Automatic artificial computer intelligence algorithms have advanced to the point where they can identify certain categories of images with high accuracy. The company Apple plans to implement this technology on its mobile phones, to automatically screen all of the pictures anyone takes with their phone. An examination of Apple's plans to 'scan' your iPhone photos for abusive content - TNW News, August 2021 The stated goal is not bad, trying to prevent child abuse material. But the implications for privacy are not good. It's very common these days for teens to send naked or sexual pictures of each other. Doing so can result in severe consequences. (related thread: Suicide of teen highlights problems in pornography law ) With all these type of pictures getting automatically tagged by a computer and reported, it could get a lot of children in huge trouble with severe legal consequences. Very likely the algorithm would not always be able to differentiate between children and adults, so more likely what would happen is any pornographic images would get automatically reported. If you send a pornographic picture to your girlfriend, or she sends one to you, very likely that picture will be flagged, sent off, and stored in some database until an actual human is able to look at it and determine it is not child pornography. Again, your privacy would be gone if sending pornographic images through your phone is something that you or your partner sometimes do. This is the equivalent of mass computer-assisted spying and surveillance on phones, or at least any pictures owners take with their phones. Right now Apple controls 46 percent of the smartphone market in the US. There could also be Fourth Amendment search issues with this, since it could be extremely easy to frame innocent people with crimes. Think about hackers getting into phones. Since these reports are made automatically by computer, police would not need any other additional actual physical reason to search the phone in the first place. Maybe to help you understand, a physical analogy of this would be if someone planted a stolen piece of property in your house and that piece of property had a tracking device in it, so police do not even need any other reason to search your house. The very fact that the piece of stolen property is in your house in enough reason for both the search and for you to be arrested, making it far easier for an innocent person to be punished.
That's going to be problematical at best. I was involved in a case of child pornography some years back. Had a customer come into our store with a virus infected hard drive. The virus deleted every one of his files and so it was in effect an unformatted hard drive. The reality was that only the File Allocation Table was deleted. The files were there, but no operating system could access it. Unless you had the proper tools. Which as an IT professional...I had. So we're doing the full, sector by sector scan for any intact files. I just happened to look at the screen at the right time and saw that the last file recovered was 13yofbj.jpg. I wrote that name down and when the recovery was done, I did a search for the file name. It was as I thought, a young girl "bobbing the knob". Worse still it was in a buried folder of other child porn. About 30 folders worth and several thousand files. I told my boss and she called the police. The part that made it difficult, was the fact that the legal definition of child porn has to involve children before they develop their secondary sexual characteristics because there are sex workers out there who look a lot younger than they are and they take advantage of that fact to cater to those who prefer the younger crowd. That particular image...was not what was needed to start the investigation. It was enough probable cause for them to look further into the contents of those folders. Yes...there were images of girls who were obviously pre-pubescent and yes...he was arrested, tried and convicted. I'm curious to see how/if a computer algorithm can determine the differences.
You do realize that there are viruses now that can automatically download child pornography onto people's computers. I'm not in favor of people sharing pictures of sex acts involving very young children, but I have to say this whole basic idea of criminalizing mere pictures does set a bad precedent, when it comes to civil liberties. If you can criminalize what essentially amounts to just data in a computer, it's real easy for that data to be put there by someone else, and it will ultimately set a precedent for other types of data and other types of information to be criminalized as well. It does ultimately take the first step out onto a slippery slope. I would hope someone could come up with a creative way to deal with this to try to stop it without actually criminalizing information, or arresting people just because some type of data was found in people's computer. When you say that something should be illegal, then pretty much automatically you justify all sorts of laws or actions to try to investigate and enforce that thing being illegal, and that's where you can run into problems with civil liberties.
