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Fighting pedophilia at the expense of our privacy: The EU rule that could break the internet
(english.elpais.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2023
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No, we should definitely not simply accept this kind of unjust and overly excessive legislation. Reality has shown that even democratic governments will use these technological means for questionable purposes. Also, what if there is a security breach and god knows who gets access to everyone's private messages? The old story of "i have nothing to hide" is no excuse, everyone has a right to private communication without fear of "saying something wrong". Things that are okay to say now may not be in the future. We see a trend towards right and extremist parties in many European countries, what if they get access to everyone's communication and have the means to go after whoever they like? Once the door is open, there is no going back. And even if there is no bad intention and they really just look for child pornography: There are always false positives and algorithms are faulty. With this legislation, everyone is suddenly at risk of being visited by the police because some system decided that you are a threat
To tell the truth, the most worrying part of the law is not the mandatory control over everything but the fact that people/accounts/sources can be blocked in order not to produce more "offending" contents (whatever the criterion to determine what offending contents are). This is against the net neutrality and violates the principles of the www, as the title hints. But, you know... the fact here is that I sincerely believe that we can't do anything to stop this from happening, I'm not a troll. Maybe it's just pessimism.
And it kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it? Saying we don't prosecute the pedophiles, just block them on this platform and have them go somewhere else? I think they should convict them, not sweep this problem under the carpet and make it invisible. Those pedophiles are probably happy about the possibility of being just blocked instead of facing prosecution.
Who said that there won't be any prosecution?
It is implied. Sorry, I didn't find the reference so it's more speculation what I'm doing. But CSAM is already illegal. You can have it taken down immediately and if someone doesn't comply, they become complicit by today's standards. The user doing it needs to face prosecution and that's already how legislation is. So what do you need that additional exception for?
It is good for the one case in which you're not doing the first two things. It is an excuse to not do the job properly and just hide it so nobody notices. The 'easy route' that does away with the difficult investigations and court cases and such. And I'm good at that myself. I procrastinate a lot. If you give me an excuse not to do a difficult thing, I'll happily use that excuse. In my opinion, it's a very bad approach to police work and they shouldn't have an easy excuse available to them, not to dig down and do their job properly. And I can't see anyone benefit from that except from prosecution now not having to pursue their investigations to the point where they catch the pedophile, and the criminals themselves.
I think I'd rather have 3 horrendous pictures online than have it hidden from my view and know they took the easy way to (not) deal with the offender.