The European Commission lost the Chat Control 2.0 battle over access to end-to-end encrypted data. By the summer 2026, they will be back with their next attempt: Going Dark. This time some EU member…
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The problem with "child abuse" is that some countries classify drawing things as "child abuse," or "rape," or "animal abuse." (Something I don't agree with.)
I mentioned in another thread a few weeks back that I got raided by the British police last February for "uploading/downloading "illegal" anime artwork on one of the (anime) artwork websites we're criminally investigating." (Yes, the British police are criminally investigating artwork websites, and I'm still under investigation at the time of writing this.)
Even if somehow the government were able to catch everybody who abuse children, take photos and upload them to sites on Tor, they can classify anything they like as "child abuse" in order to justify survillancing people and restricting further freedoms.
What's even sadder is that people don't care about safety. They care about the illusion of safety. As long as people have the illusion that they're being kept safe - the farce known as the Online Safety Bill being a great example - they'll tolerate any injustice.
Honestly, I'd recommend downloading software like Signal, Session, VeraCrypt, etc. as well as making a Linux USB stick now (especially since countries like the UK wants Red Star OS levels of snooping) because this is honestly going to get much, much worse...
I'd be curious what would happen if you pointed the relevant authorities at any decently sized store selling manga. There's got to be at least one stereotypical sexualised 4000 year old loli vampire or whatever in there.
The sad truth is probably that they'd just shrug their arms and do nothing, since the surveillance and harassment is the point, and not even upholding the letter of the law, and much less its spirit.
The people in the system have to do something to justify the existence of such a system and bump their metrics. Whether someone did something bad or not is irrelevant. It is the job of the prosecution lawyers to figure out the grounds. Legality and culpability is a paperwork.
Of course, if someone is rich and powerful (ehm, epsty, ehm) then the whole system will look the other way around. At least until it's impossible to do so. Then such a person and his footprint will just disappear in the same big bureaucracy that is doing this.
By spwa4 2025-12-2214:18 Is that why the fact that getting essentially every LLM to produce sexualized stereotypes is trivially easy, yet getting zero attention from these guys?
Or, much more long-running than the LLM "loophole": there's entire "channels" on Social Media, like Tiktok and Facebook Instagram Reels and Signal and Whatsapp and Telegram and ... that post essentially nothing but that, and no reaction.
https://www.tiktok.com/@modelagencyai/video/7225020868131294...
But what I find most criminal about these systems is that they're all about catching. These people never touch what happens when they "catch" someone. What happens, of course, is that they usually can't do anything about people actually spreading these images, but they can arrest the minors involved and lock them up long term in a terrible system. Of course, that system is horrible and is getting further defunded every year, including 2025. But that is where these children they "help" end up. And they don't care at all.
You care about children and victims of child abuse? How about we start with improving the living conditions of the actual known victims? Instead we see regular scandals about the child services system itself abusing children. Rotherham, Romania, child services involvement in Ukraine, Hungary, "toeslagenaffaire", the Netherland's youth services approving foster parents who literally only wanted to torture a young girl (and ignoring her pleas for help), ...
Frankly, if that isn't done first, I refuse to believe there is any real intent to help these children.
What's the point of criminalising hand-made pictures? I just don't understand it. I could understand the point of criminalising child porn photos, as producing these photos obviously requires violating other laws (actually not obviously, as you can dress adult actors to look like children, but whatever). But things that are obviously drawn without any involvement of real children, what's wrong with them? Just keep them away from general public (honestly any moderation will do that just fine) and weirdos who wants this stuff will find it and discharge their libido in a peaceful way.
To me, it looks counter-productive to actual child safety... It's like criminalising porn pictures to protect women? Makes no sense.
I'd say it makes a lot of sense. It likely encourages pedophilia, meaning people that consume such things will often adopt a wrong idea of what's okay. It's similar to the way that regular porn affects the brain. I understand where you're coming from, though and I get your point, but I feel if someone consumes a lot of media of a certain type, they begin to 'embody' that media.
Just don't goon.
Ah, yes, the gateway drug trope. Always a good one for asserting control indirectly. Inevitably results in increased profits for the purveyors of the gateway drug and no reduction in demand or consumption. Prosecutors and jailors get richer too. Follow the money.
By Sporktacular 2025-12-2613:371 reply Ah yes, the gateway drug straw man. Poster didn't say it causes that consequence, just that it normalises it. Just like video games normalise violence, gay porn normalises being gay etc. Doesn't mean it should be banned, but it does shift the winds about what is acceptable. And that is a worthy discussion when it comes to images of child exploitation.
Normalizes vs causes is a vacuous distinction here, and both of your examples deserve some proof that there's any difference
By Sporktacular 2026-01-0715:36 What's to explain? Seeing gay porn doesn't increase the number of gay people but can let gay people feel less abnormal. If cause equaled normalisation they would be synonymous.
By Jigsy 2025-12-2216:14 > meaning people that consume such things will often adopt a wrong idea of what's okay.
I've been reading "illegal" manga for 20 years. I've never once thought that these acts would be okay to do in real life.
Same when I read the 1906 novel Josephine Mutzenbacher.
By TiredOfLife 2025-12-2210:103 reply > It likely encourages pedophilia
It's like saying that pictures of gay people encourages homosexuality
By shlip 2025-12-2210:16 Or saying playing violent video games makes you violent, which sounds familiar...
Of course pictures of gay people doesn't encourage being gay, but being gay is fine. Being a pedophile is not fine. If there is even a small chance that something will cause someone to be a pedophile, it's best to minimize it. We aren't talking about pictures of pedophiles, we are talking about what is, in essence, child pornography. Maybe 'encourages pedophilia' is not a thorough enough way to phrase it, but a 'dormant' pedophile is much more likely to become an 'active' one if they are consuming excessive amounts of media related to their interests.
By Jigsy 2025-12-2217:25 > Being a pedophile is not fine.
You're not equating pedophilia with child abuse, are you? Because having an attraction to children (pedophilia) isn't in itself a crime.
By munksbeer 2025-12-2316:00 > If there is even a small chance that something will cause someone to be a pedophile, it's best to minimize it.
