While I agree the spread of CSAM needs to be stopped, we can’t violate everyone’s privacy in the effort to do it.
And are actual people going to be reviewing these messages or are we just going to blindly trust AI not to flag innocent people on accident?Moreover, there is no way to implement scanning for {something-bad} in our encrypted communications that will not be abused or put people’s safety at risk.
We need lawmakers to understand this.
Edit: And we need to hold those who don’t respect it accountable for their acts of aggression.
Oh, they do, they already exempted themselves and the police.
Nothing to worry about, everyone…
I got pictures of my nieces and nephew naked taking their bath… Am I going to jail?
I mean, client-side scanning would do shit all to help anyway because nothing prevents culprits from encrypting the messages in a different app they are using for sending. This is just entirely a net loss – right as fash are poised to take over too. What a mess.
Looking for CSAM is only the excuse they put out. Who knows what they are actually after. Maybe they just want to find compromat on people.
Its purpose is to quash dissent when the inevitable authoritarian police state comes.
They won’t let another French revolution happen again
Imagine trying to prevent the French to protest
Well, we can’t trust that corruption would be low enough that this wouldn’t be exploited for other reasons. Child trafficking and exploitation is off the charts. If this did actually help those kids I’d consider supporting it. But I do remember when Apple announced that they would do this that some groups that seemed reputable claimed that it wouldn’t actually help. I don’t know what to think of it.
99.9% of CSAM sharing etc. happens on the dark web forums, not on like, whatsapp or signal. So this legislation wouldn’t help prevent or catch those people
These are the same people who allow Catholic clergy to fuck kids… to this day!
Ohh wait. It is not about the children? Colour me surprised. It is nearly as if it is used as a pretense to strip away our rights 🤔. Just wait for the next big terrorist attack. Then we will get our rights taken away under another pretense 👍
As long as there are powerful people, they will always use their power to life a live of “rules for thee but not for me”.
I was interested in Apple’s approach where they would look at checksums of the images to see if they matched checksums of known CSAM. Its trivial to defeat by changing even a single pixel, but it’s the only acceptable way to implement this scanning. Any other method is an overreach and a huge invasion of privacy.
Its trivial to defeat
Maybe, depending on the algorithm used. Some are designed to produce the same output given similar inputs.
It’s also easy to abuse systems like that in order to get someone falsely flagged, by generating a file with the same checksum as known CSAM.
It’s also easy for someone in power (or with the right access) to add checksums of anything they don’t like, such as documents associated with opposing political or religious views.
In other words, still invasive and dangerous.
More thoughts here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/11/why-adding-client-side-scanning-breaks-end-end-encryption
Checksums wouldnt work well for their purposes if they could easily be made to match any desired checksum. It’s one way math.
One-way math doesn’t preclude finding a collision.
(And just to be clear, checksum in the context of this conversation is a generic term that includes cryptographic hashes and perceptual hashes.)
Also, since we’re talking about a list of checksums, an attacker wouldn’t even have to find a collision with a specific one to get someone in trouble. This makes an attack far easier. See also: the birthday problem.
Checksums, on the other hand, are designed to minimize the probability of collisions between similar inputs, without regard for collisions between very different inputs.[8] Instances where bad actors attempt to create or find hash collisions are known as collision attacks.[9]
Even this method is overreach: who control the database?
Journalist have a scoop on a US violation of civil rights? Well not if it is important to the CIA who slipped the PDF that was their evidence into the hash pool and had his phone silently rat him out as the one reporting.
This hands ungodly power to those running that database. It’s blind, and it “only flags the bad things”. Which we all agree CSAM is bad, but I can easily ruin someone inconvenient to me if I was in that position by just ensuring some of his personal and unique photo get into the hash. It’s a one way process, so everyone would just believe definitively that this radical MLK guy is a horrible pedo because we got some images off his phone in a diner.
It’s not as easy to defeat as just changing the pixel…
CSAM detection often uses existing features for image matching such as PhotoDNA by Microsoft. Similarly both Facebook and Google also have image matching algorithms and software that is used for CSAM detection which.
These are all hash based image matching tools used for broad feature sets such as reverse image search in bing, and are not defeated by simply changing a pixel. Or even redrawing parts of the whole image itself.
You’re not just throwing an md5 or an sha at an images binary. It’s much more nuanced and complex than that, otherwise hash based image matching would be essentially useless for anything of consequence.
