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Facebook's WhatsApp Has an Encrypted Child Porn Problem (techcrunch.com)
Videos and pictures of children being subjected to sexual abuse are being openly shared on Facebook's WhatsApp on a vast scale, with the encrypted messaging service failing to curb the problem despite banning thousands of accounts every day. From a report: Without the necessary number of human moderators, the disturbing content is slipping by WhatsApp's automated systems. A report reviewed by TechCrunch from two Israeli NGOs details how third-party apps for discovering WhatsApp groups include "Adult" sections that offer invite links to join rings of users trading images of child exploitation. TechCrunch has reviewed materials showing many of these groups are currently active.
TechCrunch's investigation shows that Facebook could do more to police WhatsApp and remove this kind of content. Even without technical solutions that would require a weakening of encryption, WhatsApp's moderators should have been able to find these groups and put a stop to them. Groups with names like "child porn only no adv" and "child porn xvideos" found on the group discovery app "Group Links For Whats" by Lisa Studio don't even attempt to hide their nature.
Better manual investigation of these group discovery apps and WhatsApp itself should have immediately led these groups to be deleted and their members banned. While Facebook doubled its moderation staff from 10,000 to 20,000 in 2018 to crack down on election interference, bullying, and other policy violations, that staff does not moderate WhatsApp content. With just 300 employees, WhatsApp runs semi-independently, and the company confirms it handles its own moderation efforts. That's proving inadequate for policing at 1.5 billion user community. It's a similar problem that WhatsApp, used by more than a billion users, is facing in developing markets where its service is being used to spread false information.
TechCrunch's investigation shows that Facebook could do more to police WhatsApp and remove this kind of content. Even without technical solutions that would require a weakening of encryption, WhatsApp's moderators should have been able to find these groups and put a stop to them. Groups with names like "child porn only no adv" and "child porn xvideos" found on the group discovery app "Group Links For Whats" by Lisa Studio don't even attempt to hide their nature.
Better manual investigation of these group discovery apps and WhatsApp itself should have immediately led these groups to be deleted and their members banned. While Facebook doubled its moderation staff from 10,000 to 20,000 in 2018 to crack down on election interference, bullying, and other policy violations, that staff does not moderate WhatsApp content. With just 300 employees, WhatsApp runs semi-independently, and the company confirms it handles its own moderation efforts. That's proving inadequate for policing at 1.5 billion user community. It's a similar problem that WhatsApp, used by more than a billion users, is facing in developing markets where its service is being used to spread false information.
It's not a 'problem'.
You are just not yet used to the 3rd millennium.
After all the government needs it unencrypted so they can fap to it, and every once in a while publicly convict someone who isn't part of their paedo club.
Hint: The people with power are the ones most likely to abuse children.
See UK's parliament from the 80s-10s(and probably before and after), and
the Jeffrey Epstein guilty plea (which allowed the network of paedos around him to escape justice, while he got a literal slap on the hand, not even real PMITA prison time.) And don't even get me started on the Catholic Church, who at least just got one major blow with the conviction of an ArchBishop in Australia, one of the top three in the Vatican at the time of his trial.
For every creep you bust .a new creep is created to fill the vacuum left by the last. I recognize the intentions are noble but the goal is unattainable. For every effort we put into we put Into these things ,we are still forever sitting in the same situation. Playing Ring around the outlets with no actual decrease in the indesired behaviors.
And in financials we call these effort a money pit. And cut our losses for the sake of pragmatism.
Think of how much we could accomplish with the efforts that are put into this impossible mission, if put into things that actually can be helped?
"While courts have found that identifying a suspect by IP address isn't sufficiently specific, maybe it should be enough to secure a search warrant. Then you can send in the cops and bust these creeps."
You mean the clients of Starbucks?
Or the VPN people?
Isn't Whatsapp tied to your mobile phone number? At least in Switzerland, you'll need to have ID to even use prepaid. There is no such thing as an anonymous telephone number in Switzerland.
