Why can’t algorithms do the police work for some crimes?
Let’s walk through this.
1. Criminal kidnaps child and abuses him. 2. Criminal produced video of said abuse and sells it on the web. 3. Criminal continues to sell it and it spreads. 4. The video is detected by authorities who promptly add it to database. 5. Video is cryptographically hashed and now anybody who stores this content in iCloud can be identified 6. A customer of the criminal is caught 7. Forensics leads authorities to criminal who produced the video 8. One less criminal to profit from kidnapping and abusing children
Everyone tries to make this approach as a slippery slope to facial. It doesn’t have to be that way if the right people are in the loop to blow the whistle.
Full whitepaper: https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...
This entire endeavor hands the keys to an unaccountable police state.
You are describing the reverse cause of targeted search for the individual in which each step has probability that is much less than 100%. The technology discussed is a broad sweep: everything, everywhere, every time.
Oh, well, no need to worry so much, Apple has just added data collection ability which others had in one way or another.
Most reductions of privacy toward the police would act as an effective deterrent to that crime and other crimes.
Deterring crime is not enough to justify a reduction in privacy.
For the second one, maybe, but I seriously doubt icloud encryption is going to do that.
Either way, just talking about baselines and percents is a good improvement over just "this would decrease crime". Add in the downsides too and you have yourself a good platform for discussion!
if you really want to put a dent in abuse, mandate cameras in every home because that is where most abuse happenes. Anybody who opposes that clearly has something to hide...
Police can always pinky promise to never use it for anything except catching the baddies.
Yes. For anyone who wonders. This is sarcasm.
I'm carefully not alleging that this is illegal, because it's a third party doing it and it's not obvious that they are acting as the governments agent. Regardless of whether or not that solves the legal problem of unlawful searches, it does not solve the moral problem that we have a right to be free from unreasonable searches.
Replace "child porn" with "political posters" here. If you would have a problem with that search, I claim that you should have a problem with this search, because the there is no evidence that the person you are searching is committing a crime, and as a result the claim for this to be a morally valid search needs to not be about guilt (which would require probable cause first), but about it not being a prohibited search in the first place.
Don't think of an algorithm as an independent actor, think of it as an awesome tool that makes you 100x more productive.
a) Executives at Alphabet, who are ultimately in charge of the companies decisions
b) The individual product managers, lawyers, engineers, and whoever else is involved in creating, maintaining, and running the system that bans people inappropriately.
The algorithm they are using is a tool that they are using to do this, using a tool does not absolve them of the responsibility in any way.
... and guns and cars don't kill people, murderers do.
But now a company is creating s new kind of "gun" that huge chunks of the community of security professionals are warning about because it is insanely powerful and dangerous.
We have a number of reasons to warn about it:
- China will undoubtedly demand to have Apple scan for their hashes too. The databases these hashes are collected from are not public for obvious reasons so this means they can slip whatever they want into it. Maybe Apple will check the images before they send them over but that is not necessarily the case as far as I read it, also it takes one rogue employee to correctly classify as not abuse material but make a note of the account and send it back after work.
- This is not your average sha256 hash. This is perpetual hashes. They are made to catch not only the exact document but all kinds of variations of it. I have not specialized in perpetual hashes but as far as I can understand it goes without saying that the more resistant this is to modifications, the easier it becomes to create innocent images that triggers it.
- even if we had a magic algorithm that resonated with everything good and only matched the images we wanted there still is potential for abuse. When I was younger I browsed through the cache folder of my machine and I remember there being a lot of images there that I can't remember having seen on any site I visited. Now it is said that this algorithm will only flag images about to be uploaded so obviously cache folders won't be scanned. But once this tool is in place why won't governments start applying pressure to Apple to scan everything? And what prevents someones soon-to-be ex from downloading and slipping some into iCloud when one leaves the phone unlocked?
- Due process should sort many of the problematic cases here, but child abuse is for good reasons one of the worst things you can get accused. A mere accusation is often enough to ruins someone's life even if it later becomes clear to law enforcement that the person is innovent. Also most places have a way to go wrt due process.
If one child abuser can sell his contents to thousands via nothing but WhatsApp, word of mouth, and a Bitcoin wallet, what will you do to fight that?
I’m all for freedom of speech and freedom from fishing expeditions and what not, but if you don’t deter these things they will grow.
WhatsApps only claim to be private is end-to-end encryption of messages. The moment a polkce officer opens the phone of a buyer they can identify the seller. Same if an undercover cop hears the word-of-mouth and buys.
This is just ordinary good police work that I whole-heartedly support.