https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/zcvwno/steel_rein...
Opening the door lets a group of them quickly file in at once to swarm the occupants.
- they still have to be physically there
- one team can do only one raid at a time
- people know if they did a raid
- they needs a judge order and because the previous point you can counter sue if reasonable, at least theoretically
- they can't impersonate you all around the globe including in countries outside of the UK just by raiding you
- a raid is time wise also limited
- police being able to raid doesn't prevent you from guarding yourself against random criminals or agents of foreign hostile governments raiding you
- you know when you are raided
- you are still allowed to put steal doors in your home
- I probably missed a bunch of points
I.e. it's not the same, not at all.
A more correct comparison would to state police can raid you, so they should be able to hack your device but only to retrieve information and being required to leaf a message behind (and even that comparison has issues).
I think this is the big change people miss when it comes to police powers in the digital age. There's not been really been a culture shift from the police nor the citizens about police powers, just a increase in quantity of ability that has turned into a difference in quality. For decades agents of the state have had the theoretical ability to surveil people, and the people were generally OK with it because of the assumption that "well they won't bother doing it to a random guy like me", which was true, back when it required actual footwork, and even pulling up someone's file was a physical task
Assuming one does accept targeted surveillance in extreme cases, then I'm not sure how to solve this apart from the frustratingly "stupid" and probably unenforceable solution of requiring the police and intelligence agencies to be stuck on 90s tech. Theoretical legal sanctions against doing this appear to have no teeth, the only way to discourage surveillance abuse is to make each instance have a non-circumventable operational cost
So to use a concrete example: I actually like private CCTV in public spaces. I do feel safer knowing the police can use that footage if I'm a victim of crime. But I only accept it because most systems are just writing to a local device, meaning there's a cost to the police asking for it. Any scheme to automate access to these records over the internet, no matter how well-meaning and theoretically legally restricted they are, would inevitably be used to make those scenes from The Bourne Ultimatum seem quaint
No one is mass-sharing their safe of child-porn worldwide with thousands of other child-porn voyeurs.
The internet and its ubiquitous accessibility combined with digital image file formats has changed the landscape for those that would fight these heinous crimes.
It is indeed a new and special case where a locked safe is not.
I wouldn't call 1 on 1 chats mass sharing
I see no reason the give the gov eyes on everything when they have a perfectly valid route to investigations.
These government agents are people as well, and as people they'll suffer to wade through the dark corners of the web to locate a minuscule part of all the CP data available worldwide. These people will inevitably require mental care to deal with the trauma of looking at GiBs and GiBs of small kids being raped, that's not a cost we can handwave to "we employ government agents", there's not a limitless supply of people willing to do this job, and doing this job doesn't come for free, not for the individuals doing it neither for society (mental trauma care; staffing high enough to allow rotations and avoid burn out, or PTSD, etc.).
Plus even if you did dragnet everything, you'll still need a human in the loop to verify the findings, even if ml classifiers are used to find leads.
Plus what about people that just encrypt their messages locally before sending them across a backdoored platform? The gov can't make encryption illegal. It's just math. Folks will steno it into memes or whatever is hot that gets shared to allow it to live in plain sight.
Security back doors also carry the risk of having the opposite effect. We’ve seen many examples of powerful, nation state developed tools being leaked online.
There may be a rise in scenarios where people (including children) have their personal devices breached and are extorted for the exact thing the security backdoors were created to prevent.
Governments use CP/Abuse to pass legislation, which is immediately used for almost anything other than that. If a government did actually care about child welfare there are many things they could do that would actually help children.
But this law to "protect children" is being passed by a government that is simultaneously cutting services that help children, and also trying to reduce/restrict sex ed that so that it is easier to abuse children, I'm going to say that "protecting children" is not their goal with this law.
As I said elsewhere, any argument for "we need the ability to remotely access the content of a phone" (which is what the law is demanding: silent updates to remove encryption and anything else they "need") equally applies to having a government mandated cameras in every house. That would actually prevent child abuse. It would prevent domestic violence. If such was happening the police could intervene immediately. It would remove he said/she said from courts: you can simply play the video from the home.
By the definition of "no encryption because protect-the-children", mandatory cameras in every room of every house is both acceptable, and also objectively superior to BS anti-encryption laws. You can't abuse or beat your family members in the first place if a camera is watching, but anyone moving CSAM around on the internet isn't going to have a problem getting an actual encrypted channel - all the law does is make your personal communication, banking, finances, etc insecure, criminals are safe. Of course even if someone does use a now insecure communication channel to share their child abuse it's moot: the cameras in their house would have already caught them.
