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One Bad Apple

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Re: One Bad Apple

#431

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Here's the gist of a post I made a couple of days ago (I removed one sentence that someone considered inflammatory):

Having known many victims of sexual violence and trafficking (Seriously. I deal with them, several times a week, and have, for decades), I feel for the folks that honestly want that particular kind of crime to stop. Humans can be complete scum. Most folks in this community may think they know how low we can go, but you are likely being optimistic.

That said, law enforcement has a nasty habit of having a rather "binary" worldview. People are either cops, or uncaught criminals.

With that worldview, it can be quite easy to "blur the line" between child sex traffickers, and traffic ticket violators. I remember reading a The Register article, about how anti-terrorism tools were being abused by local town councils to do things like find zoning violations (for example, pools with no CO).

Misapplied laws can be much worse than letting some criminals go. This could easily become a nightmare, if we cede too much to AI.

And that isn't even talking about totalitarian regimes, run by people of the same ilk as child sex traffickers (only wearing Gucci, and living in palaces).

”Any proposal must be viewed as follows. Do not pay overly much attention to the benefits that might be delivered were the law in question to be properly enforced, rather one needs to consider the harm done by the improper enforcement of this particular piece of legislation, whatever it might be.” -Lyndon B. Johnson

[EDITED TO ADD]: And I 100% agree that, if we really want to help children, and victims of other crimes, then we need to start working on the root causes of the issues.

Poverty is, arguably, the #1 human problem on Earth, today. It causes levels of desperation that ignore things like climate change, resource shortages, and pollution. People are so desperate to get out of the living hell that 90% of the world experiences, daily, that they will do anything (like sell children for sex), or are angry enough to cause great harm.

If we really want to solve a significant number of world problems, we need to deal with poverty; and that is not simple at all. I have members of my family that have been working on that, for decades. I have heard all the "yeah...but" arguments that expose supposedly simple solutions as...not simple.

Of course, the biggest issue, is that the folks in the 0.0001% need to loosen their hands on their stashes, and that ain't happening, anytime soon. I don't know if the demographic represented by the Tech scene is up for that, since the 0.0001% are our heroes.

Re: One Bad Apple

#432

Post by intended »

commoner wrote: post #287
intended wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t that an alleged memo from the NCMEC? I would sincerely doubt an official memo from any agency would use the term “shrieking minority”, it sounds like imaginative fiction of what a government agency would actually say.

9to5Mac published the full message that NCMEC sent to Apple: https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/06/apple-internal-memo-icloud-ph... It does say "We know that the days to come will be filled with the screeching voices of the minority."

Wow. Thank you, looks like I was wrong.

Re: One Bad Apple

#433

Post by lilSebastian »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #7

NCMEC has essentially shows that they have zero regard for privacy and called all privacy activists "screeching voices of the minority". At the same time, they're at the center point of a highly opaque, entrenched (often legally mandated) censorhip infrastructure that can and will get accounts shut down irrecoverably and possibly people's homes raided, on questionable data: In one of the previous discussions, I've se…

> It also seems like the PhotoDNA hash algorithm is problematic (to the point where it may be possible to trigger false matches

A post here some days ago (since removed) linked to a google drive containing generated images (which displayed nonsense), the hashes of which matched those of genuine problems images.

Re: One Bad Apple

#435

Post by api »

annexrichmond wrote: post #307
api wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 mak…

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…?

Re: One Bad Apple

#436

Post by d110af5ccf »

hutzlibu wrote: post #429
FeepingCreature wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> About this time, someone usually mocks "it's always about the kids, think about the kids." To those critics: They have not seen the scope of this problem or the long term impact. There is nearly a 1-to-1 relationship between people who deal in CP and people who abuse children. And they rarely victimize just one child. Nearly 1 in 10 children in the US will be sexually abused before the age of 18. Maybe it's the fac…

"and instead massively step up monitoring requirements for families" Pls have a family first and then see if you ask for more state governence into your life? It is true, most abuse happens in the family, but there is also schools, churches, sports clubs, ... But the thing is, if the schools for example would have the stuff, with enough time (and empathy) to care about the actual children and talk with them and inter…

> talk with them and interact with them (and not mainly the paperwork about them) - then you could easily spot abuse everywhere and take action

My impression is that the abuse is easily spotted, and paperwork done, but that often not much comes of it. We (USA) don't actually seem to have very good systems for handling things once they're discovered, partly (largely?) due to lack of resources.

