Administrivia: the porn and advertising thread

[Ken Brown]

phil hunt wrote:
 
> Two questions I'd be interested in people's views on:
> 
> (1) if everyone starts using crypto, will it be possible to effectively
> limit the availability of any type of matter (such as child porn, or
> for that matter unauthorised copies of music) over the net?
> 
> (2) if the answer to the first question is "no", will the authorities
> eventually stop trying?
> 
> (For what it's worth, my current answers to these questions are "don't
> know" and "probably, after a generation or so").


(1) No. Depending on how limited "limit the availability" is.  Look how
successful they are with heroin - you can't encrypt that, you can't
transmit it at the speed of light, if you want it you have to deal with
very nasty men with guns, most of the heroin on sale is adulterated,
often to near-uselessness,  and it can easily kill you if you make any
of a large number of common mistakes when using it. But you can still,
so I am told by the newspapers, buy it in every city in Europe. 

Compared with that, control of porn or copyright violations is *already*
effectively impossible. Widely used strong crypto would just put the
seal on that. If millions of people in Britain (or any other country)
were every day transferring petabytes of apparent randomness from
computers in other jurisdictions, mostly through many layers of
redirection, it would be impossible to follow what was going on.

The reason it is still possible today to limit the availability of child
porn is that most people - even most people who involved in other sorts
of crime - won't tolerate it. So they will tolerate physically intrusive
methods of control. Child porn can be used to justify armed police
bashing down doors at 0400. MP3s of the sound track of The Matrix can't. 

But even child porn cannot be suppressed entirely, and with universal
crypto it would be effectively impossible, at least in anything other
than a police state. You'd have to go after the users. One possibility
would be TV detector vans roaming the streets at night looking to see
what pictures you have on your screens. Would the UK tolerate a few
thousand secret police literally looking into random bedrooms to see who
is wanking at what? They'd end up banning a lot more than child porn. A
future police state where the morals of Singapore were allied with the
methods of the Stasi. I suspect most people would, in the end, prefer to
look the other way and forget about pursuing the users (though not
makers) of child porn. The correct jurisdiction to prevent child abuse
is the one in which the children live.

(2) Not for a long time. The real problem for most governments with
universal crypto is not porn (which exists anyway), political speech
(which by definition has to be widely available it does any good, or
harm - not even the government of China really cares much about a few
activists talking to each other), or even copyright violation (big in
America, but they can, and will, adjust, when the amount of money needed
to get ever more draconian laws through the Senate exceeds the amount of
money Disney & Murdoch can afford - or when too many teenagers get their
doors kicked in). 

The real problem  for governments is the threat of the privatisation of
money. Expect governments to do anything they can to prevent that.
Drugs, porn, copyright & so on provide levers for them to work on public
opinion.

Ken (almost back on topic)