Comment by budududuroiu
6 hours ago
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-...
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.
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... [2] https://www.hstoday.us/subject-matter-areas/cybersecurity/su...
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.
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> 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.
There are many, many things we can do that actually protect children -- and we generally already do them. That's the nature of the problem. After you do all of the things that are reasonable and cost effective, it solves 90% of the problem, 95% of the problem, 99% of the problem, but never 100% of the problem.
So you can't give them something that does that. The thing they're proposing doesn't even do that. Nothing does. And then disingenuous opportunists keep proposing the thing that should never be done because they know it lets them paint you as the bad guy for having to tell them no again and again.
What you need instead is to identify and strip power and resources from the people who keep proposing it.
I don't think I agree - "think of the children" is not primarily a rational argument, it's more an emotional and political lever that is used to frame anyone in opposition as being opposed to more child safety, which is very obviously a bad thing.
It creates a moral asymmetry where one group is "defending children" and another group is "defending an abstract concept", but group A wins out primarily due to millions of years of human evolution. It has very little (IMO) to do with the actual underlying concepts being debated.
>It creates a moral asymmetry where one group is "defending children" and another group is "defending an abstract concept", but group A wins out primarily due to millions of years of human evolution. It has very little (IMO) to do with the actual underlying concepts being debated.
You aren't actually engaging with why group A wins. Those "millions of years of human evolution" actually instilled in people a desire to protect children.
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Interesting. It would be easy to detect hate speech client-side too I’d imagine. My phone already listens for certain words.
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
Funny, that Mullvad link, given their CEO has funded the Swedish Örbreo party. They've said all sorts of stuff including the very sanitized term "remigration".
Good comic, but they're no longer credible.
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> 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!
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?
Aren’t stupidity, shortsightedness, and corruption universal human “values”, well-spread all across the political spectrum?
> 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?