#noplacetohide — Public Fediverse posts

Just a beautiful take on today's idiocy! LOL 😆 #AusPol #NoPlaceToHide

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:mhcjj2m4vioa5rzc5a62rxos/post/3mfxo46d6ks2r

Just a beautiful take on today's idiocy! LOL 😆 #AusPol #NoPlaceToHide

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:mhcjj2m4vioa5rzc5a62rxos/post/3mfxo46d6ks2r

Just a beautiful take on today's idiocy! LOL 😆 #AusPol #NoPlaceToHide

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:mhcjj2m4vioa5rzc5a62rxos/post/3mfxo46d6ks2r

Just a beautiful take on today's idiocy! LOL 😆 #AusPol #NoPlaceToHide

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:mhcjj2m4vioa5rzc5a62rxos/post/3mfxo46d6ks2r

@smaurizi
«We spoke online that day for two hours. His first concern was what was happening with some of the NSA documents that, with his consent, Poitras had talked about to a Washington Post reporter, Barton Gellman.
...
Rather than report the story quickly and aggressively, the Washington Post had assembled a large team of lawyers who were making all kinds of demands
and issuing all sorts of dire warnings.»
#glenngreenwald #noplacetohide #snowden

@smaurizi
«We spoke online that day for two hours. His first concern was what was happening with some of the NSA documents that, with his consent, Poitras had talked about to a Washington Post reporter, Barton Gellman.
...
Rather than report the story quickly and aggressively, the Washington Post had assembled a large team of lawyers who were making all kinds of demands
and issuing all sorts of dire warnings.»
#glenngreenwald #noplacetohide #snowden

@smaurizi
«We spoke online that day for two hours. His first concern was what was happening with some of the NSA documents that, with his consent, Poitras had talked about to a Washington Post reporter, Barton Gellman.
...
Rather than report the story quickly and aggressively, the Washington Post had assembled a large team of lawyers who were making all kinds of demands
and issuing all sorts of dire warnings.»
#glenngreenwald #noplacetohide #snowden

@smaurizi
«We spoke online that day for two hours. His first concern was what was happening with some of the NSA documents that, with his consent, Poitras had talked about to a Washington Post reporter, Barton Gellman.
...
Rather than report the story quickly and aggressively, the Washington Post had assembled a large team of lawyers who were making all kinds of demands
and issuing all sorts of dire warnings.»
#glenngreenwald #noplacetohide #snowden

@smaurizi
«We spoke online that day for two hours. His first concern was what was happening with some of the NSA documents that, with his consent, Poitras had talked about to a Washington Post reporter, Barton Gellman.
...
Rather than report the story quickly and aggressively, the Washington Post had assembled a large team of lawyers who were making all kinds of demands
and issuing all sorts of dire warnings.»
#glenngreenwald #noplacetohide #snowden

NoPlaceToHide - Vergangenheit. Progressive thrash death metal? It's complicated. At one point, there's a saxophone solo. 'Nuff said.

Anyway, this is a great and kind of forgotten (or is it just me?) metal release from Tønsberg, Norway, anno 1995.

#NoPlaceToHide #metal #nowPlaying

NoPlaceToHide - Vergangenheit. Progressive thrash death metal? It's complicated. At one point, there's a saxophone solo. 'Nuff said.

Anyway, this is a great and kind of forgotten (or is it just me?) metal release from Tønsberg, Norway, anno 1995.

#NoPlaceToHide #metal #nowPlaying

NoPlaceToHide - Vergangenheit. Progressive thrash death metal? It's complicated. At one point, there's a saxophone solo. 'Nuff said.

Anyway, this is a great and kind of forgotten (or is it just me?) metal release from Tønsberg, Norway, anno 1995.

#NoPlaceToHide #metal #nowPlaying

NoPlaceToHide - Vergangenheit. Progressive thrash death metal? It's complicated. At one point, there's a saxophone solo. 'Nuff said.

Anyway, this is a great and kind of forgotten (or is it just me?) metal release from Tønsberg, Norway, anno 1995.