Re: One Bad Apple

#437

Post by headShrinker »

truetraveller wrote: post #99
iJohnDoe wrote: post #91

I haven’t read all the details, articles, and comments. My personal thoughts on the whole situation are the following. If you are a parent and lose a child then you would want every possible avenue taken to find your child. You would be going mad wanting to find them. If there is a way to match photos to known missing children then I say it should be at least tried. I equate this to Ring cameras. They are everywhere.…

"It’s all an invasion of privacy until you’re sitting on the other side of the table" This is very insightful. It's also depressing, because it's a great point for those who oppose privacy. I even find myself swayed by this reasoning.

The government believes you might have information about a missing child and are withholding it. They are about to restrain you against your will and search your rectum without your consent.

The reason this violation was able to take place is because…

> It’s all an invasion of privacy until you’re sitting on the other side of the table

The thing about privacy and the government is you must always envision yourself on the wrong side of the table, because you are. Right up to the point they are inside you. [1] Your right to privacy is your strength and without it you are a slave to forces you don’t understand, can’t see, hear, taste, or smell.

Privacy or lack there of changes who you are and how you act. It changes what you say and why.

Be very careful how you submit to surveillance. The privacy you forfeit can never be recaptured.

[1] https://news.yahoo.com/mexico-man-sues-over-repeated-anal-pr...

Re: One Bad Apple

#438

Post by mlac »

nobody9999 wrote: post #223
mlac wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think "Think of the kids" applies very well to the CREATORS of pornography. Per wikipedia, there isn't any conclusive causal relationship between viewing CP and assaulting children. “Think of the Kids” damn well applies to the consumers of this content - by definition, there is a kid (or baby in some instances) involved in the CP. As a society, the United States draws the line at age 18 as the age of consent [the…

>Demand drives creation. Getting rid of it on one of the largest potential viewing and sharing platforms is a move in the right direction in addressing the problem. Yeah, that focus has worked really well in the "war on some drugs," hasn't it? I don't pretend to have all (or any good ones for that matter) the answers, but we know interdiction doesn't work. Those who are going to engage in non-consensual behavior (wit…

Random pictures aren’t going to be in the CSAM database and trigger review. And to have multiple CSAM hash matches on your phone is incredibly unlikely.

An unsolicited email / having photos planted on your phone or equipment is a problem today as much as it will be then, but I think people over-estimate the probability of this and ignore the fact it could easily happen today, with an “anonymous tip” called into the authorities.

If they are scanning it though iMessage they will have logs of when it arrived, and where it came from as well - so in that case it might protect the victim being framed.

Re: One Bad Apple

#439

Post by mlac »

skinkestek wrote: post #302
DSMan195276 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Were that to happen today, I would be sitting in a jail cell, looking at a lengthy prison sentence. No you would not, I was ready to somewhat agree with you but this is just false and has nothing to do with what you were talking about before. The law does not say that naked photos of (your or anyone else's) kids are inherently illegal, they have to actually be sexual in nature. And while the line is certainly not a…

> The law does not say that naked photos of (your or anyone else's) kids are inherently illegal, they have to actually be sexual in nature. But that depends on who looks at it. People have been arrested and (at least temporary) lost custody over their children because someone called the police over perfectly normal family photos. I remember one case a few years ago where someone had gotten into trouble because one ph…

As soon as it is used in a negative way beyond CSAM scanning, it will cause people to sell their phones and stop using apple products.

If Apple starts using the tech to scan for religious material, there will be significant market and legal backlash. I think the fact that CSAM scanning will stop if they push it too far will keep them in check to only do CSAM scanning.

Everyone can agree on using the tech for CSAM, but beyond that I don’t see Apple doing it. The tech community is reacting as if they already have.

Re: One Bad Apple

#440

Post by IshKebab »

> Apple claims that there is a "one in one trillion chance per year of incorrectly flagging a given account". I'm calling bullshit on this.

Why? You can get any false positive rate you want if you don't care about the false negative rate.

It seems likely that that was a design criterion and they just tweaked the thresholds and number of hits required until they got it.

The last analysis on HN about this made the exact same mistake, and it's a pretty obvious one so I'm skeptical about the rest of their analyses.

It is nice to have some actual numbers from this article though about how much CP they report, the usefulness of MD5 hashes, etc.

Edit: reading on, it seems like he just misread - it sounds like he thinks they're saying there's a 1 in a trillion chance of a false positive on a photo but Apple are talking about an account which requires multiple photo hits. The false positive rate per photo might be 1 in 1000 but if you need 10 hits then it's fine.

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