CSAECop

It's still not clear to me whether you are raising an issue with scanning client side, or your concern is actually with some other policy you expect to be implemented in future.

What is the most obviously different effect on society? I don't know how anyone would even know what CPU calculated their file hash.

Can you explain why?

Commenters here are making claims about false positives, arrests of innocents, lived ruined etc. These effects are identical whether uploads are scanned before or after transmission.

What are the different effects of society from scanning the upload before transmission?

I completely agree with your characterization of the various concerns.

I don't agree with the characterization that this system will cause baseless accusations.

These systems have been in place for many years and have proven themselves useful and reliable.

Apple have tried to implement it in a way that allows them to turn on E2EE on iCloud, and HN has turned that into a conspiracy theory.

Sorry, to clarify, you do in fact support Apple running the exact same scans on their server side CPUs? A situation that has the exact same effects on society...?

Your only concern then, is with a future authoritarian policy of your own imagination?

The distinction between scanning locally before upload, and on server after upload, is an implementation detail. The only reason Apple have done this is to allow them to implement E2EE for iCloud without hosting CSAM.

All arguments relating to anything other than this are arguing against something that doesn't exist.

I don't dispute that fictional proposals in the imaginations of HNers might pose a grave (fictional) threat to civil freedoms.

Nobody is proposing that though...

It's a fact that NCMEC referrals have identified teachers who were secretly pedophiles, who were subsequently banned from teaching. Most people see this as a good thing. If you want to do away with this, you have to bring a compelling argument.

I support everybody's right to argue for the type of society they want to see, but there's an arrogance/conspiratorial flavor to a lot of the comments here that suggest they don't really understand what they are up against. There are actual benefits.

Have we established that? Certainly not a reality I recognize. The processes involved in CSAM databases like NCMEC/ICSE are many years old. If it leads to widespread civil rights abuses, where are they?

Google Drive has 1bn users. Google scans content for CSAM already. Shouldn't we be seeing these negative side effects already?

Proponents of these systems can point to thousands upon thousands of actual "wins" (such as identifying teachers, police officers, sports coaches, judges, child minders etc who are pedophiles) and detractors cannot provide actual evidence of their theoretical disadvantages.

No system is perfect, no system "guarantees civil freedom", this is not a fair test. The actual evidence suggests automated scanning for CSAM is a net win for society.

How are you expecting me to describe this limit?

I think it's legitimate for companies to implement automated systems, such as CSAM and spam filtering, to limit the amount of unwanted material on their networks. I don't have any problem with Apple, Google, and Microsoft, checking the hashes of files I upload (or attempt to upload, in Apple's case) to their servers against ICSE. I would have an issue if employees of those companies had unfettered, unaudited access to users files.

Outside of giving my opinion of a specific proposal I don't know what you expect me to say.

Perhaps you could describe your own "limit" to how much avoidable suffering is acceptable to you before you would support automated scanning of uploads. I don't personally believe it's possible to precisely explain an overarching "limit" in situations that balance competing moral and philosophical concerns.

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I'm being rate limited now due to downvotes, might not be able to respond further

I don't know why this is downvoted, you are absolutely right.

Prosecutions based, essentially, on community suspicion are what lead to countless black men being wrongfully convicted of the rape of white women.

Police embracing cutting edge science like DNA sequencing is what allows unreliable antiquated evidence like (gasp) eyewitness testimony to be given it's proper weight.

Perhaps people consider DNA evidence to be "good old-fashioned policing" nowadays but it was within people's lifetimes that it was as new was quantum computing is today.

The sooner the "good old fashioned policing" meme dies the better.

The system is basically what you describe except the explicit report is precisely what Apple send to NCMEC.

By the time it gets to the police, there will be an identified crime.

This has been the case for many years. I don't have the numbers to hand but I believe NCMEC receives around the order of 100 million referrals a year.

EDIT: it's 20 million according to https://www.missingkids.org/ourwork/ncmecdata

https://www.missingkids.org/footer/media/keyfacts - around 99% are from tech company referrals, 1% from members of the public

Well, police still investigate with evidence, but the potential scope of "evidence" is pretty much the whole physical universe. File hashes and TCP packet captures are evidence, DNA fragments are evidence, weather patterns are evidence, in the same way that people's memories are evidence.

Through the decades, the respect shown to eyewitness testimony has generally declined, and crimes with no eyewitness evidence are still expected to be solved.

For offences with a huge online aspect there is no prospect of "getting out there" until you work out where "there" is, because it could be anywhere in the world.

You probably don't realise it, because you're coming from a perspective that has been heavily influenced in a particular way, but some of these questions are kind of insulting and don't really assume good faith (or even basic decency) on my part.

> "does the CP protection end justify any means?"

Like, is this legitimately a question you think I might answer "yes" to?

This is the equivalent of "do you support the rape of children?".

I'll gladly comment on more specific points if you are genuinely struggling to understand how Apple could honestly implement this system in good faith.

> "Can’t the police do good old fashioned police work to catch people doing these things?"

I'm a detective that works exclusively on online child sexual offences.

The short answer to this is "no", although the question doesn't make much sense to me. Policing has always been near the forefront of technology.

Perhaps you could expand more on what "good old fashioned police work" means, in this context?