Abuse: Blocking child porn online
Authorities are stepping up the pressure on encrypted messaging after an explosive rise in child sexual abuse imagery on the internet, said Jennifer Valentino-DeVries and Gabriel Dance in The New York Times. The Times reported that tech companies flagged a staggering “45 million photos and videos as child sex abuse material last year,” including “horrific” images of kids as young as 3 or 4. Two decades ago, there were about 3,000 reports of such images on the web. Today, Facebook’s Messenger app “accounted for nearly two-thirds of reports,” and law enforcement is concerned that the app’s impending move to encryption could make it easier for child predators to conceal their online activities. In a letter to Facebook last week, U.S. Attorney General William Barr asked the company to hold off its encryption plans “until it figures out a way to provide government access to the services for investigative purposes,” said Robert McMillan in The Wall Street Journal. Don’t hold your breath. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged that extending encryption “will come at a cost to user safety,” but Facebook, like other tech companies, argues that open government access “could ultimately be misused by hackers or spy agencies to steal data from consumers.”
“Child exploitation is certainly an issue outside of Messenger,” said Damon Beres in OneZero.Medium.com, but “no other company bears as much responsibility for the spread of this content as Facebook.” Now Facebook threatens to make the situation even worse with encryption. There’s a simple way to solve this. “We take for granted that you can send images, links, and videos on Messenger, but what if you couldn’t?” Limiting Messenger to text solves the problems. Yes, other companies might create a Messenger-like service, “but it would not be supported by the dominant social network.” No doubt “banning all link and image sharing in Messenger will find favor in, for example, authoritarian governments,” said Casey Newton in TheVerge.com. This is not a problem unique to Facebook. In fact, “thanks to Facebook’s efforts in particular, law enforcement detects millions of cases in which terrible images are being shared around the world.” The tech platforms have worked actively to limit child porn, and their reports have led to thousands of arrests; Facebook’s work on this has been lauded by the FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Choosing between private communications and access for law enforcement to block terrorism and child porn is a truly agonizing dilemma. As the world moves inexorably toward encrypted communication, “we lack easy methods for balancing the risks versus the benefits.” But Facebook at a minimum has a responsibility to try.