https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_room_case
Everyone, please DO NOT underestimate people's malicious will to abuse weak minority groups having un-moderated platforms as their primary tool. Due to lack of Telegram's basic moderation, those victims had been severely abused to the unrecoverable level, more than two years. This could've been at least mitigated if they simply closed the room based on user reporting, which they refused to do so.
My answer is No.
The "genuinely harmful content" is minimally harmful compared to the damage censorship can do.
The problem is always with people being dicks, not the information. E.g. a jilted lover posting porn videoes of an ex is only a problem because the lover will deliberately attempt to show them to the ex and the ex's social contacts (and even that is only harmful because some people are judgemental bastards. Yes, some people like scat, get over it), so target the lover with harassment charges rather than making the information distribution illegal.
I'm a bit of a freedom of information purist, I think a world with 0 censorship would be better than the current one, as the censors will always be tempted to censor more and more things to advance their interests. The maximum badness from zero censorship is much much lower than the maximum badness with censorship.
It's not about people being dicks it's about information as weapons laying around forever.
Humans have built-in forgetness but modern days tech does not. Since we are evolving at nature rate, technology must be rein in from time to time.
However, people are quite capable of being very unpleasant to eachother without sex videos, if it wasn't that the person seeing red would have done something else (keyed car, sabotage, malicious lies... plenty of options). Regardless they should be disciplined, probably fired outright.
Since none of us are the operator in the matrix, we're not looking at the raw bytes of the blockchain, we're always using some view layer over the data. So the view layer can choose to not see the content of some block.
This could be done by having community operated blocklists to the effect of "you don't want to know what's at these locations" - you can't take back what's been said on chain, but you can cover your ears.
I seem to lean quite far on the freedom side of most arguments, but I do acknowledge there are times when action may need to be taken in the interest of the public. My objection is that I neither want it to be impossible to take action or for a foreign company to unilaterally decide what action to take.
What we need in situations like this is a legal process. If one doesn't exist, it's not for companies to start deciding what information the public should have access to and what is "harmful", but for democratic countries to pass laws with the consent of their local electorates to decide what legal protections and processes need to be put in place.
The problem we have today is that there are too many foreign companies deciding what we can and can't say or do. Crypto has the exact opposite problem, but unless our governments step up and regulates these companies in the interests of the public our only option (if you don't agree with the censorship) is to create something uncensorable.
The legal system has its own faults of course. It's administered by fallible governments and can have individual bad actors. But could a legal system expect to exert control over a decentralized system like a blockchain?
Put another way, if there was a "crypto twitter" clone, and someone posted revenge porn or personal information about someone (home address, let's say), wouldn't that post be forever embedded into the blockchain? Would a legal system ever be able to remove it?
Ultimately a legal system is how a society controls a governments monopoly on violence. A legal system can remove almost anything if it really want too, by virtue of the fact that it can send big men with guns to destroy whatever physical manifestations of the thing exists.
Of course there are practical limits to this power. But that’s never stopped a government before.
I don't know of any situation where someone has used this to dox someone, but nothing prevents it.
>What we need in situations like this is a legal process. If one doesn't exist, it's not for companies to start deciding what information the public should have access to and what is "harmful", but for democratic countries to pass laws with the consent of their local electorates to decide what legal protections and processes need to be put in place.
What is interesting is that I wouldn't even have to change a single word here and I can equally apply this reasoning to encryption. It is almost always unpopular on HN to suggest that universal end-to-end encryption might not be a great idea or that encryption backdoors are something that need to be seriously discussed, but those opinions are born out of the same underlying logic.
Free speech is good, but no society wants universal free speech since there are legitimately evil people who will use their speech for malicious means. Same is true about encryption. Why are we ok with removing revenge porn from Google results but need to just accept that we are allowing child porn to be shared via easily encrypted channels?
Selective censorship by central authorities can be granular, choosing to create a legal process for selective censorship doesn’t suddenly allow any person on the internet to potentially censor any thing they want. Weak encryption however allows anyone, anywhere, with enough effort to break all encryption everywhere, and do so without without detection or needing to expose themselves via a legal system.
Also there aren’t “central encryption authorities” that all encryption passes through. Anyone can implement modern crypto wherever, so banning it makes no sense. It’s like trying to ban the concept of Pi.
This is always stated as a universal truth of the technology, but this mostly seems like a people and organizational problem. We already have encryption algorithms that can encrypt content for decryption by multiple optional keys. Why couldn't we fragment and distribute one set of those keys among multiple legal entities? That would require coordination and agreement to decrypt anything. That wouldn't be a true backdoor anymore than the original key is a backdoor, it would simply be overhead on the existing encrypted content to allow it to be decrypted by multiple keys.
>Also there aren’t “central encryption authorities” that all encryption passes through. Anyone can implement modern crypto wherever, so banning it makes no sense. It’s like trying to ban the concept of Pi.
