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Google and Microsoft To Block Child-Abuse Search Terms
mrspoonsi writes "Leading search engine companies Google and Microsoft have agreed measures to make it harder to find child abuse images online. As many as 100,000 search terms will now return no results that find illegal material, and will trigger warnings that child abuse imagery is illegal. The Google chairman said he hired a 200-strong team to work out a solution over the last three months. Google's previous set of measures, which displayed a warning to people attempting to search for illegal material and caused a 20 percent drop in illicit activity."
Please search for and compile the list of 100,000 terms.
Which will inevitably all:
- Have double meanings;
- Be likely to be used by victims of abuse who are looking for help;
- Be useful for legitimate research;
- Be searched for by people looking for news or discussion on censorship;
- End up with a lot of political hot topics thrown in.
Thanks!
I guess children will have to search for abuse some other way, then.
It's something to INCREASE abuse by:
1) Redirecting resources away from finding abusers;
2) Giving the impression that "something is being done already" so resources don't need to be reviewed;
3) Misidentifying abuse as something which is caused by the availability of images of abuse, when in fact almost all child sex abuse occurs within families or thanks to trusted acquaintances for various complex reasons which require careful analysis rather than knee-jerk political reactions.
Fair enough, child abuse is universally against the law (unless there are a few countries without such laws on their statue), but by the same token murder is illegal the whole world over, and I do not see Google bringing up an "Illegal search" page if you were to type "how to murder someone", perhaps it will do one day...
Yesterday I was not allowed to take a single photograph of my daughter who was in a dance competition, to quote "in case it ends up on the internet". This memory (dance competition) will be lost now, because it was not recorded. There was even an announcement, make sure all Phones and iPads are kept in your pocket / bag, something seems very wrong with this endless search for the boogeyman.
You could try to get a secret court order that Google wasn't allowed to talk about that made them add noted child pornography search terms like "Edward Snowden" to the list.
Actually it does not do anything about child abuse. It just hides the problem. People that look at such images are a minor side-issue. The real issue is people that abuse children, and even there those that document their crimes in images or video seem to be a small minority.
I think this is designed (like so many efforts by law enforcement) to give the appearance of doing something really valuable, while it is likely rather meaningless in reality and may even be counter-productive. If this effort went into preventing children from being harmed in the first place, it might actually accomplish something. Instead they go for an easy, but fake, win.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Exactly. Unfortunately this is tactics of sweeping the dirt under the rug. Shutting your eyes and pretending it's not happening. I don't understand why noone in their right mind thinks that hiding criminal activity reports will stop crime, but are sure that if we remove all child abuse pictures from the internet, then the problem will solve itself.
You realize there is a difference between people that harm children, and people that look at pictures of it, right? And that in order to protect children you have to find the first kind in time, and not the second one?
This while action just gives the appearance of doing something valuable, while it is pretty meaningless for actually stopping abuse.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
True, but there are leads you can follow up with traditional police work, e.g. trying to find people that make and sell this kind of material. Focusing on those that search for it just deviates resources from it for cheap, bombastic, but meaningless headlines. Example: In one of these operations in Germany, 3000 homes were searched. That made for grand headlines. Do you know how many people were actually charged? Less than 20! But the police got their headline and gave the impression of doing something. (So much for violating rights and privacy...)
I have the impression by now that they care far more about the appearance of doing something than actually doing something, because actually doing something worthwhile here is hard and gives far less impressive headlines. So they go the easy way, and all the abused children are just out of luck. That strikes me as incredibly unethical.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Protecting the children is not the point of this. It's done to give the powers that be just another arrow in their quiver to crush the little man if he ever dares to fight against one of their corrupt construction projects, or if he ever dares to do his job too well researching who planted bombs against utility poles in the eighties. At least, that's what it is used for here in Luxembourg.
I think the opposite is probably true. I know watching woman in pornographic videos increases my visualizing women in day to day interactions in similar roles.
One of the best things for my marriage was when we decided to quit watching these types of videos. It moved the focus of sex back to love instead of a sport.
You understand the difference between "visualising" and "raping", yes? Watching porn did not making you a rapist?
Actually, I think it's done for no other reason than to shut Claire Perry and The Daily Mail with their "Stop online porn" campaign the fuck up - yes, that's a real thing.
Since she was elected this is the only issue she's focussed on, if I were Dave Cameron I'd be pretty sick of hearing her harp on about things she doesn't understand by now too and would probably do something useless and pointless just to get her off my back.
Not saying it'll work of course, and not defending it, but I can understand why someone would cave in to a multi-year barrage of whining from that silly cow.
Now we just need her to suffer the same fate as Jacqui Smith, the last MP who was as whiny and clueless as Claire Perry - her being caught charging her husband's porn to her expenses. Karma - it's great.