#NoPlaceToHide #metal #nowPlaying

The last #GuessTheMovieBuilding
Has appeared in a number of films inc:
#OldSchool (03) #TheLongGoodbye (73)
#ThePlayer (92) #AmericanGigolo (80)
#Perfect (85) #TheNuttyProfessor (96)
#LoveAndMercy (14) #Breathless (83)
#FadeToBlack (80) #Whiffs (75)
#TheBarefootExecutive (71)
#NoPlaceToHide (81) #BuncoSquad (50)

TV inc:
#Dynasty #TheColbys #FalconCrest
#MelrosePlace #CurbYourEnthusiasm
#SimonAndSimon #SkipAndShannon

In reality, Westwood Boulevard, Westwood, L.A., California, USA 🇺🇸
#Architecture #FilmArchitecture #FilmMastodon 📽️ 🎬

The last #GuessTheMovieBuilding
Has appeared in a number of films inc:
#OldSchool (03) #TheLongGoodbye (73)
#ThePlayer (92) #AmericanGigolo (80)
#Perfect (85) #TheNuttyProfessor (96)
#LoveAndMercy (14) #Breathless (83)
#FadeToBlack (80) #Whiffs (75)
#TheBarefootExecutive (71)
#NoPlaceToHide (81) #BuncoSquad (50)

TV inc:
#Dynasty #TheColbys #FalconCrest
#MelrosePlace #CurbYourEnthusiasm
#SimonAndSimon #SkipAndShannon

In reality, Westwood Boulevard, Westwood, L.A., California, USA 🇺🇸
#Architecture #FilmArchitecture #FilmMastodon 📽️ 🎬

The last #GuessTheMovieBuilding
Has appeared in a number of films inc:
#OldSchool (03) #TheLongGoodbye (73)
#ThePlayer (92) #AmericanGigolo (80)
#Perfect (85) #TheNuttyProfessor (96)
#LoveAndMercy (14) #Breathless (83)
#FadeToBlack (80) #Whiffs (75)
#TheBarefootExecutive (71)
#NoPlaceToHide (81) #BuncoSquad (50)

TV inc:
#Dynasty #TheColbys #FalconCrest
#MelrosePlace #CurbYourEnthusiasm
#SimonAndSimon #SkipAndShannon

In reality, Westwood Boulevard, Westwood, L.A., California, USA 🇺🇸
#Architecture #FilmArchitecture #FilmMastodon 📽️ 🎬

The last #GuessTheMovieBuilding
Has appeared in a number of films inc:
#OldSchool (03) #TheLongGoodbye (73)
#ThePlayer (92) #AmericanGigolo (80)
#Perfect (85) #TheNuttyProfessor (96)
#LoveAndMercy (14) #Breathless (83)
#FadeToBlack (80) #Whiffs (75)
#TheBarefootExecutive (71)
#NoPlaceToHide (81) #BuncoSquad (50)

TV inc:
#Dynasty #TheColbys #FalconCrest
#MelrosePlace #CurbYourEnthusiasm
#SimonAndSimon #SkipAndShannon

In reality, Westwood Boulevard, Westwood, L.A., California, USA 🇺🇸
#Architecture #FilmArchitecture #FilmMastodon 📽️ 🎬

TFW: You #WorkfromHome to focus on finishing contributions to 3 papers and 2reports and all of a sudden it's 4pm and you've barely touched any of the stuff you planned...

Ambushed by meetings again!
#NoPlaceToHide

TFW: You #WorkfromHome to focus on finishing contributions to 3 papers and 2reports and all of a sudden it's 4pm and you've barely touched any of the stuff you planned...

Ambushed by meetings again!
#NoPlaceToHide

TFW: You #WorkfromHome to focus on finishing contributions to 3 papers and 2reports and all of a sudden it's 4pm and you've barely touched any of the stuff you planned...

Ambushed by meetings again!
#NoPlaceToHide

TFW: You #WorkfromHome to focus on finishing contributions to 3 papers and 2reports and all of a sudden it's 4pm and you've barely touched any of the stuff you planned...