I have this great idea. It involves clothes that completely cover up the people that could cause temptation, creating separate spaces for them, and so.
By ranyume 2025-12-2216:09 I like this parallel. No joke intended.
I am not sure there is evidence that this is the case. The argument sounds a lot like those made by conservatives against gay people. Somehow, in their view, homosexuality is also just a first step towards “anything goes”, including incest, pedophilia, even bestiality. Porn, in this view, should increase rape, right? But that’s absolutely not the case. People seem to calm down if they can satisfy themselves with just watching it on a screen, even if it’s not real, as in cartoons or AI generated content. Would you change your opinion if evidence pointed to this being the case, or so you have other motives for still thinking even cartoons should be made illegal if depicting such content?
By JacWpthrowaway 2025-12-2210:102 reply > Porn, in this view, should increase rape, right? But that’s absolutely not the case.
What evidence do you have that it absolutely doesn't? How would you even scientifically prove this? There are a whole lot of factors that contribute to rape or rape prevention.
Does modern sexual objectification and gratification increase the likelyhood that men will seek to actualize their fantasies? I believe it does.
From my own experience growing up watching porn from around 11-12 years of age and being an incel, when I was 21 I finally took things into my own hands and went to prostitutes to try and recreate those porn movies I was watching. I did not rape anyone but because of porn I learned that sex should be aggresive, that women respond "positively" to aggresive sex. I was sexually aggresive with the escorts I frequented, because of porn.
Over the span of 10+ years of doing this I even noticed shifts in sensibilities of escorts. Like young escorts these days by default gag when doing oral because this is what the market required in the past how many years but wasn't so common 10+ years ago.
For the record, in my experience, not even most escorts actually ENJOY aggressive sex. You would think they get used to it but trust me they don't. Aggressive sex is a perversion and I say this from experience not dogma.
> What evidence do you have that it absolutely doesn't?
I think it’s very obvious when looking at the last 20 years. Porn availability increased ridiculously since around 2000 due to internet becoming widespread. But look at statistics on rape in most countries and you see its decreasing in the large majority. Does that not convince you that at least there seems to be no causation??
By JacWpthrowaway 2025-12-2212:21 Surveillance has also increased, fear of not getting away with it is higher. Also society has been militant about this issue more with "believe all women" etc. Maybe men invest more in video games and relieve their aggression that way without risking prison. I don't know, I am no sociologist but again, there are too many variables to prove any sort of causation.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/283100/recorded-rape-off...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191137/reported-forcible...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1464272/reported-sexual-...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1418831/sexual-offences-...
I realise I respond to a stupid argument. I'm just annoyed.
You cherry picked a few outliers. Here’s a chart showing many countries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rape_in_the_Unite...
It’s clearly going down in most places, including the USA.
By flir 2025-12-2220:49 I googled my country, the USA, and the two European countries I have most experience of. I didn't cherry pick anything, I just stopped.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191137/reported-forcible...
I don't know what to tell you, except to say the messiness of the data goes to underline how poorly sourced your claim is.
By elestor 2025-12-2217:06 Exactly, people will watch porn videos of girls being choked or whatever, will be with a girl and assume she will like being choked. Not okay at all.
> It likely encourages pedophilia
Throught the same mechanism that violent games encourage violence, I presume?
Porn became abundant over last two decades and somehow people are having less sex than ever. There are many clues that those kinds of things work in the completely opposite way than you imagine.
I hate that it exists. I hate that there are people who are seeking this. But I also hate when people state confidently things that might be completely wrong and write laws accordingly.
By samus 2025-12-2213:51 > Porn became abundant over last two decades and somehow people are having less sex than ever.
That sounds like an actual negative effect, if there is actually causation. But I'd argue social media has overall a much more general influence by putting our whole lives into a panopticon. It is very hard to escape its reach even if one is not a social media user.
I know what you mean, but do you not agree that if someone is, let's say, on the point of becoming a pedophile, discovers such media, it will become more and more of what they think about, and what one thinks about determines their actions.
By dragonwriter 2025-12-2217:18 I don’t think there is any evidence that there is a state meaningfully denoted by “on the point of becoming a pedophile” which can be tipped by exposure to media in that way, no.
To be fair, understanding of the etiology of pedophilia is not super strong, but what there is doesn't, AFAIK, seem to support the kind of naive media-driven modelling that people like to apply to all kinds of behavior (Satanic Panic approach to D&D, Columbine and violent video games, etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum, ad infinitum.)
By scotty79 2025-12-239:49 That's easily concievable scenario. Which doesn't make it true or overwhelmingly significant to the bottom line. Many untrue things are equally easy to imagine.
What about a scenario where a person that could be satisfied by such materials in absence of them discovers actual children and hurts them?
Many men, who don't have luck with women, lust for women, but very few actually go out and hurt them. For each one that develops violent tendencies through pornography there are probably many that have their violent tendencies kept in the realms of fantasy thanks to pornography (and awareness of laws that punish actual violence).
My point is that it's too important subject to rely on just guesswork. There should be research into this because there's a huge potential for eyeballed solutions to actually hurt the vulnerable more than they help.
> will often adopt a wrong idea of what's okay
I wonder who gets to decide what's okay.
By AlecSchueler 2025-12-229:04 It normalises a market for abuse imagery and pornographic escalation is a known phenomenon.
In addition to “drawing”, it’s also the loosely interpreted age that concerns me. Any drawing “deemed under 18” is just as criminalized as the actual crime. While there are many Instagram users who pretend to be above 18, many drawings of lewd acts, adding that the age is freely interpreted by judges… it’s a free field for general oppression.
By delusional 2025-12-226:131 reply > While there are many Instagram users who pretend to be above 18
Do you support robust and mandatory age verification to enforce existing rules on social media websites, like Instagram?
By eastbound 2025-12-2210:01 What? What’s the relation between your question and being safe while consuming ok-content?
I said “deemed”. The judge can decide anything even if the user really is above 18.
Not even to ask how you enforce age verification of characters in a drawing?