You ask ANY of the guys that are actually in the streets, or people that live in edge neighborhoods... crime is going up and going up rapidly.
Perception of crime may be going up. Fear of crime may be going up. Actual crime is going down.
--this is probably, however, simply a function of the aging of the population rather than the effects of policies. The largest component of crime is teenagers and early twenties.
99% of what you hear from your local,state or federal government is 100% BS to simply calm you down.
Unfortunately, when you dismiss all data that disagrees with what you have already decided to believe, you can never learn anything.
http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2012/june/crimes_061112/
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0524/US-crime-rate-is-down-six-key-reasons
http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/29/justice/us-violent-crime/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-dimond/crime-reduction_b_2878003.html
If crime rates are going down, then why is my local police getting military grade equipment and gear? Cripes for the last sports event here they had M16 machine guns in the open and wearing full military armor.
The equipment used by police departments has no relationship to the amount of crime.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
If crime rates are going down, then why is my local police getting military grade equipment and gear?
Because people like you seem to think there's a need. They need military gear because they need military gear. Tautology, yes, but no less the truth in this case. Crime rates have been going down across the board since the 70's: lower rates of violent crime, less non-violent crime, less white collar crime, everything. The only reason you may get the impression it's happening more frequently is because channels like CNN didn't exist in the 70's.
Hmm... Seems to me that if google and bing have enough content indexed so as to be able to identify content as matching those 100,000 prohibited searches, then they ought to be able to automatically notify authorities about those web sites holding said prohibited content. Who can then take the appropriate legal actions. Which would target those who are making such content available, not the mere sick individuals seeking such content.
I've got to wonder why such wasn't mentioned.
That is a red herring. Those that _sell_ this stuff can easily be identified and shut down by a very classical police technique called "follow the money". And that, again, has the added benefit that it may actually help some of those getting abused. Just drying up public business will just drive them underground (remember the prohibition?) and do nothing to help any abuse victim at all.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Spoken like a true law-and-order fetishist that cares nothing about the actual victims. You seem to miss the little fact that focusing on the image-distribution aspect does nothing to prevent creation of such images and the child-abuse that comes with it. You also miss the little fact that you cannot practically remove stuff from the Internet, hence these victims will never know. This is just an instance of "the viewing of these images must be stopped", no matter of how many children get hurt in the process (because of misapplied limited resources) and no matter how much freedom it will cost the world. I find this highly unethical.
An ethical stance would be to demand that the acts that allow creation of such images must be stopped. But that is apparently a minor consideration today and I am pointing that out.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
These have nothing to do with eachother and everything to do with congress and homeland security money.
The problem is that what politicians like doing is creating big funds that need to be spent. So they hand money to the DHS and the DHS runs programs to distribute that money. The only reason you see the police getting all this new gear is....it costs them nothing. All they have to do is fill out some request forms and the new equipment comes showering in.
Of course it comes as equipment so, it can't be used for training, or salaries, or improving their ability to fight real crime in any way, all they can do is request new toys....so they do.
I mean if someone handed you a credit card, said it can only be used to buy guns and ammo, but you can pretty much use it as much as you want and you don't have to pay the bill.... can you really tell me shooting wont become your new favorite past-time? Would you really not want an APC and some body armor if you didn't even have to pay for the gas? How about some robots? Surely you would take those?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
If crime rates are going down, then why is my local police getting military grade equipment and gear? Cripes for the last sports event here they had M16 machine guns in the open and wearing full military armor.
Because whenever the government funds get doled about, everyone lines up to the trough, whether they actually need the stuff or not. Like right after 9/11, cities that were in no way threats on the same level as NYC all tried to get in on the newly allocated funds. It is government waste at its finest.
...
Really? I think they need it?
The GPP did not say you, but people like you: voters in your area. The place to change the militarization of our police is the ballot box. Get informed. Learn who on your city council supports more police, higher police budgets, and uses scare tactics about "rising crime" in their campaigns. Vote against them. A quick rule of thumb is to vote against anyone endorsed by the police union. Instead you should vote for candidates that support community policing and drug legalization.
If crime rates are going down, then why is my local police getting military grade equipment and gear?
Because people like you seem to think there's a need. They need military gear because they need military gear. Tautology, yes, but no less the truth in this case. Crime rates have been going down across the board since the 70's: lower rates of violent crime, less non-violent crime, less white collar crime, everything. The only reason you may get the impression it's happening more frequently is because channels like CNN didn't exist in the 70's.
A local suburban police force got an armored ram-car a few years back. They had no need for it. What they had was a bunch of federal "beef up the national police forces" money and nothing to spend it on. So they bought a tank. Some military contractor made a ton of money selling those things.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
I think the opposite is probably true.
