constant negligible sentences when "good" people are found to be pedophiles, the constant victim blaming in courts (apparently "well look how they were dressed", "they were drinking", etc are still real defenses in the US). Look at the abuse received by people who reported that "great" coach in the US, when suddenly sports was more important than child abuse. Then of course you have the constant church coverups that are routinely ruled legal, and then the victims get called scammers.
This is before you get to the abuse of children allowed by people who are trying to "stop their child being LGBT", which is literally torture, but again 100% ok because the people doing it are the conservatives who fight actual meaningful changes to protect children.
Instead what we get is police saying we need to have an unauditable system to report the content of people's phones with no warrant. Ignore the immense cost of false accusations, ignore the documented failures of these systems, ignore the incredible scope for abuse by other people (is it CSAM, or is just LGBT content? because plenty of US states and countries consider them equal). Is it reporting to parents? Plenty of child abusers will want to know if their children are looking at anything LGBT related so they have an excuse to abuse their children.
Or maybe it's protest pictures, or pro-democracy material - once you've shipped this for CSAM, plenty of countries will immediately say "now you can do that, also include this opaque database of criminal images".
Or it could be Iran saying "images of women without a hijab should be reported".
You need to understand, once you say "a persons device should report a specific kind of content on a device to any entity", the technology is in place, and the original "specific kind" becomes whatever the country says a legal requirement, and it's legally required to report to the government.
The EU doesn't have a patriot act; the whole body of decades of EU legislation on tech is still less intrusive than that one single act the US has in place and continues to use extensively. Not to mention that US agencies have a long history of acting outside the law, which has no real equivalent in Europe except maybe Russia. There is a reason why police agencies in Europe want more rights, currently they are very curtailed an unable to handle much of digital crime.
More generally, the EU has some stupid laws but also plenty of important ones that either bring greater good (safe products in the supermarkets, trade standards, common procurement rules, accountability of what national governments do on economic policy and debt levels, ...) or good for a specific sector (strong data protection and rights for instance, tech standards like usb c, etc). Here the discussion is not even about a law but about a proposal for a law where different people and bodies express different views. EU lawmaking is lengthy and quite transparent so you have these discussions often and at various points in the process, which is unusual compared to many national contexts. And it lends itself to viewing and overstating different views. It doesn't help that there are many lobby groups that sound like semi-EU bodies when they are in reality just industry groups of various kinds that make broad demands which are then echoed in the press as some kind of EU positon.
I'm sorry you've been led to have such a negative emotional reaction to the EU, but it just doesn't mirror the actual facts.
Most of them don't even allow you to opt out, they just say "we use cookies" and there's an accept button. Yes, I recognize that's malicious compliance and not necessarily the fault of the GDPR.
Comments
This is a fallacy of composition. A hearing to evaluate one proposal in one country is not 'The EU is doing a thing', any more than a hearing in a US state legislature or even in Congress is equivalent to a law being passed.
The thing is the Tech community doesn't have a clear and simple response to CSAM, although CSAM has proliferated with the growth of the internet. Nobody cares about the technical excuses; people care about the absence of any clear effort to reduce its availability and spread. Absent technical measures, people will continue to demand legislative ones.
The Automotive community doesn't have a clear and simple response to bank robbery. Nor are they expected to, because they are not a law enforcement agency.
I have never heard anyone blame automative manufactures for the use of getaway cars, nor have I ever heard anyone in that industry vocally minimizing the problem of vehicular crime to avoid some commercial inconvenience. The nearest thing I can think of is manufacturers ignoring the legal requirement for front license plates in their designs.
https://www.sfgate.com/cars/article/Front-license-plate-cars...
This is exactly my point. Yet we have people trying to get tech corporations to act in the role of law enforcement, which they ought not to be doing and certainly ought not be to required to by law.
If you have people demanding that all cars come with government tracking devices under the pretext they could be used in bank robberies and someone in the auto industry notices that bank robberies aren't actually all that common, what should they do? Pretend it to be otherwise?
This is not a matter of commercial inconvenience. The economic cost of writing or installing the code is not the issue. The issue is that this is totalitarianism which once installed would not be limited to enforcing laws against child abuse. One of the reasons privacy is a human right is to protect the public against abuses of the state. It doesn't cease to be a right because the state finds it inconvenient -- the state is meant to find it inconvenient.
Your point is spot on, but I fully expect this to change when (if) self driving cars happen. I see absolutely no chance that automakers arent forced to create government mandated overrides for police or whomever. In fact I think it’s plausible that self driving cars are not allowed on the road without centralized control from the very beginning. Not as some exception, but as a primary feature for controlling traffic as a whole.
That's a single point of failure. The centralized system goes down and your whole country's transportation system is dead. Politicians may want that but it's an extraordinarily bad idea and it's possible that there are enough people who understand that in e.g. the military with the political influence to prevent it.
It also kind of defeats the entire concept of self-driving cars, which is that they can work without that. They have to be able to work in places with bad wireless reception or a power outage in the traffic control system, not only because of the single point of failure but because things like that could happen while the vehicle is in motion.
Meanwhile there is no legitimate reason to make them mandatory because people already have the incentive to use a system that provides quicker routes. There is no law requiring people to use Waze, but they do.
Measures against auto theft are well established to have brought down incidence of robbery, because it makes it harder to get a getaway car. And the auto industry has absolutely been given the responsibility of overseeing that.
Measures against theft are driven by the market because car buyers don't want their cars to be stolen. Some incidental effect on getaway cars is nothing they had an obligation to provide.
And it's questionable whether that is even true, because anyone could just steal an older car or different make with no such anti-theft features, or use their own car and steal someone else's license plate.