If those countries have laws against making and consuming pedophile pictures and drawings (or "artwork"), I feel it's perfectly fine for people making and consuming those to be raided, even if they disagree with the law (if people could opt out of all laws they don't agree with, I'mnot sure what would be the point of making laws).
What is not ok is to watch the activities of everyone who is not a pedophile in order to catch those, otherwise when does it stop? Should they have cameras in every room of your home just in case?
By deltoidmaximus 2025-12-2217:05 > Should they have cameras in every room of your home just in case?
Given that most children are abused by some one they know that might actually be a more effective way to prevent it than whatever they're doing here. I'm sure they'll get to that eventually.
I read this as "It's perfectly fine to persecute people for their art". And boy, you're on the wrong side of history.
There are all kinds of things you might qualify as "art" which are forbidden in my country (France) - for example if your "art" is about drawing nazi symbols you hopefully are going to have troubles - and I don't have a problem with having pedophile content in that list.
By ranyume 2026-01-0116:32 Does france really prosecute people for only showing nazi symbols, independent of context? So for example, documentary series are forbidden?
To be clear, I still stand by what I said, but I don't think it's fair to equate "pedophile art" with nazi symbology. What I said is meant to be taken as a powerful but general rule that cautions against restricting art (and thus, restricting thought and expression) on the basis of fuzzy logic, hatred towards the content, racism, or any other sort of bias not supported by reality. In this regard, I don't think the logic behind restricting "pedophile art" has the same weight as the logic behind restricting nazi symbology (not even close).
By BlueTemplar 2025-12-2523:06 It is concerning to me that there are now international (Western ?) guidelines[1] (2016) and conventions that don't seem to realise the consequences of taking a hard stance on the combination of three of their points :
- a child is any person under the age of 18 years
- including non-explicit sexual activities
- any material that visually depicts a child [engaged in those]
Am I missing something, or have they 'criminalised' a quite large chunk of art ?!?
[1] https://ecpat.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Terminology-gui...
Then we have these guidelines embedded in automated systems (sometimes with people as 'cogs'), add a pinch of pressure by puritans in power of various stripes, and a decade later we end up with payment networks forcing platforms to kick out artists even when what they are doing is not illegal in their respective jurisdictions !
For clarification, you got raided despite using tor? You mention tor but dont say so directly so I'm not sure.
I've don't use Tor. I've never had a reason to.
All the artwork websites I access are publically accessible artwork websites.
By Imustaskforhelp 2025-12-229:311 reply Honestly I have been wondering more and more about it but what stops websites from having a bot on signal/(session? although I hate the crypto stuff/ may I recommend matrix/simplex)?
Like creating a bot on signal which has its own phone number (and sorry that you got raided) but I am pretty sure that the upload/download of anime artwork websites could be done through signal and the only thing I know about signal is that the one time US govt asked it to share something the only thing it gave was the ip address and when registered and literally nothing else.
Signal recently added the abilities of usernames which keep it private and with many other things I think this is a fascinating idea to build upon. I see a lot of telegram bots but honestly signal has a hard time making bots in general because they dont really surface an api itself so people go ahead and all signal's api you see on github use this project which actually has decompiled version of java
Signal and proton are two organizations that I trust a lot in our current privacy hostile world and I hope that people who have built bots or have any suggestions/opinion can discuss it in this discussion as parts of the worlds are going towards authoritarianism.
Although going further into the thread, my naivety made me realize what sort of anime pictures we are talking about and I don't really support it but still this is being a slippery slope too where as other commenter pointed out, it can be used to get more spying overall on the general public too
By Hikikomori 2025-12-2210:011 reply Manga used to be distributed on irc, you would message a bot and it woul initiate a file transfer.
By Imustaskforhelp 2025-12-2210:27 IRC is such a simple protocol seeing its implementation in <1k loc in many languages and I assume bot building process must be simple too compared to signal.
I have built bare minimum hello world bots in simplex and session and I think both had a lot of troubles to go through but if someone's interested, they can look at simplex for bot creation but they started to have client side verification/alert of content which admittedly is a very honeypot-alike activity/slippery slope itself.
Signal has some of the least controversies even though its centralized, Matrix is another good one and personally I sort of prefer matrix because all these other protocols require apps whereas matrix can work on top of a browser thus having more widespread adoption imo.
XMPP is another good protocol and at this point pardon me for yapping but I once saw someone break a nat using XMPP and using it to create website endpoint creation which was good too but personally I feel like signal is the most trustworthy overall. I wish someone can make signal's bot genuinely simple as telegram bot creation as there is a lot of potential
By numlock86 2025-12-2216:13 > this is honestly going to get much worse
Just like with Brexit, the majority of UK's population voted (and will keep voting) for this.
By miroljub 2025-12-229:38 "God save the queen, the fascist regime"
I was curious and searched to find more context and ... uh, no offense but what on earth have you been doing that you've been tangling with the law over CSAM for at least four years?
Watching anime, looking at anime artwork, reading manga since 2006.
Why else would you criminally investigate artwork websites if your aim is not to arrest artists and those who look at their artwork? (And eventually use them as an excuse to show why encryption is evil, and how "evil artists" could be caught more easily if it was backdoored.)
If you're looking for news, there won't be any yet as, as I said, I'm still under investigation.
By left-struck 2025-12-222:503 reply I think it really depends on what kind of anime you’re talking about. Like if you’re watching one piece fan art and the British police raided you, absolutely ridiculous. If you’re looking at naked artistic depictions of minors then it’s clearly not just “anime artwork”. BTW I’m not saying that someone who looks at that should be treated the same way as someone who harms a child but I’m just saying the cultural acceptance in the uk between those two extremes is vast.
By Jigsy 2025-12-222:53 They just said "illegal" artwork, they didn't stipulate. (So this could be incest, bestiality, loli, etc, etc.)
Why would cultural acceptance matter? Classifying drawing something - regardless of what it is - as a "crime" is ridiculous.
Like, for example, I don't like rape (or strangulation, something else they'll start arresting people for now since they recently made it a crime), but I don't want to see people jailed for drawing it, or jailed for looking at anime/drawings/manga/visual novels of/containing it.
I'd rather see people who actually abuse, exploit or cause general suffering to another human being arrested and jailed.