Ambushed by meetings again!
#NoPlaceToHide

TFW: You #WorkfromHome to focus on finishing contributions to 3 papers and 2reports and all of a sudden it's 4pm and you've barely touched any of the stuff you planned...

Ambushed by meetings again!
#NoPlaceToHide

MPs will debate the Government's #OnlineSafetyBill on 19 April.
Write to your MP to explain that #e2ee protects *individuals* against those who would harm them: abusers, criminals, or governments.
Would you allow Police CCTV in your home?
#noplacetohide ?
https://www.writetothem.com/

RT @[email protected]

I'd like to take a moment to observe that @[email protected] appear to have stopped tweeting/campaigning against "end-to-end encryption" and "disappearing messages" at the start of February — almost as if there was looming counter-narrative to #NoPlaceToHide:
https://twitter.com/search?q=(encrypt%20OR%20encryption%20OR%20end-to-end%20OR%20disappear%20OR%20disappearing)%20(from%3A5rightsfound)&src=typed_query&f=live

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1500838074657427461

It's maddening that a government that's demonstrated its willingness to let poor children go hungry is suddenly so interested in end-to-end encryption for the safety of "the children".

Eat shit you duplicitous Tories. #noplacetohide

RT from Al Ghaff (@GhaffAl)

Priti Patel’s £500K lie on #InternetSafety!

The Govt has spent £500K of taxpayers money on anti-encryption propaganda at a time when the public faces #CostOfLivingCrisis & soaring #energybills.

#SaferInternetDay2022 #Encryption #OnlineSafetyBill #NoPlaceToHide #SaferInternetDay

https://twitter.com/OpenRightsGroup/status/1490976737110511616

[Video embedded in original tweet]

Today is #SaferInternetDay😱

@pritipatel has spent £500K+ of taxpayers money to mislead the public on #InternetSafety.

If Govt weakens #encryption, it'll only help predators, criminals, blackmailers & scammers.

#Noplacetohide #Onlinesafetybill

👉 WATCH & SHARE OUR video now.

Today is #SaferInternetDay😱

@pritipatel has spent £500K+ of taxpayers money to mislead the public on #InternetSafety.

If Govt weakens #encryption, it'll only help predators, criminals, blackmailers & scammers.

#Noplacetohide #Onlinesafetybill

👉 WATCH & SHARE OUR video now.

Today is #SaferInternetDay
@pritipatel has spent £500K+ of taxpayers money to mislead the public on #InternetSafety.

If Govt weakens #encryption, it'll only help predators, criminals, blackmailers & scammers.

#Noplacetohide #Onlinesafetybill

👉 WATCH & SHARE OUR video now.

[Video embedded in original tweet]

The open letter can be viewed here ⬇️

#encryption #SaferInternetDay #Noplacetohide #onlinesafetybill #OnlineSafety
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/publications/experts-challenge-govts-anti-encryption-campaign/

#NoPlaceToHide…for Stupid Ideas Like Backdooring End-To-End Encryption and Undermining #Privacy - https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/noplacetohide-for-stupid-ideas-like-backdooring-end-to-end-encryption-and-undermining-privacy/ they never learn, do they?

#NoPlaceToHide…for Stupid Ideas Like Backdooring End-To-End Encryption and Undermining #Privacy - https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/noplacetohide-for-stupid-ideas-like-backdooring-end-to-end-encryption-and-undermining-privacy/ they never learn, do they?

The Fallacy of “Privacy vs: [Children’s] Safety”: why Privacy always wins over any singular concern, and why deployment of #EndToEndEncryption is essentially a binary choice, explained for #NoPlaceToHide

The #NoPlaceToHide campaign has, as-ever, flushed out a lot of argument like this:

https://twitter.com/MCFcharityUK/status/1484191619595210754

This is pretty easily explained and dismissed; but first, a quick digression.

Metcalfe’s Law (and its nitpicks)

There’s a famous law of communications that the ‘value’ (whatever that means) of a ‘network’ increases as the square of the number of participants; this is Metcalfe’s Law, and it’s a rough and ready (if arguable and nitpicked) metric to express something intuitive about networking.