This is true, but defaults matter. If the US makes a law regarding encryption, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, etc are all going to follow it. You still might be able to roll your own encryption, but the people who do that will be a tiny share of overall communication. Laws like this aren't meant to completely stop something. Putting in financial regulations to crack down on money laundering doesn't stop money laundering. The goal is to make it more difficult and prevent the most egregious cases.
There would be thousands if not millions of legitimate decryptions every year. At each instance all of the fragments will need to be put together, creating an opportunity for the data to be exfiltrated.
Additionally your making the assumption that legal agencies will be able to securely store these keys long term (I.e forever). Regardless of your view on the operational and security competency of these agencies, it’s extreme difficulty to keep cryptographic keys secure long term if you need to be able to access them on a regular basis.
Even if you don’t think most criminal organisations will manage this, you can pretty much guarantee that large nation state actors like China and Russia will find a way to get hold of these keys. You then give your largest competitors the ability to seriously damage your economy or steal secrets by either using the keys themselves, or leaking them on the internet. Suddenly every single message sent by every citizen, politician, bank, weapons company etc becomes public for all to see.
> This is true, but defaults matter. If the US makes a law regarding encryption, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, etc are all going to follow it. You still might be able to roll your own encryption
You will 100% be able to roll your own, and trivially too. You’ll just need to go to GitHub and grab the source code, or pre-built binaries for a working crypto system, of which there are many. Banning the big companies from using crypto isn’t enough, you also need to ban anyone from talking about crypto as well.
This is very different to money laundering rules. Realistically you can’t opt out of the modern financial system, regardless of what blockchain proponents say, so introducing rules to gatekeep money flows at system choke points makes sense. Also one ability to censor money at choke points doesn’t also create an opportunity for enemies to exploit those same choke points.
The money laundering equivalent of crypto censorship would be like the US deciding that it was going to switch to Bitcoin so that all transactions are public and accessible to law enforcement. Then just kinda hoping that a country like China isn’t going to launch a 51% attack.
>You will 100% be able to roll your own, and trivially too. You’ll just need to go to GitHub and grab the source code...
Github is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft won't let you host code that is designed specifically to break the law. That is the point. You would need to jump through a variety of hoops in order to avoid this. It wouldn't be impossible, but it won't be the default and most people won't go through the effort to do it.
I think the flaws are so large, and fixing them so impractical (especially anything involving direct human involvement), that the problem is essentially impossible.
In theory traffic laws should prevent 100% of car accidents. Yet people die every day in traffic accidents.
In theory the judicial system should never execute an innocent person. Yet the US sends people later proven innocent to the electric chair on a semi regular basis.
In theory everyone should have a strong interest is keeping planet earth healthy enough to support human life, yet we’re on a course to cataclysmic climate change.
Alcohol addiction should have ended during prohibition, and weed should be impossible to buy in the US. Yet neither is true.
What on earth makes you think we’ll solve the structural issues with government key escrow for all encryption, when all the evidence suggest that we’re unable to perfectly solve these issues as a species?
> Github is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft won't let you host code that is designed specifically to break the law.
Cool we’ll host it on Gitlab then, or one of many no US hosting providers. We can’t even stop people pirating movies despite the media industry throwing billions at the problem. Do you honestly think we’ll have better luck with crypto?
You wanna see how this story ends? Read up on prohibition America, or just the war on drugs. We’ve been down this road many times, with many different vices, it’s ends the same way every time. Normal people get criminalised, illicit behaviour continues regardless. Organised crime profits from facilitating illicit behaviour. Please explain why you thing crypto is going to be the exception?
Then let's as an industry try to think through ways to fix these impractical problems. My original goal was not for you and me to design the perfect system in a quick HN conversation. I was instead pointing out that the tech community too often treats this issue as a mathematical impossibility and refuses to engage anyone who pushes back on that. Admitting that something is not impossible but rather so impractical as to be essentially impossible is the first step in figuring out a solution. It is unlike the tech community to see an extremely difficult problem and just refuse any attempt to solve it because of the difficulty.
>What on earth makes you think we’ll solve the structural issues with government key escrow for all encryption, when all the evidence suggest that we’re unable to perfectly solve these issues as a species?
I am repeating myself here, but the goal isn't 100% compliance. No law can achieve that and I don't know you you are projecting that expectation on this conversation. The goal is to address most occurrences.
>You wanna see how this story ends? Read up on prohibition America, or just the war on drugs. We’ve been down this road many times, with many different vices, it’s ends the same way every time. Normal people get criminalised, illicit behaviour continues regardless. Organised crime profits from facilitating illicit behaviour. Please explain why you thing crypto is going to be the exception?