By jeffjeffbear 2025-12-223:432 reply > I think it really depends on what kind of anime you’re talking about
Does it? If I draw a naked stick figure with boobs and say it is 14, is that morally wrong? At what point should a person care? Their point is that a drawing doesn't hurt people right?
By left-struck 2025-12-2715:32 Just because it’s hard to spot the point where it becomes immoral doesn’t mean it’s not immoral. I can’t tell you at what point a person should care, and I wouldn’t want to be the judge of that. My point is that saying they’re looking at “anime” is really downplaying what’s happening. I don’t personally believe the drawings we’re referring to hurt anyone, but that had nothing to do with my argument anyway. Many people will be disgusted by it, and others will not, meanwhile most people seem to be okay with mainstream anime.
By AlecSchueler 2025-12-229:102 reply > If I draw a naked stick figure with boobs and say it is 14, is that morally wrong? At what point should a person care?
No and I'm sure every judge in Britain would throw that case out.
> Their point is that a drawing doesn't hurt people right?
It can in certain circumstances encourage a market or normalise abusive behaviour.
> It can in certain circumstances encourage a market or normalise abusive behaviour.
Just like the printed word. Books should be banned and burned. We should start with Orwell since his writing has been used as a manual for so much abusive behaviour.
By AlecSchueler 2025-12-2212:37 Hate speech is also illegal in the UK, yes.
>"It can in certain circumstances encourage..."
Anything can be bad in "certain circumstances". They should go get busy with some real crime.
By AlecSchueler 2025-12-2212:481 reply > Anything can be bad in "certain circumstances"
Can it? In the same way? It feels like your argument comes down to handwaving. Circumstantial law is hardly a novel thing.
By ImPostingOnHN 2025-12-2219:511 reply > Can it? In the same way? It feels like your argument comes down to handwaving. Circumstantial law is hardly a novel thing.
I think that was their point: your argument seems handwavey, because anything can be bad "in certain circumstances".
Hold the door for someone? Seems nice. But you could be insulting them by doing so. Or letting a virus in by having the door open too long. Or wasting energy and contributing to climate change by letting the conditioned air out. Indeed, under certain circumstances, it's bad.
By AlecSchueler 2025-12-2418:35 Sure, many things can be "bad" if you are happy to go with increasingly absurd reasoning, but I Think that's quite an unfair misrepresentation of both what I said above and of the arguments that were raised in parliament before this law was introduced. Insulting someone by holding a door open might be "bad" but could you really argue for legislating against it? Bringing in the word bad moves the goalposts quite a bit in order to frame the original position as equally limp and absurd.
By csomar 2025-12-2210:56 How do you determine that though? Do you put the pictures in front of a jury? I am riding the metro daily in a big Asian city and I am pretty sure many of the "anime" ads will be unacceptable on the other side of the world.
By delusional 2025-12-226:273 reply I can't really connect what you're saying here. I understand that you think drawing loli (I imagine) shouldn't be classified as pedophelia, but what does the law say?
Part of living in a society is compromise. I don't believe that certain stretches of road close to my home should have a 50kph speed limit, but when I get a ticket I also accept that I'm in the wrong.
If you're of the opinion that drawing children having sex (assuming again) shouldn't be illegal, you should be lobbying/advocating for that position. Changing the compromise. Otherwise you're, like me driving too fast, at the mercy of the justice system.
Laws don't require your personal conviction to matter. Sometimes we don't get to do something, even though we personally believe it to be perfectly acceptable.
> If you're of the opinion that drawing children having sex (assuming again) shouldn't be illegal, you should be lobbying/advocating for that position. Changing the compromise. Otherwise you're, like me driving too fast, at the mercy of the justice system.
That only makes sense if your general stance to everything is "forbidden unless explicitly permitted". I hope I don't have to say why that sounds oppressive.
There is more than one way to achieve a compromise in society.
By delusional 2025-12-236:301 reply > That only makes sense if your general stance to everything is "forbidden unless explicitly permitted"
Not at all. The UK, just as an example, explicitly bans images (as opposed to photographs, which are covered under different law) of children that are pornographic and obscene. That is, by legal professionals, interpreted as including manga, comics, and CGI.
You do not need some universal "default position" to understand the laws as they currently exist.
By samus 2025-12-269:28 Whether such laws already exist or not was not my point. The problem is that such laws are overreaching in nature.
The problem lies on the wide margin of interpretation those laws give the police.
50kph is a number.
"Sexualized drawings of children" is certainly open to discussion.
I remember the scandal when an American Apparel ad depicted a young woman in a thong. People were outraged because she looked minor. In fact, she was 21 years old. I wonder if people think she shouldn’t get any jobs modeling lingerie just because she appears to be underage. To be clear, the ad had nothing to suggest underage girls, just a girl in a thong which I hope everyone agrees does not have any connection to being underage, quite the opposite.
By cosmic_cheese 2025-12-2218:33 The "height of consent" is a topic that's been circulating among petite women online lately. A lot of people (mostly in western countries) seem to be of the mind that if women don't exceed a certain stature and level of buxomness, they're not an adult (or at least, shouldn't be treated as one), which is directly at odds with the hundreds of millions of women who live out their entire lives never making it past 5'4"/1.63m and/or never developing a shapely figure.
In these online discussions, the affected women express frustration with constant infantilization, being treated as adolescents even well into their 40s, ranging from suspicious glares when in public with their partners to being told that they should never marry because by doing so they'd being enabling deleterious tendencies, which is pretty screwed up.
On the flip side, girls who develop unusually early have historically been treated as if they were adults, which is also extremely screwed up and has resulted in a lot of trauma that routinely gets swept under the rug.
The west has some really weird ideas and hangups that they need to work through. How about treating people their actual age instead of using their physical appearance as a proxy?
By AlecSchueler 2025-12-229:061 reply I know it's HN and we love her numbers but legislation that requires interpretation by judge or jury isn't at all unusual. There are also several layers of oversight and courts of appeal in the UK, which are separate from the government.
By p_l 2025-12-229:25 For a long time there was push to handle some of that under magistrate courts and other approaches so that to properly defend you have to appeal to actually get in front of proper court.
