On 8/2/2023 7:03 PM, John Curran wrote:
On Aug 2, 2023, at 8:52 PM, Christian Huitema<huitema@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 8/2/2023 4:53 PM, John Levine wrote:
It appears that Keith Moore<moore@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said
Everyone needs to understand that a likely effect of any CSAM
countermeasure is to increase the distribution and production of CSAM,
and with it the number of victims.
Um, what?
That's the general tit-for-tat between offense and defense. We have seen it with spam: better spam detection begets smarter hiding of spam, and vice versa. The same is very likely to happen with CSAM. If a CSAM scanning technology is applied at control points, the criminals who profit from distributing this material would probably find some way to tweak their materials and evade that particular technology, which will evolve, etc. It will not stop if only a fraction of the criminals and their audience are caught, because there will always remain a substantial fraction in the wild to evolve their methods.
Christian -
On the surface, it would appear that particular argument (countermeasures have to be highly effective or else they simply encourage evolution and thus become ineffective over time) could be applied equally well to a large range of security measures – including many that are widely deployed today such as home and automobile locks, network intrusion monitoring, passwords on computer accounts, etc. Somehow we’ve determined that these measures remain useful, despite their imperfect nature and the continuous state of attack/defense evolution.
The locks that you describe do not work because they prevent entering.
They mostly work because they transform a mere "unauthorized entry" into
"breaking and entering", and thus filter out a category of weakly
motivated miscreants.
Security measures tend to split into two categories, encryption and
theater. The encryption-class measures can be verified with formal proof
and the like. The theater-class measures such as "letter and digits and
at least one emoticon in a password", not so much. They are mere speed
bumps on the path of intruders, while making life painful for regular
users. If you goal is lock-like signalling, then you want to minimize
the side effects on these regular users.
An equivalent of that for CSAM would be to make transmission of CSAM
material a crime and process it post facto, after the perpetrators is
already caught. A bit like processing Al Capone for mail fraud, which
did not require opening everybody's envelopes.
Now one can argue that real world security analogies don’t apply, because in the real world there is often the prosecution of culprits – unlike occurs with those caught in spam filters – but I would note that there is rather significant prosecution efforts (and successes) today against CSAM production and distribution, so that comparison to spam detection really doesn’t hold up – even modestly functional measures that mitigate a small additional fraction of the activity would make a real very difference to those who don’t have to suffer the harms of trafficking & production.
Earlier on this thread, we were told that law enforcement has a huge
pile of leads to process, and cannot possibly process them all. That's
why I do believe that enough criminals will escape and that the
proposals will create a Darwinian response of some kind. And by the way,
all these leads were obtained without letting the governments peer into
everybody's mailbox.
Perhaps I misunderstood, and there’s a more coherent formulation of why countermeasures are likely to "to increase the distribution and production of CSAM and with it the number of victims” – if so, can you elaborate?
I am not the one who said that, and I am not sure that the effect would
be more than a small temporary reduction. On the other hand, I do notice
the similarities with the "war on drug", in which the Darwinian process
got us the big drug smuggling conglomerates that then proceeded to
industrialize the production of fentanyl and crystal meth.
It is pretty obvious that if we make encryption illegal for all honest
people, criminals will adapt, and the police work will have to continue.
Thus the proposal would destroy encryption without any of the expected
benefits.
If you look at "cui bono", who would benefit from this privacy breaking
proposals, the answer is authoritarian governments, not exploited children.
-- Christian Huitema