People want to engage in vices. I'm not convinced that people have nearly as strong of a desire for complete privacy as evident by all the behavior we have seen over the last few decades in responses to how governments and corporations invade privacy. It is a popular conspiracy theory that Facebook is secretly recording audio on your phone 24/7 and uses conversations it hears to better target ads. I have multiple friends who genuinely believe this. This belief isn't enough to get them to uninstall Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp from their phones. Some people will certainly be willing to go the extra mile for privacy, but most people won't.
The people law enforcement wants to access is supposedly those traffic CP, terrorise or similar crimes. Those individuals 100% want privacy and will get it.
As for the remaining 99%, there’s no evidence that strong encryption prevents law enforcement from doing their job effectively. Want to see examples of law enforcement circumventing perfect encryption, then look to British police. They solved this problem quite elegantly, you wait for someone to unlock their phone, then you grab it out of their hands.
Because crypto is implemented in software and it’s trivial to remove the part that encrypts for the government’s key.
Additionally, a from scratch implementation of AES in JavaScript or any other modern programming language is a junior level task. Unless you propose trying to ban every copy of the AES algorithm, it will be trivially implemented and passed around regardless of what FAANG does.
Money laundering restrictions work because everything goes through a fairly centralized banking system. Crypto has no such equivalent.
You are treating encryption as an independent end goal by itself when it is only a tool that is used during communication and storage. Communication and to a lesser extent storage are highly centralized. How much of the average person's encrypted communication occurs in a channel that is not touched by some US company?
The encryption example is about being able to intercept private communication (never mind outlawing math) because someone could use that private communication for something illegal.
The two examples have nothing to do with each other IMO.
But to your point, if the sharing of child porn or other illegal content ever got so bad that something urgently needed to be done I would personally be open to limiting the use E2EE (if there truly was no better option) and I'd assume most people here would agree, although I would argue in many cases it's E2EE that prevents you from becoming a victim of things like revenge porn in the first place.
Besides, there would be quite a few people who'd be actively circumventing any such law if it were enacted, e.g. by hosting the apps in other jurisdictions. And I think that's a good thing! There should be fundamental limits on the power of governance, regardless of how democratic said governance is; and democracies can be no less abusive than other forms when it comes to minorities etc. Or even majorities, when established public mores essentially require widespread hypocrisy - the Prohibition comes to mind. "Think of the children" (or terrorists, or whatever is the go-to political excuse at any particular moment) is not a valid exception.
I agree with your general point except most people in the tech community are not willing to even have these debates. It is often treated as an issue with a single right answer and that encryption can never be compromised.
Removing ourselves from the debate is only going to end up with the decision being made without our input.
The power to ban information is too great to be entrusted to any authority at all. Depending on how thorough the "ban" (web text filter at the ISP level? mandatory AR implants at birth filtering banned content? worse?), it's anywhere from an abhorrent violation of human rights and the principles behind free exchange and scientific inquiry all the way up through literally the most powerful weapon which could even theoretically be designed.
This is not a road worth going down, for any amount of harm reduction. The cost today may be worth it. The cost long term is potentially too great to even consider risking. There is no guarantee of who holds the ban hammer tomorrow.
I appreciate the take that the future harm isn’t worth the benefit today, since we’d enable future arbiters to control what is available.
There’s nuance in determining what is a public sphere vs. a privately controlled platform. The places with the most distribution are currently private, but crypto could change that to where we collectively own the platform, effectively making it publicly owned. Does that change your thoughts on when censorship is appropriate?
But I would not trust any corporation (sometimes it's profitable to remove something so they retain control of some market) or government (sometimes it secures their power to keep people unaware of some facts about their actions) to do the same. Would you?
So I guess the question is, how does the use of this new power to suppress abuses of speech weigh against other forms of abuse that become available to those who wield this power?
For clarity: this shouldn't apply to information that a corporation produces, because corporations aren't people and shouldn't have the same freedoms. Open source is still good, and controlling information that you discover, not that you invent, is unreasonable.
Overall, my issue is less with control over information (because if you believe all control is bad, then you have to say that revenge porn isn't too big an issue, and that's not a position I'm personally willing to take) and more capital's control over information because of all the cases when capital is misaligned with the interests of the people who need it. All of these cases feel like they define technology. Lots of the history of technology can be understood as large companies (bourgeoisie) trying to keep information hidden fighting a decreasing population of 'hackers' (the proletariat), and that fight's legacy is found here, on Google's hidden page gatekeeping what should be known.
...but that's not always the case. If your information has been copied against your will in a way that removes that key (which is incredibly hard to prevent, see the "analog hole" problem in video DRM), you have to have some sort of central authority or master key to be able to remove it, and then you're again falling right back into trusting that central authority with the power to remove whatever they deem fit. What if the central authority decides you don't own the information and not to remove it? What if they claim ownership of something they want removed that isn't theirs?