There is no evidence to support your belief. There have been many instances where the availability of pornography in a society changed, either by legal changes or technology (such as the spread of Internet porn). These changes are correlated with a decline in sexual violence. Here is an overview of the evidence.
I have known several guys that watched porn compulsively. They all had no relationships with women. The porn was a replacement for actual sex. I don't know if the same is true for pedophiles, but it seems to me that child porn is as likely to reduce molestation as it is to cause it. It seems reasonable to me to ban any porn depicting an actual child, but banning porn using adults posing as children, or animation, should not be done without clear evidence that it is harmful.
The issue is massively complex.
We like the feel-good measures. We "rescued 380 children" last week by finding people associated with a nudist site that had pics of naked kids. The news articles collectively indicate that about 14 children in India were "identified" (not rescued), and that a bunch of teachers and such were removed from schools. In general, the conclusion by the online community is that 380 children were under the purview of teachers who might be into kiddy porn, and so "we rescued 380 children!" In other words: no actual children who were being abused have ceased being abused.
The actual act of censoring child pornography is highly disturbing in itself. If we're assuming that people who have an internal thought and interest in children sexually are a threat, and thus making child pornography illegal, then we have two problems. The first problem is we're trying to punish thought-crime: child pornography isn't illegal because it's harmful, but rather because we want to punish people for having these thoughts we find personally disturbing. The second problem is we're completely incapable of pursuing enforcement against persons who we've deemed dangerous (for their thoughts), until they take some kind of action.
That second problem is exacerbated by one questionable hypothesis: with the pornography outlet blocked by being as risky if not riskier than sex, will these people express by child abuse? If they're trying to find satiation and weighing risk, it's obvious that your Internet can be invisibly monitored (and thus is extremely risky) while you can at least manipulate and control children if you can get them to keep secrets (thus the spread of information is slow, if not controllable--and it's absolutely more controllable than the monitoring of your Internet activity). So it's much better to have actual sex with children than to search for child pornography at this point: it's safer.
The above hypothesis is questionable for two reasons. First: we know that exposure to pornography and other visual effects provides comfort. People start looking at perverse stuff online, then they start watching gay porn, they move to bath houses and start experimenting with homosexuality... it happens, it's a common pattern, and a lot of straight men (and women) have experimented with homosexuality or bondage or whatnot by the cycle of introduction (initial thought or suggestion), curiosity, exposure, and then action. Thus we have another questionable hypothesis: that watching child pornography may acclimate a person to action, leading to actual child sex interactions.
Another problem: action may come in different forms. Wired ran an article about online sex roleplay services, including everything from vanilla stuff to furry MUCKs (hilarity ensued: apparently a lot of not-furries got on furry sex mucks and were culture shocked). Common sexual exploration includes everything from furry fandom to group sex to, yes, underage roleplay. There are also real-world analogues of this: people actually roleplay scenarios, everything from teacher-student (college) to maids to rape play, up to and including finding young (18-20) and/or young-looking girls who can dress up as even younger girls. Schoolgirl roleplay is common; I've even known a number of girls who, in a nutshell, had the body of a thirteen year old when they were 25-ish--they could dress enough to look young-20s, but if you threw one in jeans and a t-shirt and tennis shoes you would swear she's got to be 12, *maybe* 13. That means there are many perfectly legal ways to act on these fantasies directly.
So we have a complicated net of censorship, inaction, thoughtcrime, opposing psychological theories on whether outlets help or lead to bigger crimes, and outlets that are physical but provide a harmless mechanism of action. We could also get into some social considerations like the abridged rights of minors and the philosophical concern of this whole age-of-majority thing: apparently minors don't
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Similar in the UK. We have a ban on 'extreme pornography' that had to include an exception for BBFC rated movies - otherwise, even by the writer's admission, a lot of the horror films coming out of Hollywood would meet the definition.
Take a look at the 2012 CEOP report and you can see some of that feel-good in their dubious statistics.
http://ceop.police.uk/Documents/ceopdocs/CEOP_TACSEA2013_240613%20FINAL.pdf
For example, they claim to have identified 70,000 new 'IIOC' files. Except on closer reading, duplicate detections of the same image count more than once, so that figure may be several times higher than it really should be. And of those, 75% are on their 'least serious' scale, a level which includes things you'd find in the family photo album. And one-fifth of them were classified as 'self generated' - most of which are likely young people taking a naked picture for their boyfriend who then sends it to the wider internet.
My favorite part:
'The commercial distribution of IIOC on the open internet is estimated to account for a very small percentage of the transactions taking place. This low level is likely to be a result of the large volume of IIOC in free circulation.'
Yes... piracy is killing commercial child abuse!
"Schoolgirl roleplay is common"
Of course it is. For the majority of people, school was the time of sexual awakening and exploration. That's going to leave an impression, so it's no surprise many people want to re-live it.