Most typically: if you have a social network with only 10 people on it, then the ‘value’ is 10-squared, or 100, as that’s the maximum number of direct communications relationships that the network can provide; however a network of 250 people can have 250-squared relationships, or 62,500, which is A LOT BIGGER than 100.

And a network of 1 million people has a value of one trillion, which is immensely bigger; and lo! — a social network containing 1 million people overall tends to be a lot more valuable to its participants — with more purpose and information — than a network containing only 10 people.

Okay, but what does this have to do with Children’s Safety and Privacy?

Basically, if we accept that there’s any meaning at all to Metcalfe’s Law, it means that we are content to measure the value of networks two-dimensionally — the square — which yields the number of relationships that it can hold.

However, there’s a third dimension which I have already mentioned — purpose — and that makes matters even more interesting for comparing relative values.

With Metcalfe’s law we assume and ignore that we are measuring the value of a general purpose network, but actually if we factor purpose into our maths — if we stop treating “purpose” as a continuum — then we get:

network value = square(participants) x (number of purposes to which the network can be put by users)

For a trivial example: when we consider “children’s safety” we are considering this revised Metcalfe’s Law by a large amount; for a network with 100 participants, of whom 33 are kids, and if we consider the kids safety to be 1 purpose, then the value is measured:

100 (overall participants) x 33 (kids) x 1 (safety) = 3,300

…but the network value as a whole is probably better measured as something like:

100 (participants) x 100 (participants) x 100 (purposes) = 1,000,000

…because there are hundreds, if not thousands of purposes to which a network can be put: sharing with friends, selling cars, charity collections, gig reviews, party invitations, etc; and as such we can see that (like it or not) the value of the network as a whole vastly outranks the restricted case of online safety for the subset of kids.

And the figure of 33% kids is not accidental — child safety advocates tend to quote numbers of one-fifth to one-third of internet users as being children:

Summary

So there you have it — to rephrase the challenge: “there is no such singular thing as ‘privacy’ to compare to ‘child safety’“ — because what you are weighing the relatively small set of one-or-a-few “child safety” requirements against is a never-ending list of purposes to which a network can be put:

• securely sending bank details
• organising a surprise birthday party
• sharing a cancer diagnosis
• looking for love
• exploring your sexuality and gender
• escaping an abusive partner
• booking travel tickets
• having an extra-marital affair
• organising an anti-government protest
• seeking abortion advice
• doubting your faith
• and many, many, more, including some which are terrible…

“Privacy” is a feature or quality that is innate to each and all of these purposes — rather than a thing in and of itself — and this is why the hydra-headed use-case that is “privacy” will always be more important than any singular, or small tranche, of circumscribed use-cases of any kind whatsoever, irrespective of how we feel about the matter.

Because the value of the purpose-space of a network is N-cubed, and any constraint on one-or-more dimension of that will massively diminish the value of the network.

And why is it effectively a binary issue? Because if the scores are 1,000,000 vs: 3,300 — or whatever — then the bigger number wins. And the number for ‘privacy’ will always be bigger, massively.

⊞

https://alecmuffett.com/article/15940

#endToEndEncryption #metcalfeSLaw #noplacetohide #onlineAbuse #onlineSafety

The Fallacy of “Privacy vs: [Children’s] Safety”: why Privacy always wins over any singular concern, and why deployment of #EndToEndEncryption is essentially a binary choice, explained for #NoPlaceToHide

The #NoPlaceToHide campaign has, as-ever, flushed out a lot of argument like this:

https://twitter.com/MCFcharityUK/status/1484191619595210754

This is pretty easily explained and dismissed; but first, a quick digression.

Metcalfe’s Law (and its nitpicks)

There’s a famous law of communications that the ‘value’ (whatever that means) of a ‘network’ increases as the square of the number of participants; this is Metcalfe’s Law, and it’s a rough and ready (if arguable and nitpicked) metric to express something intuitive about networking.

