alt Hacker NewsMaybe my perception is off, but it seems like there's a huge push by the legislature and some people to do anything and everything to prevent CSAM, yet almost nothing seems to be done to prevent CSA.
For CSAM, there's all sorts of monitoring, scanning, identify capturing, etc. But it's all after abuse has taken place, and it seems that many of the people actually arrested are arrested for CSAM and not CSA. This has even extended to fictional CSAM such as AI generated stories and pictures. As an aside, if that gets extended to political speech or other non-CSAM materials that are determined to be undesirable, that's a big concern. I can imagine that a conservative state could pass a law banning all porn because they claim it could encourage illegal activities such as prostitution, rape, or CSA.
On the CSA side, you rarely hear about arrests (they happen but less than CSAM). There doesn't seem to be any real push for educating and protecting kids before it happens. Ironically, the groups doing the most to educate and implement protective strategies are the ones who have been involved in abuse scandals in the past (Churches, Scouts, etc). Even then, a lot of it is just getting clearances, which doesnt prevent people who where not caught or were first timers. Offenders get put on a list/map. This is sort of a half approach. If they are still a threat, they shouldn't be released. Yet if you comb the list and see some of the results, they don't all seem to fit with CSA. I personally know of 1 who took a leak across from a playground at 2am walking home from the bars and was put on the sex offender registry because it was within 500'.
It seems like these laws are more about peddling to the publicist and lawmakers fantasy of incrementally extreme punishment rather than taking a appropriate, data driven, and level-headed approach that actually protects kids. Otherwise they will just keep pushing ham-fisted low-hanging "fixes" like required scanning and IDs to access the internet.
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In Sweden we're going to literally have Minority Report style pre-crime registries for potential child molesters. We already have one for potential domestic abusers. Fuck this country. I need to get out of here before it gets worse.
I think it's similar with other liability issues, e.g., when a company happens to "lose" customer data through a breach. They will be on the hook for not having certain audits and certifications at regular intervals. Practically never will anyone be feeling any pain due to absolute disregard for basic common sense precautions to prevent issues in the first place. So usually, the pattern is that issues that can be outsourced to insurance will be handled by compliance departments - which don't care about the actual problems, just that the fallout from them is "managed" accordingly.
>if that gets extended to
If you provide the government a platform to do So, they'll do Y if you wait long enough
One is far easier to prove. If the government could continuously monitor our actions "Is this CSA?" they might very well be pushing for that, too.
> ones who have been involved in abuse scandals in the past (Churches, Scouts, etc)
And those groups still have lower rates of abuse than Schools which do a lot less training and enforcement of youth protection policies.
Children are still safer in Scouts and churches than in schools.
Just about every kid goes to school though, so people just prefer to sweep that under the rug and focus on targeting organizations they are not a part of or disagree with because they're easier to demonize and make fun of.
I work with kids, and I've had to take the Scouts and Catholic Church's youth protection training. They are both free to take online if anyone wants to check it out.
The problem is, the things that would actually prevent CSA require things like "giving children rights", "widely mandating effective age-appropriate sex education even for young children", and "admitting that it's mostly not scary strangers doing it."
These are utterly anathema to huge chunks of society, especially American society. It's more and more clear, from the scope of the Epstein Files, just how much of American society and government has been influenced specifically to enable easy access to children by rich white men. Even beyond that, the entire right wing would instantly catch fire if we actually required effective sex education. Especially age-appropriate sex education going right down to kindergarten (yes, kindergarten: the better children that age understand what's normal and safe, the better they can communicate when someone is doing things to them that are not that...and I only stop at kindergarten because AFAIK that's the earliest mandated schooling still). Similarly, the right wing desperately wants to have absolute control over their children—treat them as property—so giving children rights that even parents have to respect will get them to oppose absolutely everything.
Plus, as other sibling comments have already noted, the real desire here is for ubiquitous surveillance. CSAM is just the excuse they use.
Because it isn't about CSAM, IMO. You see this with plenty of social issues, notably firearms ownership. The claim is we will restrict/license/outlaw xyz for the kids, but really, a data-drive approach would have focused on different things entirely (eg additional behavioral health services for kids, suicide prevention etc)
The same technology/access used for CSAM identification can find copyrighted files, materials that don't support current government, etc. Full E2E encryption seriously raises the cost of mass surveillance, and why the US government fights it at every turn going back 30 years.