France moves to break encrypted messaging

First, the French state has zero interest in access to these messages to help children. The proof: NEITHER the French police NOR the secret service investigate child abuse cases. The police only investigates them if they absolutely can't avoid it, because mostly people with access to children commit child abuse. You will find child abuse requires a child. In other words, who does that? Teachers, sports teachers and coaches and child welfare workers (sports clubs are almost exclusively government funded in France). The large majority of the perpetrators, of course, are government employees. Child services investigates child abuse cases, and WILL NOT get access to these messages. So there is zero intention to give access to messages in child abuse cases.

I mean how ridiculous is this argument. They want access to such messages to investigate child abuse cases, so they demand French spies, and tax investigators get access to everyone's messages ... Child abuse investigators are not even mentioned.

And it's not just that.

Next, France is famous in Western Europe for being one of the only EU countries where access to, uh, hentai comics, is legal and they're sold in newspaper stands.

If the French state cared about fighting sex-crimes on children they would fund taking care of the children they do "help", rather than catching criminals. Instead, this is what they do:

https://www.rfi.fr/en/france/20250502-french-child-welfare-s...

(at the very least they let it happen, but in practice they also hire people that will do this job at a very cheap wage because it provides access to vulnerable children)

Without fixing this FIRST, the only thing catching criminals will do, obviously, is make the situation of children worse. The French state fails this test.

The situation with French schools, both the immigrant situation AND the constant decline in teacher quality (for at least 3 decades now) show how much the state cares about children's future in general. Again, the state fails the test completely.

And I haven't even mentioned the refugee situation in Paris. Obviously that situation is producing a flood of child prostitution. Again, the state is showing itself unwilling to help children. Again, the French state is exposed as not doing shit to help children, or at the very least, they're totally ineffective.

So no, and sorry to state the obvious, but your suggestion is completely beside the point.

If politicians would be effectively controlled by the government and not by some independent party those mysterious, oops, accidentally deleted it problems would increase.

It seems so, yes. While I do trust eff, it seems to me that their article barely skims over the explanation of why this is a problem, although the second one does mention the ability to arbitrarily decide what triggers the filters. I would however like to point out that in France, the police cannot arbitrarily arrest people for more than 24 hours, after which they need an investigating judge's approval to prolongate detention. They also need those judges' permission to access a device. Free access to any channels of communication has never been on the table, but extrapolation of that technology to other kinds of governments with more liberal law-enforcement remains the obvious issue.

Still, I kind of fail to see how full privacy as a default is a necessity, if and only if it remains a possibility. Furthermore, by using non open source messengers such as WhatsApp, we are blindly trusting Zuckerberg, a random dude who got lucky and rich and wishes to remain on good terms with Trump, to keep our data as safe and as unreachable as he pretends.

Yeah, makes sense.

I wonder if for closed-source apps if governments can not just force the key collection the same way they would force decryption with centralized keys.

> i)> Research suggests that a significant proportion of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) is produced and distributed by parents who victimise their children. An online convenience ...

(blabla, point is it was parents)

So here is the actual link to the actual study your numbers come from: https://content.c3p.ca/pdfs/C3P_SurvivorsSurveyExecutiveSumm...

In case you seriously don't understand how you're misleading people: this is an organization that is FORBIDDEN by law to investigate cases of CSAM where the parents aren't involved. And CSAM is not their focus. Their focus is placing children.

In other words what have you proven with this study?

If you exclude all perpetrators except the category you want to accuse, then only exactly the people you want to blame are guilty. Proving all ravens are white by excluding any black ones, in other words.

The (wrong) summary study you linked to by the way, when it mentions non-family CSAM studies always has thousands to tens of thousands of cases, but when mentioning parental involvement they have 1 study with 150 examples. The other case of CSAM they mention in Canada is about "sextortion", ie. going further than just CSAM, but using CSAM to force a minor to do sexual acts. It happened exclusively at schools and talks about 23000 cases ...

Let me do the math with those numbers, even if I realize this is not a great way to compare and the numbers are not remotely complete, but let's use the numbers we have: 150 parents involved, 23000 = 0.6%. If that number can be an indication of the ratio, even with 500% error ...

Sometimes online people use these sorts of numbers as justification for that we should just totally stop investigation of biological parents in child welfare because even if you totally prevented ALL biological parent child abuse, you would have barely made a dent in child abuse as a whole. In fact there's studies claiming that because of the focus on biological (especially single female) parents child welfare agencies cause numbers of child abuse cases to go UP, not down.

Note: the study you pointed to clearly states that when it comes to single female parents, NOT A SINGLE ONE was even involved (not even unknowingly involved) in CSAM. Not one.

This is despite that being the main focus of C3P. Child abuse by single mothers is what they spend most of their attention on, how most children get placed, despite not being able to show a SINGLE case of it leading to CSAM.

So there's the problem: states force investigations away from actual child abuse. Here's how it works: Police is legally forced to refer child abuse cases to child welfare agencies, without investigation (ie. they CANNOT decide to investigate by themselves, unless there are other serious crimes). Child welfare agencies are explicitly forbidden from investigating schools, and especially forbidden from investigating the child welfare agencies themselves (despite reporters exposing a "prostitution ring" or the like inside child welfare agencies in every country every few years). You will have no difficulty finding stories of ex-"placed" children who were forced into prostitution, on facebook, tiktok, ... nor will you have problems finding reporters exposing child welfare prostitution with other government employees involved (e.g. Rotherham) regularly.

Another thing about child welfare agencies that get caught prostituting children they're supposed to protect: the numbers are absurd. Rotherham exposed that UK child welfare employees and city hall employees had organized and received payment for 1400 confirmed rapes. Claims that the total number was over 20000 are rife online. One might remark that ALL child sexual abuse cases in London in 10 years is less than 5000. That ONE case of child services sexual abuse made more victims than all other cases in the entire London area (15 million people) for 3 to 20 years COMBINED.

You know how the government refers to the perpetrators, by the way? They refer to child welfare employees and city hall employees by these words in all articles about it "Pakistani men" (and, of course, only about half were actual Pakistani, by the way. Especially in the city hall employees, no shortage of Brits. Also the police officers involved were British)

> The French state is not some cynical entre-soi that protects child abusers who are on their payroll

I've gone to school, not in France, but close enough to hear stories.

> All three disappeared from the schools within months.

Exactly. Well, they were mostly moved from one school to another, I take it? That's the case for the stories I heard. Note that you explicitly DID NOT say punished or persecuted, despite of course committing crimes. You don't even mention they were investigated at all. And they weren't.

One of the stories I heard was about a gym teacher having placed a camera in the women's showers by the way. He was caught, and indeed disappeared from school after a second incident. But ... what do you suppose happened to the videos? Nobody even went looking for them. What happened to all the videos of the ones who weren't caught?

Oh, and, three is a rather large number for one student to encounter, don't you think?

I hope you can at least agree there's a problem here. AND, that giving spies and legally-forbidden-to-investigate police officers access to private messages is very unlikely to help in those cases.