I'll play Devil's Advocate (because I enjoy throwing myself into the fray — especially when arguing against a point I actually agree with).
No one is mass-sharing their safe of child-porn worldwide with thousands of other child-porn voyeurs.
The internet and its ubiquitous accessibility combined with digital image file formats has changed the landscape for those that would fight these heinous crimes.
It is indeed a new and special case where a locked safe is not.
The most amazing psy op I’ve ever seen is this convincing the public that it’s people who use encryption who are the perverts, and not the people who literally want to creep on other people’s private photos of their kids / spouses / romantic partners.
This is exactly the opposite of how it works in the real world.
You can have multiple 1-on-1 chats, and CP collectors are pretty good at finding each other online. While I'm very much against this UK legislation, people in the tech sector do themselves no favors b¥ minimizing/handwaving the CP problem.
Isn't that why we pay gov agents to hang out in the seedy parts of the web? If CP consumers are able to find each other with relative ease, I'm sure agents impersonating them can find them too. Then it's up to them to locate them, likely by exploiting an opsec failure along the way.
I see no reason the give the gov eyes on everything when they have a perfectly valid route to investigations.
I'll also play Devil's advocate even though I'm a very vocal advocate for data privacy in real life.
These government agents are people as well, and as people they'll suffer to wade through the dark corners of the web to locate a minuscule part of all the CP data available worldwide. These people will inevitably require mental care to deal with the trauma of looking at GiBs and GiBs of small kids being raped, that's not a cost we can handwave to "we employ government agents", there's not a limitless supply of people willing to do this job, and doing this job doesn't come for free, not for the individuals doing it neither for society (mental trauma care; staffing high enough to allow rotations and avoid burn out, or PTSD, etc.).
I'm not sure I subscribe to that. I've spent a lot of time or the web, and I've seen a lot of gore. So much so it doesn't phase me now, even after not visiting those sites for a decade. I haven't dealt with csam, but I imagine the impact is similar. You get desensitized to it. The difference: LE gets to put and end to it via their investigations. That is rewarding enough for people to stay, I assume.
Plus even if you did dragnet everything, you'll still need a human in the loop to verify the findings, even if ml classifiers are used to find leads.
Plus what about people that just encrypt their messages locally before sending them across a backdoored platform? The gov can't make encryption illegal. It's just math. Folks will steno it into memes or whatever is hot that gets shared to allow it to live in plain sight.
I know LLMs aren’t a magic bullet for everything, but this seems like exactly the kind of problem they could solve well as they become more cost effective. Dramatically shrink the pool of real people required to keep an eye on this, and sub in virtual agents adept at detecting CP patterns.
Security back doors also carry the risk of having the opposite effect. We’ve seen many examples of powerful, nation state developed tools being leaked online.
There may be a rise in scenarios where people (including children) have their personal devices breached and are extorted for the exact thing the security backdoors were created to prevent.
To a point LLMs can help with this. Additionally software has played a part in this for many years but nobody is getting convicted for possessing media that hasn’t had its contents validated and graded by a human.
Governments use CP/Abuse to pass legislation, which is immediately used for almost anything other than that. If a government did actually care about child welfare there are many things they could do that would actually help children.
But this law to "protect children" is being passed by a government that is simultaneously cutting services that help children, and also trying to reduce/restrict sex ed that so that it is easier to abuse children, I'm going to say that "protecting children" is not their goal with this law.
As I said elsewhere, any argument for "we need the ability to remotely access the content of a phone" (which is what the law is demanding: silent updates to remove encryption and anything else they "need") equally applies to having a government mandated cameras in every house. That would actually prevent child abuse. It would prevent domestic violence. If such was happening the police could intervene immediately. It would remove he said/she said from courts: you can simply play the video from the home.
By the definition of "no encryption because protect-the-children", mandatory cameras in every room of every house is both acceptable, and also objectively superior to BS anti-encryption laws. You can't abuse or beat your family members in the first place if a camera is watching, but anyone moving CSAM around on the internet isn't going to have a problem getting an actual encrypted channel - all the law does is make your personal communication, banking, finances, etc insecure, criminals are safe. Of course even if someone does use a now insecure communication channel to share their child abuse it's moot: the cameras in their house would have already caught them.
So why screw around with "make everyone (including children) unsafe to 'protect the children'" when there's a much more effective solution that would stop the abuse in the first place?
Also, the UK already passed a bunch of "you don't get privacy" laws in order to "prevent terrorism", and they seem to be used primarily to catch people not picking up dog poop, not paying tv licensing fees, etc which sure as shit doesn't sound like it's terrorism related.
In summary: if a law that would otherwise violate fairly basic rights is being pushed with clearly emotive justifications like "child abuse", "terrorism" you should assume you are being played.