There was at least one case where prosecution never, ever, seen the evidence of supposed CSAM found on accused's computer, and if not for the lucky person having a slightly less overworked public defender, they had high chances of being found "guilty" if of minor offense for having what used to be staple of family photo albums - photo of the toddler grand-kids playing in kiddy pool, which was reported by computer tech at a laptop repair business.
By delusional 2025-12-229:54 50kph is a number, but that number is (in my jurisdiction) determined by the police. The laws describe a number of things they must consider when making the decision, and for every one of those aspects, reasonable people can disagree.
Then there's the fact that such a number is nearly impossible to assess in messy reality, so we usually have a bit of leeway. Who is to say I was going 52 and not 49kph? Reasonable minds can disagree, but if we do, the judge gets the final say.
> "Sexualized drawings of children" is certainly open to discussion.
I think you'll find that discussion to be very short if you show "average" people the kinds of things that are posted online. It's like Megan Kelly arguing that Epstein wasn't really a pedophile because they were 15 and not 8. That argument might work in certain circles of the internet, but nobody outside of those circles find that distinction interesting.
By Lutger 2025-12-229:52 The problem as stated in the original comment isn't that child porn as drawings is forbidden, or even that the interpretation of such is ambiguous. Or to be precise, it is not the only problem. The argument made is that these laws do not exist for their apparent intent (safety of children), but only as an excuse to exercise otherwise unlawful oppression and suppression of freedoms.
I don't find this assertion very plausible honestly, especially if this would be an argument against the existence of these very laws, because its not really an argument against government backdoors and such.
You could make the same argument (of ambiguity) with almost any crime, because there are always cases where a crime is hard to prove completely without any risk of failure, especially in the realm of sexual assault.
I'm not taking a position here, honestly I'm unsure about it, but the reasoning is sloppy and the allegations of abuse seemingly pulled out of thin air. There is also no case for why the poster is being investigated other than the pornography. It would be more plausible if there was some kind of civil disobedience involved. As stated, I'm inclined to put this in the category conspiracy theory.
By delusional 2025-12-2210:08 I like this answer posted in the other leg of this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46352710
I think an argument for the ambiguity of sexualized drawings of children must include specific examples. If he's not posting examples, I'm left assuming he probably knows they are indefensible.
The cycle of proposing the same surveillance legislation under different names is exhausting. Chat Control, ProtectEU, Going Dark - same invasive proposals, different branding.
What's particularly concerning is the metadata retention scope: "which websites you visit, and who is communicating with whom, when and how often" with "the broadest possible scope of application" including VPN services. This isn't about protecting children or fighting terrorism anymore - it's about normalizing mass surveillance through legislative attrition. Keep proposing it until opposition fatigues and it slips through.
The only sustainable solution is enshrining privacy rights into constitutional law with penalties for repeated attempts to circumvent them. Otherwise we'll be fighting Chat Control 4.0, 5.0, 6.0 forever.
By uyzstvqs 2025-12-2214:28 "Going Dark" is perhaps the most honest and realistic branding yet, on multiple levels.
We're going into the darkness of authoritarianism, and as a result we'll have to go dark to communicate freely and privately. It's also a perfect description of Europe's fear-based decelerationist attitude towards technological innovation, and how we're fully dependent on outside countries for technology as a result.
By SiempreViernes 2025-12-224:062 reply Pretty sure Google and meta are the ones that normalised mass surveillance...
By PopePompus 2025-12-2212:341 reply Mass surveillance by corporations, bad as it is, is less of a threat than mass surveillance by the government. Google can't put you in prison.
By troyvit 2025-12-2216:16 They can't put you in jail, but they will often happily sell your data to the government so that they can put you in jail [1], and by holding the data they are now open to subpoenas anyway.
Additionally, making surveillance by corporations the norm they've eroded everybody's reasonable expectation of privacy, which is the standard by which U.S. courts judge if surveillance has gone too far. Now that we're all used to this level of corporate surveillance we won't blink when the government does it too.
IOW if corporations weren't hoarding this data governments would have a much harder time securing it.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/us-government-buys-dat...
By shevy-java 2025-12-221:59 > The only sustainable solution is enshrining privacy rights into constitutional law with penalties for repeated attempts to circumvent them.
Yeah I also thought about this. Democracy needs some basic rules. Lobbyists try to not only get their laws into effect but undermine the democratic process.
By latexr 2025-12-2220:12 Chat Control was never the name of the legislation, it’s the name critics successfully gave to the “Regulation to Prevent and Combat Child Sexual Abuse”.
By snovv_crash 2025-12-2212:48 The other way would be to ruin the career prospects of any politicians that put their name behind this.
Name and shame via a broad media campaign. It only has to happen a few times for nobody to want to propose this kind of thing anymore.
Until people lobby for these privacy rights to be enshrined in law, this will continue to be a problem.
Defeating one bad law isn't enough.
By BlackjackCF 2025-12-2120:232 reply These should be enshrined into law... and there needs to be some sort of rule to prevent lawmakers from trying to ram through laws with the same spirit without some sort of cool down period. The fact that lawmakers have tried to push the same crap multiple times in the last 4 years despite a ton of opposition and resistance is ridiculous.
By idle_zealot 2025-12-2121:561 reply > there needs to be some sort of rule to prevent lawmakers from trying to ram through laws with the same spirit without some sort of cool down period
This doesn't make any sense as policy. It's often the case that the first crack at a law has oversights that come to light and cause it to fail. Then a reworked version that takes those issues into consideration is brought forward and passes. That's the process functioning correctly.
What might make sense is something akin to the judicial systems "dismissal with prejudice". A way for the vote on a law to fail and arguments to be made to bar similar laws from being resubmitted, at least for a time. So one vote to dismiss the bill, and another can be called to add prejudice.
That sounds good to me. I'm not sure if it would actually yield good results in practice.
By HNisCIS 2025-12-2123:31 Seconding "dismiss with prejudice", it's a concept in US legal proceedings to keep a prosecutor from continuing to pursue a case and it would make a lot of sense in the context of the EU. It seems like it's a common problem given the organizational structure, it seems like a very key missing mechanism.
People need to do a better job of voting out people who push such laws.
By idle_zealot 2025-12-2122:00 That is how it's supposed to work. Civic engagement and average level of education make this unlikely though. Representatives as disconnected from their constituency as those in the US are a serious threat to democracy, and there's no silver bullet fix, just a lot of obvious reforms that are really hard to pass. (Campaign finance, ranked choice voting, education funding, punishing politicians who break the law...)
Election cycles are unfortunately too long for that to work. Would need to reduce office terms to 2-3 months for "vote them out" to be viable.
By alwa 2025-12-2123:29 Then again, some governing actually does need to get done. That’s not much time to do anything that requires patient coordination and thorough consideration—especially anything of any complexity—even when people broadly agree that it needs to happen.
It’s also not much time to implement or reflect on anything: in the 2-3 month term, the new highway means construction noise and road closures, even if a year from now everyone might be glad to have a speedier commute.
It seems like, when the elected representatives are disposable like that, the power to mold policy devolves to the permanent political classes instead: lobbyists, policy shops, people whose paycheck comes from purses other than the public one…
By tremon 2025-12-2222:42 The people who push such laws are not voted in to begin with. Thorn et.al do not have elections.
By solidsnack9000 2025-12-245:28 How would anyone be voted out in the EU?
Good luck convincing people not to vote for anti-immigration measures and other populist ideas instead.
By idle_zealot 2025-12-220:491 reply You can absolutely frame enshrining privacy and punishing those who would spy on you in a populist way. The messaging writes itself. The problem is that anti-power populism is considered extremely dangerous and tamped down on far more strongly than the most virulent bigots and fascists.
Populism is how you win votes, but only one form of populism is allowed. For now, at least.
By robertlagrant 2025-12-228:531 reply Fascism requires an authoritarian state. If you don't want the horrors of the 20th century, be it fascists with a world war, or socialism with even more deaths despite being in peacetime, you don't want authoritarianism to take hold, and you want to move power out of the state.
By FpUser 2025-12-2210:09 >"you don't want authoritarianism to take hold"
I think the EU is well on its way of accomplishing just that. Not that it is unique in aspirations
By greenmoon 2025-12-220:46 [dead]
By pessimizer 2025-12-220:27 People get all of their information about what's going on in the world from people who are pushing these laws. People who contradict this information are suppressed or actually prosecuted by people who are pushing these laws. That is what these laws are intended to support. There are too many people talking to too many other people.
You need to stop blaming the victims. Europe is banning entire classes of political speech and political parties. It's always been a right they reserved - Europe has never had guarantees of freedom of speech or association, but it used to even have to debate and defend suppressing Nazi speech and parties. Now, they don't: the average middle-class European now finds it a patriotic point of pride to explain how they don't allow the wrong speech in Europe, unlike stupid America. Absolute cows.
If telling people that it's their own fault makes you feel better, you're part of the problem too. Perpetrators love when you blame victims. These garbage institutions of Europe are run by the same elites who have always run Europe, except secularly cleansed of any religious or moral obligation to the public. In America we understand that we would have secular nobles without noblesse oblige, and created a bill of rights. Europe wasn't expecting it and instead "declared" a list of suggestions.
The only thing that keeps me optimistic is how weak the EU actually is, and the tendency of the citizenry of European countries to periodically purge all of their elites simultaneously.
I do have a fear that Gladio permanently lowered Europe's IQ and level of courage, though. Being smart and brave was deadly after WWII.
By LtWorf 2025-12-2121:58 Well the italian constitution says that freedom and secrecy of correspondence and any other form of communications are not to be violated.
Not that anyone gives a shit, apparently. Laws are useless when governments aren't interested in applying them.
By mmooss 2025-12-220:58 If people want this to stop, they need to go on offense. Keep proposing laws that move the needle the other way. If all you do is play defense, inevitably you'll lose.
By IlikeKitties 2025-12-2119:433 reply There are already MANY laws in the EU and Germany for me regarding privacy. All the proposals are blatantly illegal in Germany for example. Just recently our highest court declared large scale logging of DNS request as "very likely" illegal.
A decent example being Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights:
>1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.
>2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.
Specifically:
>A 2014 report to the UN General Assembly by the United Nations' top official for counter-terrorism and human rights condemned mass electronic surveillance as a clear violation of core privacy rights guaranteed by multiple treaties and conventions and makes a distinction between "targeted surveillance" – which "depend[s] upon the existence of prior suspicion of the targeted individual or organization" – and "mass surveillance", by which "states with high levels of Internet penetration can [] gain access to the telephone and e-mail content of an effectively unlimited number of users and maintain an overview of Internet activity associated with particular websites". Only targeted interception of traffic and location data in order to combat serious crime, including terrorism, is justified, according to a decision by the European Court of Justice.[23]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_8_of_the_European_Conv...
By hexbin010 2025-12-2210:52 Exactly, great quote from the ECHR. Massive blanket exceptions for the prevention of crime or disorder
By timschmidt 2025-12-2119:542 reply Similarly, the 4th amendment to the US Constitution reads in full:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
"papers, and effects" seems to cover internet communications to me (the closest analog available to the authors being courier mail of messages written on paper), but the secret courts so far seem to have disagreed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intellig...
By Eddy_Viscosity2 2025-12-2121:062 reply SCOTUS will simply say that since the constitution didn't explicitly state that electronic data and communications was protected, then it isn't.
Even if it did explicitly say that this information is protected, SCOTUS would just make up a new interpretation that would allow surveillance anyway. Same as they made up presidential immunity, even though all men being subject to the law was pretty explicit purpose of the founding of america. I mean, they had a whole revolution about it.
Text, phone calls and emails which are not encrypted are the equivalent of a postcard. They don't need to seize the effects, only observe them.
Encrypting, end to end, would be the equivalent of posting a letter. The contents are concealed and thus are protected.
> all men being subject to the law was pretty explicit purpose of the founding of america. I mean, they had a whole revolution about it.
I don't think it is a feasible claim. Revolutionaries, by definition it seems to me, believe some men and the enacting of their principles are above the law. A revolutionary is someone who illegally revolts against the current law.
And formally recognising presidential immunity isn't really as novel as the anti-Trump crowd wants to believe. If presidents were personally subject to the law for their official acts, most of them wouldn't be in a position to take on the legal risk of, eg, issuing executive orders. If something is done as an official act then the lawsuits have to target the official position and not the person behind them. That is how it usually works for an official position.
I think it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect the law to distinguish between official acts taken in an honest attempt to benefit the nation, and those taken to corruptly and brazenly benefit oneself.
By roenxi 2025-12-226:20 That'd be a massive break from tradition in the US. AFAIK the only formal mechanism they have to separate the official from the person behind the role is impeachment by Congress. Apart from that there isn't really a mechanism to handle brazen corruption.
And US presidents have a long history of corruptly and brazenly benefiting themselves. Sometimes you see those before-and-after charts showing how much money they make while in office in excess of the official salary. The typical modern US president makes at least 10 of million in office and it isn't from the salary. Nobody likes it, but there is an open question of what exactly can be done about it.
By socalgal2 2025-12-220:40 I want privacy too but I don't think the 4th amendment is enough. The 4th amendment effectively covers what's in your house. It does not cover people and business outside your house. If you interact with someone else, they also have a right to use/remember the fact that you interacted with them, whether that's your family, friends, or some random business. You call someone on the phone, 3 parties are involved, you, the person you're calling, the company(s) you paid to make the call possible.
> There are already MANY laws in the EU and Germany for me regarding privacy
Which apply equally to the government?
By IlikeKitties 2025-12-2119:591 reply Yeah, a lot of them apply explicitly to the government. In Germany at least most privacy laws flow from Article 10 of our constitution and for example Article 8 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. Both of which have been used in the past to explicitly remove laws that violated privacy in the name of security.
By hexbin010 2025-12-2210:53 Germany is definitely a standout. I was taking issue with the blanket reference to the EU
The UK when it was in the EU for example had no problem basically doing whatever it liked, relying on exceptions for preventing crime and disorder. I'm sure there are other countries
Or like a sibling comment about Italy, who said that the government just ignores the privacy laws
Germany has a history of its government using data collected about citizens against them.
Much legislation was created after WWII to try to prevent that from happening again.
It hasn't stopped the German Interior Ministry from campaigning for EU-wide chat control and pushing to reinstate mass data retention
That's because this campaign is about changing that very law. Saying that "this is blatantly illegal" misses the basic point of this proposal being a CHANGE of the law that makes that illegal.
No, it's even worse. This is an attempt to bypass those laws by bringing in a new one at European level, and having that supersede the obnoxious protections in member states' Constitutions (Germany is hardly the only one with such protections).
By izacus 2025-12-2323:16 If this passes, Germany would have to approve of it, which makes your diction a bit wierd.
A country approving a law at a higher instance that changes their existing law is not bypassing anything.
By fulafel 2025-12-235:23 Secrecy of communiations frequently constitutionally protected:
See p. 11 of https://www.sipotra.it/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Comparing-...
By tomjen3 2025-12-2211:57 That is not enough.
We need to make every EU law contiguent on subsequently being adopted by the people - and at a significant majority (say 75% of eligible voters).
Yes that means fewer new laws, which is not a bad thing when the EU people are so detached from their population.
By 0ckpuppet 2025-12-222:37 like the Amercan Bil of Rights?
By delusional 2025-12-2120:0710 reply [flagged]
I find it preposterous that anyone defends this agenda that flips concept of 'innocent until proven guilty' on it's head by collectively punishing everyone for POSSIBLE crimes of some individuals.
In a way that any criminal will be easily able to circumvent by not following the law, so it doesn't even achieve it's goal.For example with one time pad exchanged outside of Eu's control + stenography messaging, bundled into 'illegal' app that works as VPN over HTTPS.
I find it preposterous that this issue is pushed without any input from citizens in most of member states - as it wasn't a part of political campaign of either internal elections nor EU ones!
i can keep going on and on. This isn't anything inevitable, this isn't anything that needs to be even solved. This is all done by a single lobbying group trying to push this for years.
By SiempreViernes 2025-12-2122:441 reply And I find it exceedingly annoying how all this heated discussion about the dangers of chat control is held oh so far from the actual text of the proposals.
For example: there is no actual proposed text for "ProtectEU", the name references a project to provide updates to legislation with a focus on security. All this talk about criminals circumventing the proposed law using VPN is just dreams you have.
By Xelbair 2025-12-2211:03 are you unable to comprehend hypothetical?
This is just one example showing that circumventing any legal block, without ability to control every form of communication, does not achieve it's goal.
And if any government can control all such forms of communications, we are already beyond saving.
By Xelbair 2025-12-2210:59 Thorn
By AnthonyMouse 2025-12-2121:171 reply > Fix the problem the proposal tries to fix, and the proposal goes away.
Only it doesn't. Even if you completely solved CSAM, authoritarians would still be proposing things like this to go after "terrorists" or copyright infringers or what have you. Claiming that people can't have privacy unless there is zero crime is just claiming that people can't have privacy, and that'll be a no.
Moreover, this proposal wouldn't completely solve CSAM. If the standard is that it has to be 100% effective then this won't work either.
Whereas if the standard is that something has to be worth the cost, then this isn't.
By SiempreViernes 2025-12-2122:471 reply But ProtectEU stuff is about organised crime, terrorism, cybersecurity, and countering Russian sabotage operations, not sure why you brought up CSAM.
By AnthonyMouse 2025-12-223:181 reply Who do you think is doing the CSAM? It's the criminal organizations and the terrorists and the Russian hackers, obviously.
Nobody really cares what the excuse du jour is because everybody knows that's what it is. Authoritarians want to build a censorship apparatus to use against the public, but if they say "we want to spy on our political opponents and censor people who disagree with us" then nobody would support it, so instead they say "we have to get the pedos and Putin" even though that's 0.5% of what a system like this would actually be used for if implemented.
By AnthonyMouse 2025-12-223:532 reply That seems like a criminal organization.
