Yvette Cooper to announce four new measures to combat 10-fold increase in child sex abuse images
Border Force officers are to gain powers to stop suspected child sex offenders at airports and search their phones and laptops, as part of new “world-leading” laws to stamp out online child abuse.
Officers will be able to compel travellers to unlock their devices to be scanned on the spot for abuse images, if they have “reasonable grounds” to suspect them. Offenders face up to five years in jail if illegal content is found.
Some offenders are earning more than £1 million a year by selling the AI tech capable of creating child abuse images.
Currently, officers can physically search suspects’ suitcases, but not their phones or laptops. Under the new law, those who refuse to unlock their digital files so they can be scanned will be arrested for obstructing an officer and have their devices seized and searched.
The scans will be targeted at known or suspected paedophiles based on intelligence, the sex offenders’ register and destinations from which they arrive.
Is there any OSINT groups that exist to collect and share data around the efficacy of these laws versus actual outcomes?
My thoughts have always been that these types of measures likely just make offenders more reclusive and doesn’t aim to understand their broken brains to study a much mlre scientific approach to treatment.
I’m nearing the end of my second read of the book Determined: The Science of Life without Free Will and avoiding the whole free will specifics can of worms, I think the book does a really good job at publicizing how terribly our justice system is at actually lowering the crime they allege they are mitigating with bills like these. Instead this just adds a justification for violence and repression by the state against the people. I know, I sound very Foucoult right now…
Anyways, it would be cool to pull data and investigstions on these themes that commonly use moral panic and fear to justify these bills.
War on Drugs
War on Terror
War on Pedos
War on Gangs
War on Pirates
etc…
Anyone know of communities like this that could pool this info to more readily arm law makers and advocates with readily available data?
I would also add that similarly to drug possession laws, any law pertaining to the mere possession of anything will simply be heavily abused by law enforcement to plant evidence on dissidents or others they dislike, because it is far easier to drop a bag of drugs in someone’s car or place a file on their computer compared to doing real police work.
I think it is a real shame that law enforcement is too lazy to go after the actual producers and distributors of content like this, which is why it continues to proliferate unchecked in the face of dubious laws like this proposal in the UK.
Just saying, the number of whistleblowers and other political activists in the US and around the world who are coincidentally later “found to have CSAM on their devices” seems like a statistical marvel to me.
Off-topic but for future reference @Karlson I’d appreciate it if you pasted news links in the title box like it says on future topics you post, it makes organizing the forum easier for me
The initial examination of his computer by police expert did not find any evidence of the hacking. The prosecution requested for more time “to review an independent forensic report on what had been found on Mr. Bukovsky’s computers and how an unidentified third party had probably put it there”, but the case was halted. According to a book by investigative journalist Bill Gertz, Bukovsky was targeted “in a Russian disinformation operation shortly before he was to testify before the Owen commission in March 2015. A Russian hacker broke into his laptop computer and planted child pornography photographs on the device. A Russian intelligence agent then tipped off the European Union law enforcement agency, Europol, to the photos… It was a classic Russian disinformation and influence operation”.
It looks like there was no conclusive evidence found either way and while I haven’t read the book, because I’m honestly not that interested to, there are claims from a reputable American investigative journalist that they were planted.
Those confesions that were told to the police were heresay and not shown in a police report, and the guy was a dissident protester in Russia with a long list of enemies with motive to do something like this.
It is strange how the tip came in just before he was set to testify.
This isnt a clear cut “win for surveillance” vs “win for privacy” argument. Either way I recommend reading the Privacy vs Secrecy section.
Just be clear nobody is arguing for the rights of pedophiles to create and share CSAM or like lowering the age of consent. You should assume that folks here are concerned about privacy and not utilizing child exploitation as a problem the government should solve through surveillance of everyone.
I did some research on this topic some time ago, so I will speak from memory what I remember about this issue. The general focus to address this issue is limited to acting when the crime has already happened, commonly through punishment such as prisons or other specific measures for certain offenders -sex offenders in this case-, in none of these cases has proven to be effective in reducing recidivism and in some cases is even likely to increase it, while rehabilitation has no or little positive effect in reducing crime in some cases. This would be the lowest level of crime prevention which, whether through punishment or rehabilitation, is insufficient to combat crime. Instead, the causes of crime must be addressed and action taken before it happens.
Secondary prevention targets individuals at risk of involvement in crime, such as therapeutic services to treat these individuals and dissuade them from offending. Because of stigma there are few existing efforts and therefore little research on its effectiveness is conclusive, yet it is more promising than the tertiary prevention approach to stand on its own:
«Based on this, the cost of providing these preventative services for one year is only £380 per client, meaning that for every client who does not offend in 2018, the government would save a minimum of £64,620, and only 11 clients would need to avoid involvement with the criminal justice system in order to make the program entirely cost effective»
Finally, primary prevention targets the general public, for example, through education with CSE to prevent abuse from occurring. These two approaches are more promising and require adopting a more critical approach to the current system in order to expand, but the current system rather than questioning itself prefers to continue with its flawed approach and for that it must amplify its control on citizens, the increasingly invasive methods against privacy and the increase of abuse of authority are consequences that we have seen followed in this forum, another consequence is to redefine at convenience what is considered a threat to security, by increasing the range of people you now consider a “danger” you give them a greater reason to justify their persecution, but with this you affect more and more people who not only are not a danger to society, but are the samevictimsthey claim to help. Among otherinnocent people
This echoes the conclusions that Sapolsky reached in Determined and my own intuition.
There definitely are real threats that have been stopped, but this report kind of talks around the data they show to indicate that mass surveillance is valuable, where I would disagree.
An in-depth analysis of 225 individuals recruited by al-Qaeda or a like-minded group or inspired by al-Qaeda’s ideology, and charged in the United States with an act of terrorism since 9/11, demonstrates that traditional investigative methods, such as the use of informants, tips from local communities, and targeted intelligence operations, provided the initial impetus for investigations in the majority of cases, while the contribution of NSA’s bulk surveillance programs to these cases was minimal. Indeed, the controversial bulk collection of American telephone metadata, which includes the telephone numbers that originate and receive calls, as well as the time and date of those calls but not their content, under Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, appears to have played an identifiable role in initiating, at most, 1.8 percent of these cases. NSA programs involving the surveillance of non-U.S. persons outside of the United States under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act played a role in 4.4 percent of the terrorism cases we examined, and NSA surveillance under an unidentified authority played a role in 1.3 percent of the cases we examined.
…
Surveillance of American phone metadata has had no discernible impact on preventing acts of terrorism and only the most marginal of impacts on preventing terrorist-related activity, such as fundraising for a terrorist group. Source
