Isn't that because laws relating to physical harm already exist and are well-established? There's not really much legal regulation yet in terms of specific AI-driven harms. We're probably yet still to find out all the ways in which it can be abused.
Perhaps the issue is "psychological harms" which are not yet criminal, but we have an up-and-coming generation of law grads who believe they should be.
Why is it not okay at all? That's what our intelligence agencies do with their bulk data collection capabilities, and they have an immense positive impact on society.
If you want to argue that they can scan people outside the country and not US citizens, and that that has a benefit, go ahead and make that argument. You might even convince me.
But it’s just begging the question to say there’s immense benefit to them searching US citizens’ communications without a reason.
That’s the whole question.
Show me why we should change the constitution which guarantees us freedom from this sort of government oppression.
I'm writing from a UK perspective so there's no underlying constitutional issue here like there might be in the US. Bulk data collection is restricted by specific laws and this mandates regular operational oversight by an independent body, to ensure that both the collection and each individual use of the data is necessary and proportionate.
Some of this will include data of British citizens, but the thing is, we have a significant home-grown terrorism problem and serious organised criminal gang activity, happening within the country. If intelligence analysts need to look at, for example, which phone number contacted which other phone number on a specific date in the recent past, there's no other way to do this other than bulk collect all phone call metadata from the various telecom operators, and store it ready for searching.
The vast majority of that data will never be seen by human eyes, only indexed and searched by automated systems. All my phone calls and internet activity will be in there somewhere, I'm sure, but I don't consider that in itself to be government oppression. Only if it's used for oppressive purposes, would it become oppressive.
Mass surveillance isn't necessarily bad. It depends how it's implemented. The solution you describe is basically how it works with the intelligence agencies, in that only a miniscule fraction of the data collected in bulk ever reaches human eyes. The rest ends up being discarded after the retention period.
In terms of outcomes, almost nobody is actually surveilled, as the overall effect is the same as no data having been collected on them in the first place.
That said, I am personally more comfortable with my country's intelligence agencies hoovering up all my online activity than I am with the likes of Apple. The former is much more accountable than the latter.
If your ex-spouse was a contractor for a government agency with access to the mass surveillance machine, would you still feel comfortable "that only a miniscule fraction of the data collected in bulk ever reaches human eyes?"
What if you were a candidate for political office, pushing opinions that angered large swaths of the Intelligence Comminity?
The "minuscule fraction" of content is not surfaced by some random roll of the dice - it's the definitionally most interesting content, in the sense that some human went specifically looking for it in the heap of content caught in the dragnet. And it only needs to be interesting to at least one person with the clearance to search for it.
Maybe that means it's a video of a child being abused, and some morally upstanding federal officer is searching for it because anyone possessing it is ethically and legally culpable for the abuse of that child... Or maybe it's a PDF containing evidence of FBI kidnapping and torturing innocent civilians, and some morally corrupt federal officer is searching for it because anyone possessing it is a liability who needs to be silenced... Or maybe it's a JSON file containing the GPS locations of an individual for the past year, and some emotionally scorned federal contractor is searching for it because that individual is their ex-spouse who's moved onto a new partner.
Are you really prepared to put your faith in the trustworthiness and moral clarity of the population of 100k+ people with federal security clearances?
What leads you to believe that access to search these datasets is some sort of unregulated, unmonitored free-for-all for anyone allowed to wander into an intelligence agency building?
The scenarios you invented sound very far-fetched to me, if these did happen I very much doubt the perpetrator would be able to get away with it.
> At least a dozen U.S. National Security Agency employees have been caught using secret government surveillance tools to spy on the emails or phone calls of their current or former spouses and lovers in the past decade, according to the intelligence agency’s internal watchdog.
Because when they couldn't win the war on porn, some right Christians decided to cloak their attack in "concerns" of "abuse". See project Excedus. Of course it has nothing to do with abuse and everything to do with their attempts to keep people from seeing pixels of other people having sex. Backpage was shut down despite being good at removing underage and trafficed women - which meant that sex workers had to find other places that didn't have nearly as good protections.
So yeah. When these things pop up I assume malicious intent.
