Large enough that it bothers me. The Philippines is particularly problematic, the unofficial figures are that you're looking at roundabout 700K perps world-wide and an (obviously) smaller number of producers, how accurate those are I have no idea. Fortunately my exposure to this stuff has diminished drastically over the last couple of years because I stay a mile away from anything associated with webcams but when ww.com was still up it was a regular occurrence that we had to step in and shut down feeds and alert the authorities. And that was with a published policy of going after the originators and giving full cooperation to LE.

So yes, that is happening at a non-negligible scale. In fact it is happening at a scale that is incredible (to me, at least).

> 700K perps world-wide and an (obviously) smaller number of producers

The figures I'd want are not consumers or producers but numbers of children. A child being abused 1000 times is obviously awful but its not as bad as 1000 being abused once.

> A child being abused 1000 times is obviously awful but its not as bad as 1000 being abused once.

Obvious to you. The problem with this sort of reasoning is that children are not mathematical objects. It is also the sort of reasoning that ultimately leads to the rest of society deciding that us tech people are incapable of setting things up in such a way that abuse potential is minimized. Then you get reactive stuff like this article.

Thanks for your continued replies and balanced counterpoints to various statements (including my own).

Maybe I've gone the wrong direction, but I'm almost convinced now that it may actually be worse to make public statements linking encryption to child abuse because it potentially paints backdoors as a solution in the minds of the non-technical folks, and potentially makes child abuse closer to appearing to be a "solved problem" and distracts further from progress towards a real solution.

I'm aware now (thanks to you and some others who have horrid coalface experience) that the digital realm is indeed more of a problem than I'd considered. I can't bring myself to accept, however, that mandated encryption backdoors are worth the attention they're being given by law enforcement for the purposes they're trying to align it with.

I can't accept the backdoors either. Clipper was a bad idea then and any iterations of it in the present are just as bad. Clearly that is not the most effective way to attack the child porn problem, Microsoft, for all its faults has done more to combat this than lots of other parties combined, including most nation states. Properly funding various services including the LE branches responsible for dealing with these crimes would be the way to go and that does not require any backdoors at all. The mountains of proof that are usually unearthed are strong enough for conviction, the bigger challenge is to roll up the networks but there are ways to combat that that do not require access to the payload.