Washington Post Calls Telegram 'a Haven for Free Speech - and Child Predators' (yahoo.com) 82
The Washington Post writes that Telegram's "anything-goes approach" to its 950 million users "has also made it one of the internet's largest havens for child predators, experts say...."
"Durov's critics say his public idealism masks an opportunistic business model that allows Telegram to profit from the worst the internet has to offer, including child sexual abuse material, or CSAM... " [Telegram is] an app of choice for political organizing, including by dissidents under repressive regimes. But it is equally appealing for terrorist groups, criminal organizations and sexual predators, who use it as a hub to share and consume nonconsensual pornography, AI "deepfake" nudes, and illegal sexual images and videos of exploited minors, said Alex Stamos, chief information security officer at the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne. "Due to their advertised policy of not cooperating with law enforcement, and the fact that they are known not to scan for CSAM, Telegram has attracted large groups of pedophiles trading and selling child abuse materials," Stamos said.
That reach comes even though many Telegram exchanges don't actually use the strong forms of encryption available on true private messaging apps, he added. Telegram is used for private messaging, public posts and group chats. Only one-to-one conversations can be encrypted in a way that even Telegram can't access them. And that occurs only if users choose the option, meaning the company could turn over everything else to governments if it wanted to... French prosecutors argue that Durov is in fact responsible for Telegram's emergence as a global haven for illegal content, including CSAM, because of his reluctance to moderate it and his refusal to help authorities police it, among other allegations...
David Kaye, a professor at University of California, Irvine School of Law and former U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of expression... said that while Telegram has at times banned groups and taken down [CSAM] content in response to law enforcement, its refusal to share data with investigators sets it apart from most other major tech companies. Unlike U.S.-based platforms, Telegram is not required by U.S. law to report instances of CSAM to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, or NCMEC. Many online platforms based overseas do so anyway — but not Telegram. "NCMEC has tried to get them to report, but they have no interest and are known for not wanting to work with [law enforcement agencies] or anyone in this space," a NCMEC spokesperson said.
The Post also writes that Telegram "has repeatedly been revealed to serve as a tool to store, distribute and share child sexual imagery." (They cite several examples, including two different men convicted to minimum sentences of at least 10 years for using the service to purchase CSAM and solicit explicit photos from minors.)
"Durov's critics say his public idealism masks an opportunistic business model that allows Telegram to profit from the worst the internet has to offer, including child sexual abuse material, or CSAM... " [Telegram is] an app of choice for political organizing, including by dissidents under repressive regimes. But it is equally appealing for terrorist groups, criminal organizations and sexual predators, who use it as a hub to share and consume nonconsensual pornography, AI "deepfake" nudes, and illegal sexual images and videos of exploited minors, said Alex Stamos, chief information security officer at the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne. "Due to their advertised policy of not cooperating with law enforcement, and the fact that they are known not to scan for CSAM, Telegram has attracted large groups of pedophiles trading and selling child abuse materials," Stamos said.
That reach comes even though many Telegram exchanges don't actually use the strong forms of encryption available on true private messaging apps, he added. Telegram is used for private messaging, public posts and group chats. Only one-to-one conversations can be encrypted in a way that even Telegram can't access them. And that occurs only if users choose the option, meaning the company could turn over everything else to governments if it wanted to... French prosecutors argue that Durov is in fact responsible for Telegram's emergence as a global haven for illegal content, including CSAM, because of his reluctance to moderate it and his refusal to help authorities police it, among other allegations...
David Kaye, a professor at University of California, Irvine School of Law and former U.N. special rapporteur on freedom of expression... said that while Telegram has at times banned groups and taken down [CSAM] content in response to law enforcement, its refusal to share data with investigators sets it apart from most other major tech companies. Unlike U.S.-based platforms, Telegram is not required by U.S. law to report instances of CSAM to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, or NCMEC. Many online platforms based overseas do so anyway — but not Telegram. "NCMEC has tried to get them to report, but they have no interest and are known for not wanting to work with [law enforcement agencies] or anyone in this space," a NCMEC spokesperson said.