Most typically: if you have a social network with only 10 people on it, then the ‘value’ is 10-squared, or 100, as that’s the maximum number of direct communications relationships that the network can provide; however a network of 250 people can have 250-squared relationships, or 62,500, which is A LOT BIGGER than 100.

And a network of 1 million people has a value of one trillion, which is immensely bigger; and lo! — a social network containing 1 million people overall tends to be a lot more valuable to its participants — with more purpose and information — than a network containing only 10 people.

Okay, but what does this have to do with Children’s Safety and Privacy?

Basically, if we accept that there’s any meaning at all to Metcalfe’s Law, it means that we are content to measure the value of networks two-dimensionally — the square — which yields the number of relationships that it can hold.

However, there’s a third dimension which I have already mentioned — purpose — and that makes matters even more interesting for comparing relative values.

With Metcalfe’s law we assume and ignore that we are measuring the value of a general purpose network, but actually if we factor purpose into our maths — if we stop treating “purpose” as a continuum — then we get:

network value = square(participants) x (number of purposes to which the network can be put by users)

For a trivial example: when we consider “children’s safety” we are considering this revised Metcalfe’s Law by a large amount; for a network with 100 participants, of whom 33 are kids, and if we consider the kids safety to be 1 purpose, then the value is measured:

100 (overall participants) x 33 (kids) x 1 (safety) = 3,300

…but the network value as a whole is probably better measured as something like:

100 (participants) x 100 (participants) x 100 (purposes) = 1,000,000

…because there are hundreds, if not thousands of purposes to which a network can be put: sharing with friends, selling cars, charity collections, gig reviews, party invitations, etc; and as such we can see that (like it or not) the value of the network as a whole vastly outranks the restricted case of online safety for the subset of kids.

And the figure of 33% kids is not accidental — child safety advocates tend to quote numbers of one-fifth to one-third of internet users as being children:

Summary

So there you have it — to rephrase the challenge: “there is no such singular thing as ‘privacy’ to compare to ‘child safety’“ — because what you are weighing the relatively small set of one-or-a-few “child safety” requirements against is a never-ending list of purposes to which a network can be put:

• securely sending bank details
• organising a surprise birthday party
• sharing a cancer diagnosis
• looking for love
• exploring your sexuality and gender
• escaping an abusive partner
• booking travel tickets
• having an extra-marital affair
• organising an anti-government protest
• seeking abortion advice
• doubting your faith
• and many, many, more, including some which are terrible…

“Privacy” is a feature or quality that is innate to each and all of these purposes — rather than a thing in and of itself — and this is why the hydra-headed use-case that is “privacy” will always be more important than any singular, or small tranche, of circumscribed use-cases of any kind whatsoever, irrespective of how we feel about the matter.

Because the value of the purpose-space of a network is N-cubed, and any constraint on one-or-more dimension of that will massively diminish the value of the network.

And why is it effectively a binary issue? Because if the scores are 1,000,000 vs: 3,300 — or whatever — then the bigger number wins. And the number for ‘privacy’ will always be bigger, massively.

⊞

https://alecmuffett.com/article/15940

#endToEndEncryption #metcalfeSLaw #noplacetohide #onlineAbuse #onlineSafety

The Fallacy of “Privacy vs: [Children’s] Safety”: why Privacy always wins over any singular concern, and why deployment of #EndToEndEncryption is essentially a binary choice, explained for #NoPlaceToHide

The #NoPlaceToHide campaign has, as-ever, flushed out a lot of argument like this:

https://twitter.com/MCFcharityUK/status/1484191619595210754

This is pretty easily explained and dismissed; but first, a quick digression.

Metcalfe’s Law (and its nitpicks)

There’s a famous law of communications that the ‘value’ (whatever that means) of a ‘network’ increases as the square of the number of participants; this is Metcalfe’s Law, and it’s a rough and ready (if arguable and nitpicked) metric to express something intuitive about networking.

Most typically: if you have a social network with only 10 people on it, then the ‘value’ is 10-squared, or 100, as that’s the maximum number of direct communications relationships that the network can provide; however a network of 250 people can have 250-squared relationships, or 62,500, which is A LOT BIGGER than 100.

And a network of 1 million people has a value of one trillion, which is immensely bigger; and lo! — a social network containing 1 million people overall tends to be a lot more valuable to its participants — with more purpose and information — than a network containing only 10 people.

Okay, but what does this have to do with Children’s Safety and Privacy?

Basically, if we accept that there’s any meaning at all to Metcalfe’s Law, it means that we are content to measure the value of networks two-dimensionally — the square — which yields the number of relationships that it can hold.

However, there’s a third dimension which I have already mentioned — purpose — and that makes matters even more interesting for comparing relative values.

With Metcalfe’s law we assume and ignore that we are measuring the value of a general purpose network, but actually if we factor purpose into our maths — if we stop treating “purpose” as a continuum — then we get:

network value = square(participants) x (number of purposes to which the network can be put by users)

For a trivial example: when we consider “children’s safety” we are considering this revised Metcalfe’s Law by a large amount; for a network with 100 participants, of whom 33 are kids, and if we consider the kids safety to be 1 purpose, then the value is measured:

100 (overall participants) x 33 (kids) x 1 (safety) = 3,300

…but the network value as a whole is probably better measured as something like:

100 (participants) x 100 (participants) x 100 (purposes) = 1,000,000

…because there are hundreds, if not thousands of purposes to which a network can be put: sharing with friends, selling cars, charity collections, gig reviews, party invitations, etc; and as such we can see that (like it or not) the value of the network as a whole vastly outranks the restricted case of online safety for the subset of kids.

And the figure of 33% kids is not accidental — child safety advocates tend to quote numbers of one-fifth to one-third of internet users as being children:

Summary

So there you have it — to rephrase the challenge: “there is no such singular thing as ‘privacy’ to compare to ‘child safety’“ — because what you are weighing the relatively small set of one-or-a-few “child safety” requirements against is a never-ending list of purposes to which a network can be put:

• securely sending bank details
• organising a surprise birthday party
• sharing a cancer diagnosis
• looking for love
• exploring your sexuality and gender
• escaping an abusive partner
• booking travel tickets
• having an extra-marital affair
• organising an anti-government protest
• seeking abortion advice
• doubting your faith
• and many, many, more, including some which are terrible…

“Privacy” is a feature or quality that is innate to each and all of these purposes — rather than a thing in and of itself — and this is why the hydra-headed use-case that is “privacy” will always be more important than any singular, or small tranche, of circumscribed use-cases of any kind whatsoever, irrespective of how we feel about the matter.

Because the value of the purpose-space of a network is N-cubed, and any constraint on one-or-more dimension of that will massively diminish the value of the network.

And why is it effectively a binary issue? Because if the scores are 1,000,000 vs: 3,300 — or whatever — then the bigger number wins. And the number for ‘privacy’ will always be bigger, massively.

⊞

https://alecmuffett.com/article/15940

#endToEndEncryption #metcalfeSLaw #noplacetohide #onlineAbuse #onlineSafety

RT from Al Ghaff (@GhaffAl)

This cynical, shameful & wholly misleading £500K tax-payer funded #Astroturf campaign that’s gone done like a cup of cold sick shows how this Govt is desperately trying to mislead public opinion on #Encryption.

#NoPlaceToHide #E2EE #RedMeat #OnlineSafety
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/government-encryption-whatsapp-phone-security-b1994758.html

RT from Jim Killock (@jimkillock)

The UK government proposes stripping encryption in its #NoPlaceToHide campaign.

@Telegraph reports how that works in China:

Chinese Communist Party can access athletes' personal data through compulsory Winter Olympics app
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/01/18/chinese-communist-party-can-access-athletes-personal-data-compulsory/

It’s never going to be popular to tell people that saving innocent little children is *not* the most important big-picture thing for humanity — but it’s true (HT: @elegant_wallaby)

This is a long Twitter thread which can be accessed by starting with this tweet and working backwards.

Introduction

David / @Elegant_Wallaby writes powerfully in favour of addressing child safety concerns regarding end-to-end encrypted environments — concerns which are rooted in zero, none, a complete lack of data, but the online safety community considers that to be okay because the online safety community survives on no data regarding impact, at all.

This is not hyperbole — if you check out NCMEC’s own statistics they make big headlines regarding “numbers of reports to NCMEC” but rarely if ever mention how many children they help save per year, and they also tend to lack transparency around how many reports are duplicates, are “funny memes” from developing countries which happen to have different social mores about pictures that include naked kids, and other stuff that is not germane to saving a child who is at risk from exploitation.

If you ask NCMEC more forthrightly, you can chart the growth of their database of hashes of CSAM imagery over time; for instance in 2020 they received 21.8 million reports comprising 65 million files (slide 17 of this PDF, and elsewhere) — yet a NCMEC source tells me that in that same year they only added 1.7 million “triple-vetted” images hashes to their database of CSAM; from this it might be possible to infer that more than 90% of NCMEC’s reports are in some way duplicates or irrelevant, but that would be unfair to do without more context —perhaps they simply need more “vetters”? — but all of this underscores the fact that the entire child-online-safety industry is blind to its impact.

As David himself points out: nobody from NCMEC follows up to see if their reports are being helpful in creating prosecutions. This “throw the reports over the wall to local police forces” approach is possibly even a problem, evidenced by the child-safety umbrella organisation INHOPE having to build tools to help local police forces winnow-out the duplicates and chaff in what they are given, so that they can focus on helping children who are actually at-risk:

But back to David: one of his tweets particularly grates upon me, where he writes: “knock it off with painting child safety advocates as disingenuous “think of the children” stooges for expanded LE capabilities” — and it grates for this reason:

Yes, there are certainly some people who believe that this “think of the children” push is a proxy war for expanded law-enforcement powers, and to obtain the long-sought-after “golden key” backdoors into end-to-end encrypted messengers; and I am not alone in seeing some merit in this view.

HOWEVER: I have also seen online-safety child-protection work from a close distance, and I have seen the emotional impact it has on the people who do it. Safety teams experience a proportionately small amount of very, very bad stuff, and they become really, really motivated to fix it for everyone. This leads them to develop disproportionate perspectives and become precautionary, even reactionary, depressed or catastrophizing.

For most of the past decade the UK has seen about 1750 road deaths per year, but the pandemic lockdowns of 2020 reduced that figure by 300; should we not therefore enforce lockdown perpetually to save 300 lives per annum? Or perhaps those 300 deaths happened differently, transferred to people who committed suicide from depressing isolation? Perhaps we could mitigate ALL road deaths by reducing all speed limits to (say) 20 miles per hour — but if we do that, that would happen at what other cost?

The same “solutioneering” arguments apply to CSAM.

The stark truth is: abuse happens, online or otherwise. Most of the time (93%?) the perpetrator is known to the victim, and any amount of “online-ness” is not causative. We don’t speculatively strip away fundamental human freedoms like privacy even though this abuse happens, and — just as we have not banned cars in order to keep children safe — we are forced to accept that the amount of abuse will never be zero, and that increasingly illiberal approaches towards stopping it will yield diminishing returns.

We have no numbers regarding how many globally at-risk children per year are being rescued from harm — not even sampled, extrapolated, guesstimated numbers. We are told that this nonexistent number must be used as an input to “balance” the interests of privacy for 2.7 billion people each of whom sends between zero and a few hundred or thousand messages per day, of varying sensitivity and (legal) intimacy.

There is a very large number in the order of tens or hundreds of billions of messages per day on one side of the scale, but there is a empty space on the other side.

This is unfair. This is unrealistic. This is a problem.

There are implicit and explicit calls for “productive conversation” (see below) but until someone on that side can deliver a heartless but necessary cost/benefit analysis, those who favour a “precautionary principle” approach to connecting the world’s population and undermining fundamental human rights, can and should be ignored .

Thread with David

Upstream thread continues, thusly…

#endToEndEncryption #ncmec #noplacetohide #onlineAbuse #onlineSafety

https://alecmuffett.com/article/15558