Because I've gotten a few inquiries already and also because I do enough shouting about terrible tech bills that I should also give credit where it's due: @wyden.senate.gov's Invest In Child Safety Act is a perfect example of legislation that will *actually* meaningfully improve child protection. - ThreadSky

rahaeli.bsky.social • 396 days ago

Because I've gotten a few inquiries already and also because I do enough shouting about terrible tech bills that I should also give credit where it's due: @wyden.senate.gov's Invest In Child Safety Act is a perfect example of legislation that will *actually* meaningfully improve child protection.

Comments

rahaeli.bsky.social•396 days ago

Techdirt's article on it covers the basics really well: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/31/as-congress-grandstands-nonsense-kid-safety-bills-senator-wyden-reintroduces-legislation-that-would-actually-help-deal-with-kid-exploitation-online/ It increases funding for NCMEC, the NGO that processes reports of CSAM, and improves DOJ capacity to investigate and prosecute reports. It also increases the data retention period when a site reports CSAM.

rahaeli.bsky.social•396 days ago

Anyone on any T&S team who's ever reported CSAM -- actual CSAM, not stuff misclassified as CSAM by a terrible image classifier -- knows how rare it is that a report is followed up on, even when it's egregious content that leaves you with afterimages in your brain forever.

rahaeli.bsky.social•396 days ago

This is because NCMEC is underfunded and under-resourced, and they have to prioritize the people who are actively producing new content now -- that is, cases where a child is actively being abused and law enforcement has a chance of intervening to rescue the child.

rahaeli.bsky.social•396 days ago

But the nature of the detection tools we have mean the content most likely to be detected and reported is the older stuff -- the stuff that's already made it into the PhotoDNA hash detection database. The delay in new content being added due to NCMEC under-resourcing means that's usually older.

rahaeli.bsky.social•396 days ago

It's still worthwhile to prosecute those cases: not only do the people who have older images often also have newer ones, every takedown and prosecution of every piece of CSAM helps to prevent the constant revictimization of people who have already been through horrors.

rahaeli.bsky.social•396 days ago

Congress is perfectly willing to haul social media CEOs in front of them for a dog and pony show hearing where they literally take a page straight out of Joseph "are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party" McCarthy's playbook.

mikestucka.bsky.social•396 days ago

Hey @katereports.bsky.social , you might appreciate this thread

invalidusername.bsky.social•395 days ago

Glad to see there’s at least some valuable solutions being proposed. As someone who is in Gen z, I can say it’s extremely disconcerting that it’s taken this long for the legal and regulatory conversation to even get started.

rahaeli.bsky.social•395 days ago

Oh, there's already things in place, it's just deeply underfunded

invalidusername.bsky.social•395 days ago

As is always the case

rahaeli.bsky.social•395 days ago

This is definitely an egregious case, though. They need like half again as many analysts as they have, sigh.

invalidusername.bsky.social•395 days ago

Seems like maybe we should reduce spending elsewhere 🤔

rahaeli.bsky.social•395 days ago

Or tax Certain People more! Or, preferably, both.

alphaincipiens.bsky.social•277 days ago

Ron Wyden continues to be one of my favorite guys in politics today

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply