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Notes -
European tech, American tech, and regulation
tl;dr: what do you think about 1) European alternatives to American tech, and 2) European and American tech regulations?
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Vaguely, I believe American tech companies should be regulated more, since they seem to be damaging society and have effective monopolies due to network effects. And more importantly I want to see more tech innovation, which I think is hurt by less competition. But I don't exactly know how.
I generally think America and Europe should work together, but here, I think different regulatory frameworks and competing tech services is good.
Good riddance.
My heuristic is that any time the state whines about CSAM, or generally one of the horsemen of the infocalypse, treat it as a power grab by the police wanting more rights to snoop on citizens. Once you let them snoop, they will find other areas of concern which are also very terrible and before you know it, you have been frog-boiled into letting them search your phones for copyright violations.
The largest problem with CSAM is people paying for it, because it creates an incentive to produce more, which involves the sexual abuse of kids. The good news (at least when this product is concerned) here is that most people are not skilled enough to hide financial transactions. "So you just create a bunch of wallets and then use mixers to move funds from a wallet linked to you to a wallet not linked to you" is not something most people will understand.
The second, IMHO much smaller problem is people making CSAM available for members of the public. It is obviously bad for the victims, and arguably it may create customers willing to pay or more speculatively drives consumers to sexual abuse. But even here you do not need to scan people's private messages. After all, definitionally any such group has an inlet, which means that you can just have cops infiltrate it. And once you are in their chat groups, you can trivially track down the people behind it through their phone numbers. Well, at least for mainstream chat apps which the chat control would target, but anyone tech savvy enough to use tor will also be tech savvy enough to thwart client side scanning.
What remains would be closed groups, who personally know and trust each other, and use encrypted chat apps to exchange CSAM. This seems a pretty minor problem, to be honest. If you institute client side scanning, they can just switch to trading boxes full of VHS tapes. Any car on the Autobahn could have such a box in it! Does this mean we should install xray scanners to search through all the cars?
Obviously not. There are always tradeoffs between effectively enforcing laws and the costs of doing so, both monetarily and to civil liberty. CSAM as a whole, and the cases which could only be detected with client side scanning in particular does not seem like a big deal, e.g. compared to sexual abuse of children more generally. I mean, it is good that it is illegal and we will punish you if we catch you, but the average kid getting sexually abused is not getting abused because their guardian wants to make a quick buck selling CSAM.
But the political reality is that there are no quick fixes for actual sexual abuse. It is just not politically feasible to put any child under 24-7 video surveillance (and in fact that would probably mess up kids too). The relevant tradeoff is how much you want to treat any father, teacher or sports coach as a possible child molester. But you can't win any votes by moving that tradeoff.
So instead you focus on the creeps watching CSAM, and the technology they use. 80% of the voters don't understand tech, and everyone hates CSAM, so that is a winning strategy.
End-to-end encryption is a technical fix which was widely rolled out when it became apparent to the tech community that the state will snoop on traffic to the maximum extend technically feasible. Similar to how the US founders wanted the population armed so there was a failsafe if the government turned bad, really. Obviously there is some push against E2E, and this is just part of that.
As a side notice, I find it especially ironic that the so-called Christian parties (e.g. CDU in Germany) are always championing these anti-tech measures. Half of them are in a church which a mere generation ago was systematically enabling priests to sexually abuse kids. You know, actual children, most of whom were likely traumatized. And now they want to tell us that if there is some creep who is jerking off to nude pictures of five-year-olds, that is a civilizational emergency and we need to bug everyone's phones to stop it.
This is just general man-hating; the women who vote for those parties want the power to ban all men jerking off to nude pictures of women (so that men can be maximally exploited by women) and 5 year olds are just the motte of that argument. Traditionalists (or more loosely, 'Christian conservatives') and progressives are in agreement that this is a thing that should happen and the language differences between the two groups are just bikeshedding.
And their opponents are progressives, who are... also systematically enabling priests to sexually abuse kids, but it's totally different this time because instead of men in churches with an abusive hand it's women in schools with an abusive mouth.
Also there's lots of sexual abuse of children by teachers. Supposedly far more than the total amount of abuse by religious figures. But more kids go to school than church.
Teachers are religious figures. The Christian Right was correct when they made this observation back when they were a relevant political force, but they also believed that was in large part a good thing and were as such unwilling to actually do anything about it.
Which is in part why they got away with it even when the gender balance was closer to 50/50 than it is today, and now that it's shifted further into a majority-female profession, that gender's sexual abuse is harder to prosecute because [for the 50% of the population that doesn't benefit from being able to do it], a significant portion of men don't believe it's a coherent concept, and even if they do, they think that the only way it happens is not actually destructive (re: South_Park_Nice.jpg).
Yet, if you believe the statistics that show this population 'abuses' students in the male mode at a far higher rate than men did at their peak, it's likely that the female mode of sexual abuse occurs at an even higher rate than that.
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