By Jigsy 2025-12-224:05 (Can't reply directly): I know he was involved in it, I just didn't realize it was on the scale of a network.
By AnthonyMouse 2025-12-224:03 Your argument is that, among other things, a human trafficking network isn't a criminal organization?
By trueismywork 2025-12-2120:141 reply Its like govt banning bleach and when chemical companies protest, the govt tells them to fix problem of people mixing bleach and vinegar. Its a problem, it has to be solved. If you dont like this, find another solution govt says.
By delusional 2025-12-2120:261 reply It's also a bit like when the government bans opioids because they're an addictive narcotic, but then allows their use in specific circumstances where the benefit outweighs the downsides, and then works with the industry to try and make it harder to abuse them.
It's like a lot of things.
By trueismywork 2025-12-2121:271 reply But they aren't working with industry here.
By delusional 2025-12-2122:021 reply We aren't at that part of the EU legislative process yet. First the commission agrees on a framework, then the working groups work with industry to fill out the details of the framework. That's standard EU process.
By bccdee 2025-12-224:23 Okay? The framework being proposed here is designed to enable universal communications surveillance. No combination of "details" would make that acceptable.
This framing is extremely counterproductive, though.
Most societal problems cannot be fixed entirely. There will always be child sex abuse just like there will always be murder, theft, tax evasion, and drunk driving. It makes sense to see if things can be improved, but any action proposed must be weighed against its downsides. Continued action by police is a good thing, but laws for that have been established for a long time, and the correct answer may well be that no further change to laws is required or appropriate.
(Ab)using child sex abuse to push through surveillance overreach is particularly egregious considering that by all objective accounts most of it seems to happen in the real world among friends and family, without any connection to the internet.
By delusional 2025-12-2121:541 reply > It makes sense to see if things can be improved, but any action proposed must be weighed against its downsides.
This is that. What you are seeing, repeated attempts to discuss a proposal, is the process by which the EU bureaucracy weighs the downsides. When you see it being pushed, that's evidence that some member states do not find "the correct answer" to be "no further change". That will eventually necessitate a compromise, as all things do.
> (Ab)using child sex abuse to push through surveillance overreach is particularly egregious
You are editorializing to a degree that makes it impossible to have a rational discussion with you. You HAVE to assume the best in your political adversaries, otherwise you will fail to understand them. They are not abusing anything, and they don't think it's "surveillance overreach". They believe it to be just and fair, otherwise they wouldn't propose it.
The people proposing it believe it to be to their own personal advantage. They don't necessarily believe it to be just and fair.
By SiempreViernes 2025-12-2122:50 The commissioners are porposing
> We will build resilience against hybrid threats by enhancing the protection of critical infrastructure, reinforcing cybersecurity, securing transport hubs and ports and combatting online threats.
for their own personal benefit? What? (Quote from the ProtectEU document)
By JoshTriplett 2025-12-2121:43 > Fix the problem the proposal tries to fix, and the proposal goes away. Until you fix the problem, the only proposal that exists will keep being the only one that exists.
Unfortunately, politicians and lobbyists are a hard problem to solve.
By timschmidt 2025-12-2120:11 The Epstein debacle seems to indicate that child sexual exploitation is a preferred method of entrapping, blackmailing, and controlling world political and science leaders and the wealthy. And implicates the same intelligence agencies calling for mass surveillance.
By b00ty4breakfast 2025-12-220:24 Intent is unimportant; the law itself is authoritarian. And if you think that there aren't nefarious actors waiting in the wings to take advantage of these kinds of laws, I got a bridge I'd like to sell you
I'm curious, what would you personally consider to be a step too far in the fight against CSAM?
By delusional 2025-12-2122:222 reply Thank you so much for asking the question instead of assuming an answer.
I don't think I have an ideological limit. I'm pro weighing alternatives, and seeing what happens. If law enforcement misuses the tools they are given, we should take them away again, but we shouldn't be afraid to give them tools out of fear of how they might misuse them.
I think my limits are around proper governance. Stuff like requiring a warrant are hard limits for me. Things like sealed paper trail, that are too easily kept away from the public, are red flags. So long as you have good ways for the public to be informed that the law isn't working, or being misused, I don't have many hard limits, I don't think democracy really allows for hard limits.
At the very broad level. I believe that Big Tech (Meta, Google, etc.) are already surveilling you. I believe that government should have at least as much ability to surveil you as companies. If you are willing to hand over that data to a company, you should be willing to hand it over to your government (specifically YOUR government, not the one the company is based in).
By socalgal2 2025-12-220:43 The obvious difference is a business (Meta, Google, etc..) can at most refuse to do business with you. The government can throw you in prison. Therefore, it's more important to restrict what the government can do than what business can to.
yea I get a few companies have too much power. That doesn't really change the point except to argue that they too should be more restricted
By like_any_other 2025-12-2120:441 reply > Fix the problem the proposal tries to fix, and the proposal goes away.
Bullshit. We are by far - by FAR - the most surveilled we have ever been in history, including under the worst of the Stasi, yet they lie to us about "going dark". The most minuscule scrap of privacy is a problem to be solved to them.
By SiempreViernes 2025-12-2122:52 Yeah, the Irish really should step up their GDPR enforcements.
It's something that can't be fixed, so rather than trying to cure it through bad privacy invading laws we should be looking in how to mitigate the problem through good reporting, accountability laws, and therapy laws.
A few examples of how mitigate the problem
* Require 2 adults at all times when kids are involved. Particularly in churches and schools.
* Establish mandatory reporting. None of this BS like "I'm a priest, I shouldn't have to report confessionals." That sort of religious exemption is BS.
* Make therapy for pedophiles either fully subsidized or at least partially subsidized.
* Require adult supervision of teens with kids (one of the more common sources of child sexual abuse).
CSAM will happen. It's terrible and what's worse is even if the privacy invasion laws could 100% prevent that sort of content from being produce, that just raises the price of the product and pushes it to be off shored. No amount of chat control will stop someone from importing the material via a thumbdrive in the mail.
The problem we have is the truth of "this will happen no matter the laws passed". That truth has allowed politicians to justify passing extreme laws for small but horrific problems.
