Olives @olives@qoto.org

https://reason.com/2023/09/13/brickbat-fashion-police-4/

"The Chinese government has proposed a law that would ban wearing clothing or symbols that "undermine the spirit or hurt the feelings of the Chinese nation.""

"The proposal comes after police in Suzhou detained a woman for wearing a Japanese kimono and after people wearing rainbow-print clothing were barred from attending a concert in Beijing."

https://edri.org/our-work/open-letter-eu-countries-should-say-no-to-the-csar-mass-surveillance-proposal/ Another open letter against this terrible proposal. Yes, the one referred to in the E.U. as chat control.

https://edri.org/our-work/party-cipate-and-celebrateencryption/ Interesting campaign in favor of end-to-end encryption.

Do you remember the Phoenix Wright courtroom, lol (a bunch of video games with an anime).

It was very "Don't waste our time, we know it was you." with like no evidence.

And then, the lawyer, Phoenix Wright, has to really prove his case, even uncovering the identity of the real murderer.

Due process is important.

"Would AI porn reduce child abuse?"

The answer to that would be yes.

I honestly don't think this is an interesting question for a number of reasons.

A better question is whether AI panic would lead to incursions on free expression, privacy, due process, and other human rights. The answer to that is absolutely yes.

Prohibitions or restrictions tend not to be particularly nuanced. This is particularly the case when it involves the State. For a number of reasons, the State is the worst place for that.

The State also tends to be very adversarial, and not particularly co-operative (to advance better ends), whenever they get involved in something. Keeping the State out entirely seems like a good scenario.

Some arguments are very bad.

Someone might deliberately "send porn to a minor". It appears there are already laws to deal with this? Also, they could still bother a minor in different ways, and chances are that a bad actor could still do it, regardless of how someone targets good actors.

There are other ways in which someone could be harassing. However, these are either illegal, and / or don't inherently involve a particular technology. Also, punishing good actors would not stop bad ones.

Sounds important for U.K. people.

There's a new lobbying push for chat control at the E.U.

So, I think I'll cover some of misinfo being spread briefly.

1) It is argued that all is well with existing scanning / prevention initiatives.

It is inarguable that existing initiatives have not led to legitimate expression being censored or chilled. They very much have been.

2) It will lead to "technological improvements" in the future which will lead to fewer issues.

There is no evidence that this will happen, and even if it did, it still wouldn't resolve the core problems with this proposal.

3) Law enforcement agencies support it.

Yes, well, law enforcement will likely support anything which "might" be helpful, or which might reduce effort expended.

4) Accuracy rates are high.

Are they? Even if they were, at scale, it would still lead to many false positives, discriminative impacts, chilled expression, or disclosures of sensitive information to hostile governments.

5) The largest U.S. based companies already appear to do many of the things you want them to do here (although, I think there are quite a few areas where they go too far, I won't elaborate on it in this post).

I won't comment on whether that is a violation of privacy or not, however, isn't it misleading to suggest that little is being done?

6) Appealing to the notion that the Internet is a "lawless space".

The Internet has never been a "lawless space". The regulatory structure of the Internet tends to be the way it is to be protective of various human rights, such as due process, freedom of expression, and privacy.

Putting a disproportionate focus on "fighting child abuse" at "all costs" would push these contingencies out of alignment, and would create many harms in it's own right.

Further contrary to the notion of the Internet being a lawless space, cases of child abuse are vigorously investigated and prosecuted by law enforcement agencies from across the globe.

7) Public opinion supports it.

We've already been over how and why that survey is flawed. But, if you want a brief recap of one manner in which it is, the people who relied on it boasted about how they put a strong influence on people participating in it to answer a particular way.

8) End-to-end encryption is not threatened.

This is complete bullshit and everyone knows it. Playing silly little semantics games does not change that basic fact.

9) Prevention is a major focus of this proposal.

This sounds like a euphemism for censorship, privacy intrusions, and due process violations. This seems likely to hit legitimate use of a service. This makes me even warier of this proposal.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/09/arkansas-shouldnt-hastily-make-foia-less-functional Arkansas looking to undermine FOIA and make the government less transparent.

While I hold the government to a yet higher standard, particularly as they tend to be a very blunt instrument, I don't think it makes sense to let private platforms off for poor free expression either.