So why screw around with "make everyone (including children) unsafe to 'protect the children'" when there's a much more effective solution that would stop the abuse in the first place?
Also, the UK already passed a bunch of "you don't get privacy" laws in order to "prevent terrorism", and they seem to be used primarily to catch people not picking up dog poop, not paying tv licensing fees, etc which sure as shit doesn't sound like it's terrorism related.
In summary: if a law that would otherwise violate fairly basic rights is being pushed with clearly emotive justifications like "child abuse", "terrorism" you should assume you are being played.
The police do not need more power. They do not need to violate everyone's rights. They need to do their jobs and do actual work with what they already have, and demonstrate basic competence before they get any more invasive tools. Recall the Ariana grande bombing in the UK? Multiple friends and family of the bomber had independently and repeatedly reported them to the UK police. 9/11: multiple US government agencies had all the information needed, but were too busy trying to compete with each other. In addition (tens of, if you look at the US) thousands rape kits that aren't even processed, and weirdly they keep finding serial killers and rapists when. they. just. do. their. job.
Throwing away more of our privacy, when police already have huge amounts of information that they just can't be bothered to look at, is beyond stupid.
Similarly, based on the track record of supporting and aiding child abusers, and cutting support for children, any claims a government makes saying something is to "protect children" is clearly false.
So if people claim this, that all government people are "good people", who are "just trying to help". The problem is the result. The real question is what happens to those children, to the victims, the rest doesn't matter.
And the outcomes ...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8225538/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/30034577
These people know this. They go through the web merely to punish and use violence against society to force what they consider decency standards. The problem is, they do not help these children, they usually only damage them (which leads to constant embarrassments. FBI 2 years ago proudly announced they had done a razzia, and "saved" 43 children from prostitution. Before 2 weeks passed 41 out of 43 of them had run away, with the very large majority very likely going back to prostitution). They just throw them into the child services system which destroys these children's lives far more than even actual abuse does. And, of course, mostly they were not abused but protected by their parents, and were far safer at home. And even that's ignoring that this is government: a significant fraction will get deported if they don't run away.
And this is ignoring the "accidental" studies, which follow this same pattern: someone wants to make a career and needs, effectively, to find a large amount of children abused, to get attention. These can't be actual abused because of how humans work: abused children ... abuse others themselves, damage themselves, do drugs, act in criminal ways, ... So nobody in the system wants those, at best they are very problematic. What these individuals need to do is convince authorities that a large cohort of normal (very young) children are in fact abused, and "need help". Mostly, of course, they don't tire themselves, and do this by simply lying, then ripping the child from their family.
The "plus" side of this is that we have plenty of evidence of the effect of child services ABSENT earlier abuse or problems in the child's life. And the evidence is damning. These children don't study. They suicide 10x more than normal children. They essentially do not, at all, continue studies after high school, and a high percentage doesn't finish high school
I would like to point these are studies, but this is extremely visible to people working in the field. The help government provides doesn't help children. They know this, yet they keep working in this system. This is, obviously, not moral.
We already have mountains of awful laws that are passed via appeal to csam emotion. I see no reason to pass another one under the appeal of csam reduction when we all know how it will really be used.
They literally are though? Numerous cases of child abusers abusing their children and publishing the footage of it from their homes, not to mention the mass storage and hosting (hosting _may_ be less common now).
People physically abuse their family and children at scale (domestic violence is not rare), a really good way to stop this would be to mandate cameras and microphones in everyone’s houses.
Don’t worry though: to see/hear recordings from inside someone’s house police will need a warrant.
(But Apple is in the right in this case.)
Sure you could limit yourself to known contacts, but that wouldn't make you rich nor would it create self-sustaining network.
This is exactly the opposite of how it works in the real world.
Or, better, do you shit with the door open?
But it feels like to really achieve successful political pushback on something of this magnitude, it really requires going on offense.
Like, why are all the headlines not "Dudes in law enforcement demand access to millions of young women's intimate photos"?
Is that yourself with a weapon, or the attacker?
This includes cases where people have killed unarmed intruders.
What will typically get people in trouble is not self defense, but cases where the victim continues after an attacker is no longer a threat (is subdued or fleeing).
Hope you feel better soon.
That said, it’s still creepy, I agree.
Have you seen doors in the uk? Most are just there for design.
They can't break most encryption with force.
Behind every door and every locked place there could be child pornography and illicit materials hidden!! Every house, every hotel safe are suspects!
Criminal oversight, criminal oversight!
(and if they think their reasoning for backdoors into online chat and conversation is mandated by this supid reasoning of theirs then it must be valid for all entrance doors of every home and buidlding and every locked spaces as well! Getting easy access to material without assistance or knowledge of the people involved.)