In the wake of the shocking The New York Times report on the increase of reports of child pornography,
Pictures of child sexual abuse have long been produced and shared to satisfy twisted adult obsessions. But it has never been like this: Technology companies reported a record 45 million online photos and videos of the abuse last year.
More than a decade ago, when the reported number was less than a million, the proliferation of the explicit imagery had already reached a crisis point.
Skipping questions of the reliability of using these reports as a proxy for the actual size of the problem, let’s move on to where Ben Thompson of Stratecherry inches, if only implicitly, towards a less definite position on the question of the encryption of communications:
This report about child sexual abuse makes the point much more meaningful, and leads me to reframe the questions I originally raised in that piece: might it be the case that Facebook’s decision to encrypt conversations is not both good for consumers and good for itself, but rather good for itself and actively bad for society?
It’s worth taking this question apart in order to understand the clash taking place.
First, good is a relative word, and it can be defined for our purposes as the satisfaction of the immediate desire of the entity using it. If a person deems it good to catch a criminal, such as a viewer of pornography, then the act of catching and imprisoning them is good, and if insecure communications increases the probability of success, then that is good. The fact that there may be non-immediate reasons to not permit insecure communications isn’t relevant, since good is defined as satisfying the immediate desire.
Contrariwise, a viewer of child pornography will consider it good if they are not caught and imprisoned. If secure communications lessens the risk, then that facility is good.
When Thompson wonders “… not both good for consumers and good for itself, but rather good for itself and actively bad for society?” he is not inaccurate in his description: consumers, regardless of their goals, prefer private communications.
But immediate desires, I hear my reader mutter, are rarely a good way to run society, and, despite the blandishments of innumerable commercial entities, I agree. The momentary satisfaction of desires such as child pornography appears to lead to indisputable crimes, and thus Thompson’s last observation is also accurate: … actively bad for society. Yes, period. They are.
Despite the quasi-admissions of the secure communications advocates that secure communications can enable many bad actors, they don’t want to admit to being part of the problem, and that’s because they, themselves, really aren’t. They worry about governmental abuse, for the most part, with some concerns about private monitoring of their communications.
And they think they’ve found the perfect solution, a malady of us computer-folk[1], in algorithms. Certainly computers have been used to improve – we think – many aspects of life, and here’s one more.
But I think, in a position that is almost certainly irrelevant given the nature of the maths involved, it’s a mistake to attempt to replace monitoring of human governance with algorithms. In an already demonstrated result, it will abolish the importance of human judgment by making the scenario itself less and less likely to happen.
Algorithms continue to be relatively inflexible, which means they don’t adjust to the situation very well. As we continue to move towards truly intelligent computer entities, this will change, but in the area of deciphering communications, the algorithms are more or less context free.
This means we’ve abandoned our responsibility to police ourselves, leaving it to computer systems little better than hammers to do that work for us. And, in the process, are losing the opportunity to learn wisdom and to grow beyond our petty little desires and live with each other again[2].
I should also observe that the secure communications absolutists are also the extremists in this discussion. I’m well aware that the math is considered by many to be impenetrable, although a group of smart colleagues of mine actually think secure communications will become a dream in the world of quantum computers, but that’s a matter still in the future. But the other side, asking, technologically naively as it may be, for a backdoor in order to catch the bad guys, have not asked for abolishment. I don’t see them as non-compromising extremists; that would be the secure communications group.
The relative ignorance and out-right stupidity of many criminals is irrelevant to the discussion, as we’ve seen non-hackers use hacking packages to harass many entities on the Web for money. I have no idea what to suggest at this juncture, because there is a variable that almost no one is tracking:
Why does it matter more and more?
As resources become more and more precious, whether directly through their possession, or indirectly through having the financial resources to afford to obtain them, these communications become more and targets by the have-nots (or, at any rate, the have-not-enoughs, which may be an entirely different group). That last variable is the hardest to change, and the most controversial of all. But it may be the key to this mess.
1 I’m starting to regard myself as a former computer geek. Although I never was much of one anyways.
2 Cliff Stoll said it first, essentially. Maybe he’s right after all.
