(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]
Einstein had it right
2024-07-04 00:00:00
Short of a “black swan” event I am pretty much persuaded, on their own within the EU, children’s organizations cannot win the absolutely critical argument about strong encryption in mass messaging environments.
It seems clear the campaign the children’s groups mounted on the proposed EU Regulation was necessary, can be built on and it was at least partly successful. But only partly. There is a very big gap between “partly” and “satisfactorily”.
How many more harrowing victim statements, delivered in person by victims does there need to be? How high do the numbers need to go in respect of discovered instances of csam or grooming?
How many more petitions and letters from important people need to be written and delivered? Hitherto have we just been sending them to the wrong places?
Is there some presentational or communications skill or trick which we have not yet learnt and mastered? When we do will everything fall into place? Have we not done enough “consensus-building” with Big Tech and the privacy lobby? Do we not have the right configuration of international organizations leading the charge? Is more research needed, if so on what?
I assume from the way I have posed these questions you have worked out what I think the answers are.
As Einstein memorably put it
Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results
Nothing we have done up to now has moved the dial sufficiently where it is needed and while there likely is a need to bring new MEPs up to speed, that really cannot be the limit of our ambition. The same roadblocks will still be there in various capitals.
Being right is not proving to be enough. Having the “angels of our better nature” on our side, appealing to people to “think of the children” is not cutting it. No amount of moral indignation is going to shift things in the way needed. This is an intensely political confrontation. The good guys don’t always win. The bad guys don’t always lose.
The mistrust of state institutions and Big Tech is entirely understandable, not only but particularly in those countries in the EU which had very bad experiences in their not-too-distant totalitarian pasts. But we cannot let pre-internet history condemn children to a nightmarish internet future. I acknowledge there is a worrying rise in populist parties not just in the EU but around the world. However, it is a category and self-serving scaremongering error to leap from that observable fact to the conclusion that, for instance, introducing client side scanning is merely a stepping stone to welcoming back the Stasi and jackboots.
It’s easy to state the problem. I apologise for not also providing an answer. That requires a lot of heads to get together. But I am sure we need to open channels to and link up with other citizens’ organizations outside of the usual suspects in the children’s world.
[END]
[1] URL:
https://johncarr.blog/2024/07/04/einstein-had-it-right/
[2] URL:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
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