The police do not need more power. They do not need to violate everyone's rights. They need to do their jobs and do actual work with what they already have, and demonstrate basic competence before they get any more invasive tools. Recall the Ariana grande bombing in the UK? Multiple friends and family of the bomber had independently and repeatedly reported them to the UK police. 9/11: multiple US government agencies had all the information needed, but were too busy trying to compete with each other. In addition (tens of, if you look at the US) thousands rape kits that aren't even processed, and weirdly they keep finding serial killers and rapists when. they. just. do. their. job.
Throwing away more of our privacy, when police already have huge amounts of information that they just can't be bothered to look at, is beyond stupid.
Similarly, based on the track record of supporting and aiding child abusers, and cutting support for children, any claims a government makes saying something is to "protect children" is clearly false.
The very, very large majority of child abuse happens at schools, half by other children, half by staff. Especially in phys ed/sports. Think about this: this is so prevalent you will probably remember cases of this yourself. Of course, government has made sure there is absolutely nothing child services or police can do about teacher abuse, and nothing can be done at all about teacher (or school) responsibility when they fail to protect children during school (despite the law saying they are responsible). The only thing child services can do is effectively attacking the child (using violence to demand the child be "treated"). And while the police technically can go after the perpetrator, they don't need any proof to go after the child (which "solves" the problem), but they need proof to go after the perpetrator ...
The whole system around children is setup to protect government against children, FIRST. This will not change with surveillance, in fact it will be made a lot worse, and this is a far bigger problem than CP.
So if people claim that all government people are "good people", who are "just trying to help". The problem is the result. The real question is what happens to those children, to the victims, the rest doesn't matter.
To some extent that's actually true. Most teachers that eventually get convicted for ... students aren't pedophiles. They're people with no previous offences, who really did start their job to teach, who at some point lose their self control when dealing with children, because it's so easy. The problem with it being so easy, which leads to the sad observation that they tend to be responsible for a LOT of children, and therefore make a lot of victims before anything is done, because the system is set up to protect them. The current record is a German director of child services, who sexually abused over 30000 children. You might ask how you can even do that, that's almost one child per day, for a decade. The sad answer to that is that he had a large team around him. Teachers, in more normal cases are accused of abusing between 5 and 10 children.
These people know this. They go through the web merely to punish and use violence against society to force what they consider decency standards. The problem is, they do not help these children, they usually only damage them (which leads to constant embarrassments. FBI 2 years ago proudly announced they had done a razzia, and "saved" 43 children from prostitution. Before 2 weeks passed 41 out of 43 of them had run away, with the very large majority very likely going back to prostitution). They just throw them into the child services system which destroys these children's lives far more than even actual abuse does. And, of course, mostly they were not abused but protected by their parents, and were far safer at home. And even that's ignoring that this is government: a significant fraction will get deported if they don't run away.
And this is ignoring the "accidental" studies, which follow this pattern: someone wants to make a career and needs, effectively, to find a large amount of children abused, to get attention. These can't be actually abused because of how humans work: abused children ... abuse others themselves, damage themselves, do drugs, act in criminal ways, ... So nobody in the system wants those, at best they are very problematic children. What these individuals need to do is convince authorities that a large cohort of normal (very young) children are in fact abused, and "need help". Mostly, of course, they don't tire themselves, and do this by simply lying, then ripping the child from their family, but for example there's the "on this anatomically correct doll" scandal.
The "plus" side of this is that we have plenty of evidence of the effect of child services ABSENT earlier abuse or problems in the child's life. And the evidence is damning. These children don't study. They suicide 10x more than normal children. They essentially do not, at all, continue studies after high school, and a high percentage doesn't finish high school
I would like to point these are studies, but this is extremely visible to people working in the field. The help government provides doesn't help children. They know this, yet they keep working in this system. This is, obviously, not moral.
My point was that minimizing the csam issue isn't that relevant to the terribleness of a proposed law. Csam will likely always exist, unfortunately. It's too hard to prevent; the punishments seem to be nondeterrents.
We already have mountains of awful laws that are passed via appeal to csam emotion. I see no reason to pass another one under the appeal of csam reduction when we all know how it will really be used.
I suspect, as always, the bad guys would find ways around any such measures. Leaving, normal, law abiding, tax paying citizens with diminished rights and freedoms.
They literally are though? Numerous cases of child abusers abusing their children and publishing the footage of it from their homes, not to mention the mass storage and hosting (hosting _may_ be less common now).
People physically abuse their family and children at scale (domestic violence is not rare), a really good way to stop this would be to mandate cameras and microphones in everyone’s houses.
Don’t worry though: to see/hear recordings from inside someone’s house police will need a warrant.
In order to distribute illegal material, you have to go public with it, i.e. contact strangers. One of those strangers is going to be a police agent or a snitch seeking favors from the police.
Sure you could limit yourself to known contacts, but that wouldn't make you rich nor would it create self-sustaining network.
No one is mass-sharing their safe of child-porn worldwide with thousands of other child-porn voyeurs.
The internet and its ubiquitous accessibility combined with digital image file formats has changed the landscape for those that would fight these heinous crimes.
It is indeed a new and special case where a locked safe is not.