Quite aware of that. I've seen cases where computers on high speed internet connections have been turned into pirate FTP sites back in the days when the best connection was about 1-3 mbps and anyone pushing 10+ was "rocking phat pipe". And yes, some of those pirate FTP sites were pirate child porn FTP sites that the criminal pedophile community would use to share images. In this case however, he was tried and convicted on more than just the images. His browser history was a consideration and the computer itself was enough to get a search warrant of the person's home wherein they did find printed copies of the images as well as underground 'zines. This was not a case of a virus or a hacked PC turned into a pirate FTP site. The problem with those images is that while the images in themselves isn't the problem. The problem is that they were created in the first place. That an actual child was put into a sexual situation and made to perform for someone else's benefit. Even if it's now 30 year old images, that still means that 30 years ago a crime was committed. Again, while that it true, there needed to be corroborating evidence in order to convict the person with the porn. Files buried in a computer could be virus or hacked into a PC. But to prove that we need to check things. Like for example, I worked on a church computer that was infected with a lot of porn. Regular, adult porn and it was all legal stuff, but I did find a virus that is known for slipping in porn as you have said. When I saw and cleaned that, the protestations of innocence from the pastor was a lot more believable. Flip side to that, if I were to find porn in a PC that's in the house of someone with a teenager and I didn't find a virus...I'd be suggesting to the parents to install Net Nanny. And even if I did find a virus, I'd still blame the teenager. Not for downloading porn, but perhaps unknowingly downloading software that might have it as a piggybacked bit of code. The problem is that the "information" was illegal long before the PC was commonly available to the general public. They made photographs of child porn illegal. So when you now introduce PCs and the 'net, you now have a new version. A new form of photograph, digital and not chemically produced. Should it be allowed when the older version is illegal? That could open the doors to more child porn. After all if the law was against a media where light strikes chemicals and more chemicals are used to produce the image and they use a media where light is converted into 1s and 0s... "Can" being the operative word. We've seen people violating civil liberties over botched murder investigations. people forced to give a confession to rape that DNA has cleared them of the crime that STILL had to fight to get out of prison. We've also seen the other side of the spectrum where police have followed the rules, properly investigated and brought the suspects to the criminal courts where the evidence had them convicted and properly sentenced. The world isn't perfect. There will always be abuses of a system. Doesn't mean that we should say "@#$% it" and allow crimes.
But the development of technology made transfer of information and images far easier, and allowed huge amounts information and pictures to be stored. Of course there is a similarity, but there are also huge differences that make it almost impossible to compare. When you add a physical thing to your library, it is far easier to know and be aware what is in that physical thing. With a download, you could be loading what amounts to a small library of information, so much information there's no realistic way for you to look through it all every time. Maybe if I can explain it to you this way, it's like the difference between handing you a small box versus parking a giant cargo container in your driveway jammed full of so many things it's impossible for you to even go through it. With a physical thing, there has to be a physical connection and some physical exertion to move the object. With an electronic thing, all it takes is a few effortless quick clicks. But each of these laws just create more additional ways in which abuse could occur, and make it more likely. The point is maybe we should only stick to the most essential laws, or try to avoid creating laws that could likely allow high probability of problems. Now I think we're going off topic. This thread was intended to focus on the civil liberties aspect. But maybe we can bring this up just a little bit. Let's please use some logic here. What is the connection between the too, exactly? Everything you stated is true, but what are you actually trying to imply? More specifically, how does criminalizing the pictures prevent the abuse from happening? Look, I'm not trying to argue in favor of this one thing specifically, but I'm just coming at this from a Libertarian approach and am really really against possession laws of any sort. It would certainly be reasonable to make it illegal to buy pictures of abuse, and it would be understandable to make it illegal to distribute nude pictures of someone else when it was obviously done without their consent, but why specifically does there need to be a law against possession? Is this really something that is absolutely necessary, or is it just convenient to law enforcement?
The I only benefit I can think of of making the possession itself illegal would be to make it easier to get convictions, and thus easier to scare and discourage the community from buying or making the images.
We hereby declare it illegal to look at child porn. And we shall enforce that by looking at child porn.
There is no pretense of privacy with cellphones. It is just a matter of who do you want to invade yours---Apple or Google.
We have a massive problem with child pornography and trafficking. Apple is doing something about it. I see what y'all are saying about the potential infringements, but I'm not unhappy with a company looking to do something to solve the problem.