Is that different in other countries? Are there ways to use Whatsapp without a phone? Because otherwise I find it highly questionable to share illegal content on there. What stops any agency from infiltrating the group and collect phone numbers?
Yes I recognize this is a quite socially disassociative Stance to take, but to look at a situation objectively disassociation is a prerequisite
Uh, hang on a cotton-pickin' second. Isn't WhatsApp supposed to have "end to end encryption?" Didn't they like publish a whole paper describing how their end-to-end encryption made it impossible for third parties to know the content that was being sent? Wasn't it supposed to be impossible for anyone, including WhatsApp themselves, to know the content being transmitted on their system?
Doesn't end-to-end encryption, where "even WhatsApp" can't see the contents of the messages, sorta preclude the use of moderators to moderate content? That is, if WhatsApp can't see the messages, they can't moderate the messages, right?
So, um, am I wrong in thinking that WhatsApp's claim to being able to moderate messages and claims that messages cannot be read by WhatsApp are sort of incompatible? Unless WhatsApp's supposed "end-to-end encryption" is more of a bullshit marketing ploy rather than a description of the actual algorithms in play here...
In the US you can get anonymous prepaid phone service you just pay cash for (through purchased service cards you can pay cash for, anyway).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This problem is only going to grow in the future. You can't control or reliably censor information on a free and open internet. The only way to ensure that nothing "bad" happens on the internet is to completely lock it down and whitelist everything that is posted. This isn't going to happen.
In a few years blockchain based messaging apps will be launching and they will not be controlled by Facebook or anyone else. You won't be able to ban anyone. This is something we are going to have to accept and deal with. There will be things you don't like on the internet.
A few decades ago I admined an server on an IRC network. If you got a full list of channels, well... you saw channels with a lot of these sorts of titles. I know from conversations with other admins that the FBI liked these sorts of channels. They could just hop in, start collecting all sorts of logs with people offering up stuff and downloading other things. They were less pleased with well-meaning admins wading in and shutting those channels down. It made their jobs harder than when people were providing searchable kiddy porn so they could get busted.
Those areas could be a minefield of law enforcement. Why wouldn't they go after the low-hanging fruit? It's a lot easier even than to try to snoop the traffic.
For every creep you bust .a new creep is created to fill the vacuum left by the last.
Nonsense on its face and an entirely evidence-free assertion. You paraphrased the common anti-war line from about 10-15 years ago that said if you kill terrorists you just create more terrorists.
And guess what . . . . that's exactly what has happened.
We've spent the last 20 years killing "terrorists", and we've killed a lot of them, and it hasn't reduced the number of terrorists one bit.
I mean, he just looks like he's into that kind of thing. He looks like a child molester.
Corporatism != Free Market
no, group ones are encrypted as well.
- if this service is end-to-end encrypted, then only alice and bob can read the messages. Carol is in no position to moderate anything.
- If carol was invited to this exchange, and given cryptographic access to Alice and Bobs chat, then she can investigate and report whatever child porn she finds. its no different than my coworker inviting me to go cockfighting after work.
- the concept of encryption has nothing to do with the cusp of the issue: child pornography exists in 2018 and is illegal. Its no different than say, the illegality of content of the panama papers or the coverup of Pat Tillmans execution (both illegal.) These illegalities and many other white-collar first-world crimes were also encrypted, but here we are using child pornography to sensationalize an otherwise mundane report on crime.
- using this story, we can turn end-to-end encryption into a hot button item that demonizes any politician that seeks to preserve constitutional freedom of speech. example: We're not disagreeing that breaking end to end would ruin freedom, but we are saying that if you dont do something to outlaw crypto, you're a pedophile by proxy.
Good people go to bed earlier.
... and the only real cure is unattainable.
People want child porn and the cure is to stop that desire. Pedophilia is a sexual preference.