But being critical of pornography and considering it to be abuse isn't a view limited to right-wing Christians. For example, here's what Noam Chomsky has to say about it:
> Pornography is humiliation and degradation of women. It's a disgraceful activity. I don't want to be associated with it. Just take a look at the pictures. I mean, women are degraded as vulgar sex objects. That's not what human beings are. I don't even see anything to discuss.
> Interviewer: But didn't performers choose to do the job and get paid?
> The fact that people agree to it and are paid, is about as convincing as the fact that we should be in favour of sweatshops in China, where women are locked into a factory and work fifteen hours a day, and then the factory burns down and they all die. Yeah, they were paid and they consented, but it doesn't make me in favour of it, so that argument we can't even talk about.
> As for the fact that it's some people's erotica, well you know that's their problem, doesn't mean I have to contribute to it. If they get enjoyment out of humiliation of women, they have a problem, but it's nothing I want to contribute to.
> Interviewer: How should we improve the production conditions of pornography?
> By eliminating degradation of women, that would improve it. Just like child abuse, you don't want to make it better child abuse, you want to stop child abuse.
> Suppose there's a starving child in the slums, and you say "well, I'll give you food if you'll let me abuse you." Suppose - well, there happen to be laws against child abuse, fortunately - but suppose someone were to give you an argument. Well, you know, after all a child's starving otherwise, so you're taking away their chance to get some food if you ban abuse. I mean, is that an argument?
> The answer to that is stop the conditions in which the child is starving, and the same is true here. Eliminate the conditions in which women can't get decent jobs, not permit abusive and destructive behaviour.
The main impetus behind "child safety" advocacy nowadays seem to be by cells of extremist right-wing Christian / QAnon types who believe in conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and the "gay groomer" panic. It's a reasonable assumption to make about any such group mentioned in the media that doesn't have an established history at least prior to 2016.
It sounds like an entirely unreasonable assumption to me. Advocating for child safety is something that transcends political differences, and generally unifies people across the political spectrum.
I mean, there aren't many people who want paedophiles to be able to amass huge collections of child abuse imagery from other paedophiles online. And pretty much every parent wants their child to be kept safe from predators both online and offline.
I didn't claim otherwise. The fact remains that a specific subset of a specific political party has been using "advocating for child safety" as a pretext to accelerate fear of and harassment against the LGBT community and "the left" in general for years now, and they put a lot of effort into appearing legitimate.
And yes, because their politics are becoming normalized within American culture, it is necessary to be skeptical about references to any such group. Assuming good faith is a rule on HN but elsewhere, where bad faith is what gets visibility, it's naive.
Well, paedophiles hijacking leftist movements for their own ends is a known problem, it's happened before and it will happen again. One particularly infamous instance occurred in the UK back in the 1970s:
So if there are indeed some right-wing groups talking about this, maybe it's best not to brush off their claims without some scrutiny first. And I say this as someone who mostly agrees with the left on most things.
Anyway I don't think that any of this has much to do with Apple being asked to implement specific technical measures for detecting child abuse imagery.
> So if there are indeed some right-wing groups talking about this, maybe it's best not to brush off their claims without some scrutiny first. And I say this as someone who mostly agrees with the left on most things.
Figlet indeed.
> figlett 5 months ago [flagged] [dead] | parent | context | prev [–] | on: Florida courts could take 'emergency' custody of k...
> This is excellent news for children at risk of being abused by militant transgenders and the medical establishment who are enabling them. Thank you Florida for trying to put an end to this menace.
Exactly, this is one area where the political left, particularly in the US, are failing terribly on child safety.
I'm in the UK and we're doing better here though, the main left-wing party is backing away from the particular ideology that has enabled this. I was going to vote for them anyway as we desperately need our public services to be restored and welfare for those less fortunate in society to be improved, but I'm pleased they're moving towards a sensible, harm-reducing stance on this issue rather than assuming everything the gender activists say is reasonable.
Might just be your personalized experience. I get music, comedy and old film clips recommended to me on YouTube. It's actually gotten really good at predicting what I might enjoy watching.
By contrast, Twitter is always showing me controversial tweets from people I don't follow. But then that's mostly why I use the site, to enjoy the arguments and drama.