The Post also writes that Telegram "has repeatedly been revealed to serve as a tool to store, distribute and share child sexual imagery." (They cite several examples, including two different men convicted to minimum sentences of at least 10 years for using the service to purchase CSAM and solicit explicit photos from minors.)
When did the memo go out? (Score:2)
When did child porn stop being the common term and it change to child sexual abuse material?
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Apple popularized it when they refused to say "child porn" and used this as a euphemism for it when they had to run a PR campaign to try to smooth other the whole "we scan everything for bad things" brouhaha some time ago.
No, it predates Apple's shenanigans by a very long time. I think the US Government (FBI maybe) made up the term. Perhaps as long ago as 2000.
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Me
>popularized it
You:
>made up the term.
Which one do you think better answers the question of:
>When did child porn stop being the COMMON TERM and it change to child sexual abuse material? (emphasis mine)?
To amke the accent on the asbuse of the child get (Score:3)
"While this phrase still appears in federal law, âoechild sexual abuse materialâ is preferred, as it better reflects the abuse that is depicted in the images and videos and the resulting trauma to the child."
While CSAM is a mouthfull, I understand the reason why they want to change the terminology, it makes a lot of sense. Wait a decade and it will be common parlance, just like you try to avoid CP as abbreviation nowadays.
Re:To amke the accent on the asbuse of the child g (Score:5, Interesting)
"...as it better reflects the abuse that is depicted in the images and videos..."
No.
No abuse need be depicted, the abuse is alleged to exist merely by the existence of the images. The term propagandizes the content, it is intended to generate an emotional response.
"I understand the reason why they want to change the terminology..."
Do you? Because when you explain it you get it wrong.
child porn does not put the accent on child abuse (Score:2)
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the child abuse which happen for that material to be made.
Then, the term is used incorrectly when no children are involved, such as when the images are AI-generated or made with adult actors posing as children.
Yes, some adults look like children. I am currently working in the Philippines, and I have adult female co-workers who look like they're about twelve.
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Do you? Because when you explain it you get it wrong.
No, they didn't. There is no such thing as child pornography. Children cannot consent to sex or anything related. They are not, and cannot, be performers such as adults are in the real porn industry. Oh look, the exact same thing I just said [rainn.org].
While some of the pornography online depicts adults who have consented to be filmed, that’s never the case when the images depict children. Just as kids can’t legally consent to sex, they can’t consent to having images of their abuse recorded and distributed. Every explicit photo or video of a kid is actually evidence that the child has been a victim of sexual abuse.
So much propaganda. /s
Re:To amke the accent on the asbuse of the child g (Score:4, Insightful)
Every explicit photo or video of a kid is actually evidence that the child has been a victim of sexual abuse.
Even when it's a selfie?
Re: To amke the accent on the asbuse of the child (Score:1)
I'm pretty confident that here in the US children are not prone to taking naked pictures of themselves and uploading them to social media.....
Re: To amke the accent on the asbuse of the child (Score:5, Informative)
I'm pretty confident that here in the US children are not prone to taking naked pictures of themselves and uploading them to social media.....
1. Yes, they do, and some of them have been criminally charged [aclu.org] for their selfies.
2. Explicit photos need not be "uploaded to social media" to be considered CSAM.
Re: To amke the accent on the asbuse of the child (Score:1)
I guess I should have specified children younger than teenagers. Also I'm thinking that the younger the person in the scenario you referenced the more likely the parents would be charged.....
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How do you rate cartoons? I'm sure I've read of cases where those were prosecuted.
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Some teenagers are more sexually active than others, most people start becoming interested in sex in their teens so it's not uncommon for teenagers to be sexually active (usually with their peers of a similar age), and this often involves sending sexually explicit material to each other.