The social structure is similar to America's need for drugs: Stop the desire for drugs and Bob's yer uncle,
Until then, it's wack-a-mole.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
I'd love to see the data you used to pull that conclusion out of your ass.
Oh wait. Funny how sharing of pictures of child exploitation is supposedly the big problem, and not the exploitation itself. Gotta love the backwards logic.
Name one other crime where they would complain that it is too easy to find photographic evidence of the crime.
For every creep you bust .a new creep is created to fill the vacuum left by the last.
So there is a queue of wannabe pedos waiting for vacancies to arise?
Or at least that is what the mainstream US media wants me the believe. So that is why all Facebook's attention goes to the wrong area.
none of this is new. They were doing this crap via IRC when I was a lad. The encryption isn't very useful since you still need to advertise the crap for trading and there's plenty of honey pots out there to catch these sickos.
This is just more bullshit fear mongering narrative from the "ban encryption" crowd.
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Groups with obvious CP related names? Maybe, but it could also be an organization that wants to outlaw strong encryption so that they can monitor all communication, and which is safe from prosecution under CP laws.
There are many claims (which of course may be false) that the FBI is the worlds largest distributor of child porn - done of course to attempt to catch (entrap?) peole trading illegal material.
This may legitimately be a bunch of incredibly stupid child pornographers, in which case I hope they spend a good long time in prison. OTHO, its sure convenient for organizations that want to stop encryption.
I guess you don't pay attention to the news and all the stabbings, shootings and vehicles running people over in Europe, all in the name of alla snackbar. That didn't used to happen.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Will be interesting to see what happens when computing power is sufficiently powerful to both break encryption and possibly to match abuse photos to their owners. A lot of traffic is already recorded, it just can't be read currently. In 10 years, when authorities have a clear record of CP being transmitted/received, will there be a lot of doors being knocked down?
What good is banning the users and groups going to do?
They will just move elsewhere...
Given that what they're doing is illegal, why not report the users to the appropriate authorities?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
You should check your figures.
Global Terrorism Index 2018: https://www.statista.com/stati...
The US have a higher prevalence of terrorism than any European country (although Ukraine is only one place behind the US).
The only way to stop a bad guy with encryption is with a good guy with encryption
The US have a higher prevalence of terrorism than any European country (although Ukraine is only one place behind the US).
Except that index ignores the normalisation between countries. The index itself is derived from absolute numbers: the number of terrorist incidents per year, the number of fatalities caused by terrorists per year, the number of injuries caused by terrorists per year, and total property damage caused by terrorism per year and then simply ranked between 0-10 being the best and the worst country.
The size of the USA in terms of many metrics (population, immigration, GDP, landmass) etc, makes it closer to combining all of central and western Europe figures into one.
A. It was going down before there was widespread adoption of Internet access, so, post hoc ergo propter hoc.
B. It's been going up fast since 2013.
C. I really hope you aren't intimating that it's ok to distribute pictures of people f*cking little kids in the hopes that it might de-motivate someone else from f*cking their little kid. That's not ok. Those kids are re-victimized every time some pedo leers at their image. So I'm sure that's not what you were saying.
True. Thanks for pointing that out. I wish I had moderator points to upvote your post.
I never thought it possible Statista would publish such a sloppily defined metric.
This makes me pity the people in Iraq even more...
I never thought it possible Statista would publish such a sloppily defined metric.
Statista publishes metrics from 3rd parties and unfortunately in terms of comparing terrorism there isn't really much other stuff out there than the Institute for Economics report, however that doesn't make the metric useless. Looking at individual rankings and their changes over years relative to other countries still provides some insight into the terrorism landscape. While the ability to side by side compare countries like the USA to countries like Iraq, the comparison between say France and Germany still is quite accurate.
Also the report itself has a huge amount of insight despite the way the rankings are published: http://visionofhumanity.org/ap...
Will read that, thank you. Certainly, it is true that some information is better than none. I just expected (naively perhaps) that something called an 'index' would be normalized to some attribute like population (or one of the others you named).