It just doesn't work. Information removal is a superpower I do not trust any large organization to wield responsibly.
The "private business right of refusal" argument has some merits, but also substantial equity and justice problems.
Indexing the web is an old tradition.
You would get users to sign the social contract with some online entity and that entity would censor the blockchain for their ideological/legal jurisdiction. For example, you could sign the Christian fundamentalist social contract and have all blasphemy removed from your search results. In exchange, you would receive community support, access to their content, etc. If they found out you were browsing blasphemous material they would revoke the particular social contract you signed.
Just spitballing here, but I wonder if the nofap guys could start something like this to block all nsfw content on whatever distributed blockchain thing was out there. Then they could offer some special forum as a benefit. You could use a DAO for governance conflicts, etc.
The victim would contact the organizations and ask that they remove the material citing their mission and bylaws. Maybe they would form a hierarchy with the most generally agreed upon rules being shared, like a treaty, between blockchains.
No? We're just gonna relitigate it all from scratch again - relearning the same naive lessons over and over? (Shockingly people in this space do indeed understand the implications of censorship-resistant platforms.)
What would happen if someone encoded something horrible and illegal like child porn into a blockchain? Is everyone who operates on that chain guilty of possession? Does that make a specific crypto "illegal" if its blockchain contains illegal content?
Which is a fancy way of saying that they haven't. The only images in the bitcoin blockchain are ascii art.
There are plenty of hashes of different types of data in the bitcoin blockchain, but hashes are not the hash function's input data.
Schneier himself repeated this bogus "there's illegal content in the bitcoin blockchain already!" claim, which shows the legs this false meme has on it.
Please stop repeating this falsehood.
JPG of Nelson Mandela encoded into bitcoin blockchain: http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photo...
Illegal porn and classified documents embedded in the blockchain (page 3): https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/pdf-33/accenture-editing...
Original research source: https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf
By that definition, however, every file could be transformed into an illegal one through a suitable cipher and key.
Then there's the concept of steganography.
Digital data is interesting for sure.
(Unless you’re saying that the bits 0 and 1 already exist in the blockchain, which is reaaaaallllyyy stretching the definition.)
There’s the concept of “illegal numbers”, which means that there are technically numeric representations of images or copyrighted material that you can’t know/possess without breaking a law. But the law is subjective which is why we have judges and juries to apply judgement to whether having a large number written on a piece of paper is equivalent to possessing illegal material.
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There’s the concept of “illegal numbers”, which means that there are technically numeric representations of images or copyrighted material that you can’t know/possess without breaking a law. But the law is subjective which is why we have judges and juries to apply judgement to whether having a large number written on a piece of paper is equivalent to possessions illegal material.
There is no person they can throw in jail, no corporation that can be sued, no servers that can be seized, domains taken over, etc, that will result in that data no longer being available to those that know where to look for it.
The data just remains online until such a time that the coins of a given chain are worth $0.0 and coin holders no longer have a financial incentive to keep the ledger online.
FWIW the ones I talked to where more of the door kicking variety, not the 'cyber' type.
The point wasnt that I put their logo on a chain, its that I could put a photo online that the states monopoly on violence was entirely incapable of removing.
The FBI doesn't give a single damn hoot about "data exfiltration" via blockchain metadata. Anyone with half an understanding of any of those terms knows what an absurd implication that is.
For concerns about "data exfiltration", discussing blockchain doesn't even make a single damn bit of sense. Blockchain is about impermanence and publishing, not about "exfiltration".
I'm not sure which is more amusing, thinking that the FBI would give a hoot about b64-encoded data in the metadata of a transaction, or that this person wrote that comment on HN to try and seem cool. LOL, what, the FBI reached out to them (how?/why? nothing about this makes sense)?
Lots of distasteful outcomes possible.
Do they? Nothing is ever _really_ deleted on the good old-fashioned internet either.
We can't have our cake and eat it too. Having a centralized arbiter of truth is more dangerous to the truth than bad people who do bad things.
Tell that to folks doing web archival.
There was never a way to undo porn video you made when you were younger.
The situation we have today does allow you to address such a problem: Google can remove search results. It's not possible to do that on the blockchain.
Google prevents new searches or tries to but if you have the link you can visit without google. Same as the blockchain you would need to know where to look.
And as someone who has worked in the blockchain space for a long time, it’s pretty much unanimously agreed in the space that the cost of inevitably protecting bad actors is worth the value in protecting good actors. Good and bad are subjective there, but for better or worse the blockchain isn’t.
How does the notion of a purely distributed, unregulated, uncensorable, blockchain-backed internet handle "revenge porn" or other genuinely harmful content?
An argument I hear from the crypto community is that blockchain is good because it enables freedom of speech that can't be banned by governments or other central authorities.
The crypto community needs to address the other side of that coin too. Are there circumstances when something should be banned, and how does that work on a blockchain?