[Cryptography] Encryption and anonymity as top tools for images of child sexual abuse

Henry Baker hbaker1 at pipeline.com
Mon Sep 30 16:44:45 EDT 2019


At 12:28 AM 9/30/2019, Peter Fairbrother wrote:
>On 30/09/2019 05:16, Tom Mitchell wrote:
>[..]
>>Difficult... topic
>
>There is fundamentally only one way to look at it - do we allow unbreakable encryption or not.
>
>If we do allow it then people will use it to do bad things. Like people use shoes or telephones or toilet paper to do bad things (I'm not sure what bad things people use toilet paper for, but I'm sure there are some).
>
>If we don't allow unbreakable encryption then modern banking becomes impossible. Freedom of speech becomes impossible. And so on.
>
>And then the bad guys will find another way, or just use illegal encryption.
>
>So, to a balance of harms.
>
>Personally, I only care about abuse of children. I do not care per se if perverts look at dirty pictures of children, as long as they do not abuse children. A senior policeman in the child-abuse field I talked to about this once said that the damage continued as the children in the pictures are still alive, but I am not sure how significant that is.
>
>So, does looking at dirty pictures of children increase abuse of children? No-one knows. There is evidence both ways. There is no justification to assume it does - there was plenty of abuse before the internet (or photography) was thought of.
>
>How much does encryption help perverts? It made it harder for the Police to catch them  -  well actually, no, it didn't. If before the internet and encryption it was this hard to catch perverts (when anyone actually tried), the internet and encryption didn't make it much if any harder to catch them.
>
>Another thing that encryption does not do is make it easier for perverts to actually abuse children (except in the way that shoes or telephones do).
>
>There is just [1] this image in some people's heads that if there was no encryption then all the perverts would either go away or get caught easily and children would be safe and Police bills for catching perverts would decrease.
>
>So, if we banned unbreakable encryption, would child abuse fall? By how much? Personally I think it might fall a little for a short time, but then it would increase back to present levels or even more.
>
>To a final reckoning then, a small temporary decrease in child abuse versus no banking and no free speech.
>
>Doesn't seem so difficult now (or any less a horrible choice).
>
>Peter Fairbrother
>
>[1] there are of course also the people with different agendas, such as policemen and other workers in the child-abuse field I wouldn't leave a child with; and peepers from the Government and elsewhere who (ab)use the child abuse issue to try to defeat encryption.

I'm sorry if I sound cynical, but perhaps I've lived too long and seen too much.

To a first approximation, politicians use "child pornography" as a boogey man to scare unsophisticated voters into supporting universal surveillance ("no place to hide"), aka "back-doored encryption".

Followers of Russ Roberts's excellent Econtalk podcast will quickly recognize the "Baptist & Bootlegger" unholy alliance going on here.  The Baptists wanted Prohibition, because they didn't want anyone to drink alcohol for religious reasons, while the bootleggers wanted Prohibition, because it expanded the market and drove up the prices for bootlegged whiskey.  Those against child pornography (most of us) team up with the bootleggers -- NSA/CIA/FBI/Google/Facebook/Twitter/etc. -- who want a modern Panopticon with no "ungoverned spaces" -- not even the spaces between our ears!

Prohibition was finally ended because the cure was worse than the disease: Prohibition helped produce the modern Mafia and led to huge increases in big-city crime & violence, as well as major corruption among big-city police forces.  Perhaps there is an equivalent lesson here for "back-doored encryption" (I like to call it "hack-doored encryption") ?

None of us want child pornography, but once we realize that the price of *zero pornography* is also *zero civil rights* and *zero free speech*, then we appreciate the wisdom of President Eisenhower: "If you want total security, go to prison.  There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on.  The only thing lacking... is freedom."  (Oh, and by the way, child pornographers don't last very long in prison; just ask Jeffrey Epstein.)



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