Maybe every car should have a tracker, camera, and audio mic feeding back to the police, just in case someone in some car somewhere is driving drunk and talking about it. Then we can immediately dispatch an officer. Also, it’ll be easy to track stolen cars right? You might even catch other crimes, so it’s like a win-win-win, right?
Does that seem reasonable? If not, then phone scanning probably is not reasonable either.
Do you know if actual child abuse also proliferated?
That's another absurd point about our public debates: No one cares to share some facts. It feels like it's all based on gut feeling and emotions.
As far as I know, we don't have official numbers (at least not shared as part of the discussion). But what we know is, those scanners have a significantly high error rate and will overwhelm law enforcement with false-positives. What we also know is that law enforcement is simply not competent enough, there was a case in Germany where they just removed links in a Forum forgetting to sweep the according link targets to file hosters.
That's a different question, isn't it? Maybe you should explore it on its own rather than letting it distract from the issue under discussion.
It is the issue under discussion. The justification for prohibiting the material is that its production requires child abuse. But copying doesn't require additional production. It may have even gone down if dissemination of existing images competes with new production, or wider dissemination makes it easier for law enforcement to obtain the images and use them to track down the producers. Whether or not the amount of abuse increased is then quite relevant.
No, the issue is the proliferation of CSAM. Reducing child abuse in CSAM production is only one of the reasons its prohibited. I find it hard to believe that a long time technology advocate like yourself is unaware of the fact that the circulation of older CSAM continues to hurt people who were abused in its manufacture.
Your comment unfortunately exemplifies the problem of tech people trying to define the problem away rather than directly address the harms involved or propose privacy-respecting technical solutions to proactively mitigate it.
It is the primary reason that it's prohibited, outweighing any other reason by an order of magnitude.
That depends on how they feel about it. If it is the case that dissemination of existing material reduces the production of new material, no one could be faulted for wanting what they went through to prevent someone else from being forced to go through it too, if at all possible.
There isn't any known privacy-respecting technical solution and it may not even be possible for one to exist. You can't tell if someone's secret is unlawful without knowing what it is, but anything with access to all of everyone's secrets is inherently a comprehensive violation of everyone's privacy. Any technological solution that could be used for this could not be limited to being used for this.
Fundamentally what you're asking for is the technology to violate everyone's privacy, so that you can violate the privacy of child abusers. But the technology doesn't care what you use it for. It can't be limited to only being used against bad guys.
There are lots of things you can do to reduce child abuse, the problem is conservatives hate anything that means sex is not taboo. The result is that they block any kind of meaningful sex ed, and make manipulating and abusing children much easier - manipulating children by telling them people will think they're sluts, or their parents will abandon them, or better yet that the victims are responsible are all standard tricks of abusers.
Then you get the constant negligible sentences when "good" people are found to be pedophiles, the constant victim blaming in courts (apparently "well look how they were dressed", "they were drinking", etc are still real defenses in the US). Look at the abuse received by people who reported that "great" coach in the US, when suddenly sports was more important than child abuse. Then of course you have the constant church coverups that are routinely ruled legal, and then the victims get called scammers.
This is before you get to the abuse of children allowed by people who are trying to "stop their child being LGBT", which is literally torture, but again 100% ok because the people doing it are the conservatives who fight actual meaningful changes to protect children.
Instead what we get is police saying we need to have an unauditable system to report the content of people's phones with no warrant. Ignore the immense cost of false accusations, ignore the documented failures of these systems, ignore the incredible scope for abuse by other people (is it CSAM, or is just LGBT content? because plenty of US states and countries consider them equal). Is it reporting to parents? Plenty of child abusers will want to know if their children are looking at anything LGBT related so they have an excuse to abuse their children.
Or maybe it's protest pictures, or pro-democracy material - once you've shipped this for CSAM, plenty of countries will immediately say "now you can do that, also include this opaque database of criminal images".
Or it could be Iran saying "images of women without a hijab should be reported".
You need to understand, once you say "a persons device should report a specific kind of content on a device to any entity", the technology is in place, and the original "specific kind" becomes whatever the country says a legal requirement, and it's legally required to report to the government.
The difference is ridiculous laws in the EU actually get passed and implemented.
The EU doesn't have a patriot act; the whole body of decades of EU legislation on tech is still less intrusive than that one single act the US has in place and continues to use extensively. Not to mention that US agencies have a long history of acting outside the law, which has no real equivalent in Europe except maybe Russia. There is a reason why police agencies in Europe want more rights, currently they are very curtailed an unable to handle much of digital crime.
More generally, the EU has some stupid laws but also plenty of important ones that either bring greater good (safe products in the supermarkets, trade standards, common procurement rules, accountability of what national governments do on economic policy and debt levels, ...) or good for a specific sector (strong data protection and rights for instance, tech standards like usb c, etc). Here the discussion is not even about a law but about a proposal for a law where different people and bodies express different views. EU lawmaking is lengthy and quite transparent so you have these discussions often and at various points in the process, which is unusual compared to many national contexts. And it lends itself to viewing and overstating different views. It doesn't help that there are many lobby groups that sound like semi-EU bodies when they are in reality just industry groups of various kinds that make broad demands which are then echoed in the press as some kind of EU positon.
I'm sorry you've been led to have such a negative emotional reaction to the EU, but it just doesn't mirror the actual facts.
What a joke, now I know you're just trolling or are just that ignorant of history.
Let me guess, you too are tired of GPDR popups? I love them, being able to opt out of tracking is absolutely worth the interruption.
Are you kidding me? You think those things work?
Most of them don't even allow you to opt out, they just say "we use cookies" and there's an accept button. Yes, I recognize that's malicious compliance and not necessarily the fault of the GDPR.
Governments need to realise that really stupid laws don’t need amendments. They needs to be thrown out.
So is there a Chat Control hearing in the US or not? Even so, that’s just whataboutism.