For younger kids, they often haven't yet been taught that nudity=bad so they will often take off their clothes if doing so is comfortable (eg in hot weather) and won't think twice about taking a picture if they know how to,
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Well someone here has a fucking brain. Those other comments are pretty fucking retarded.
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While CSAM is a mouthfull, I understand the reason why they want to change the terminology, it makes a lot of sense. Wait a decade and it will be common parlance, just like you try to avoid CP as abbreviation nowadays.
In time people will just start saying "see sam" instead of using the initialism and it becomes no more cumbersome than anyone saying "child porn" or its initialism "see pee". I wouldn't be surprised if part of it is just related to YouTube demonetizing videos for using certain terms that aren't advertiser friendly in much the same way that terms such as "unalived" have become popular recently.
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Re: To amke the accent on the asbuse of the child (Score:2)
For me it was mostly SAM Sites, because in CnC95 they were fun to watch open up and shoot Orcas.
Still a nerd site I hopeâ¦
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I wonder who "the child" is when it's AI-generated. They use the same term for it all.
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The old term probably lost its impact due to overuse. So they got a new one...
Re:When did the memo go out? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Much "soft language" happens to prevent stereotyping or 'offending' someone. "CS-AM" means the child is a victim even if sexual meaning doesn't exist.
It allows the shit excuse of "Every explicit photo or video of a kid ...", when the law states female nipples are "explicit" material. It sidesteps the truth that many photos of males are not sexual while every photo of a female, is by law, explicit. The result is pre-teen females being hidden from public view and parents declaring the world owes them, be
By their logic (Score:3, Insightful)
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Telephone companies
* one-to-one
* used to have Yellow Pages to lookup keywords, only included legally established businesses
* collaborate with the authorities: wiretapping, owner name, list of contacts, list of text messages, location data.
Telegram
* group chats
* find a group chat by keyword; unfiltered, anything you might think of
* does not collaborate with the authorities
It's the "does not collaborate" that make them into problems.
Telegram is closer to Facebook groups than to telephone. But Meta has functio
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The telephone and cable companies will gladly let the government snoop on any communication with a court order. Hell. If you're the NSA, they'll let you do it without a warrant. [wikipedia.org]
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The telephone and cable companies will gladly let the government snoop on any communication with a court order. Hell. If you're the NSA, they'll let you do it without a warrant. [wikipedia.org]
And if you wanted to, you could use a frickin' modem and then encrypt what goes over it.
Would the phone company be responsible then? Why or why not?
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Are you sure you understand how encryption works? The medium doesn't matter, whether it's disk, phone line, cable line, or the airwaves. Unless you're communicating directly with another person and generated your own key/certificate pair, there's no guarantee you won't be MITM attacked. If you're talking with a web site with SSL, I wouldn't doubt that the NSA has a root CA you trust that could generate the certs on the fly and do just that for you. At the end of the day, if you're hitting anything on th
They'd go after Mastodon if they wanted CSAM (Score:1)
I don't believe this is what they're really worried about, because they could just go after Mastodon if they really were worried primarily about CSAM.
This is "won't someone think of the children" used to go after platforms saying stuff they want to censor.
Re: They'd go after Mastodon if they wanted CSAM (Score:2)
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So is the telephone and cable companies. Should either be snooping on me because I might be a pedophile?
They are common carriers, social media and public messaging sites are objectively not. When your telephone company starts providing you a public group messaging board for sharing images, you can bet your arse they would come under the focus of a law requiring moderation, as literally every other place that offers similar services already has.
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So is the telephone and cable companies. Should either be snooping on me because I might be a pedophile?
The question is irrelevant as they are spying on you with the excuse that you might be a pedophile. Think about it for a minute.
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Found the fascist.
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Badd Faithh: a good name for a hair-metal band (Score:2)
Yeah, it's a dilemma. You don't want to throw the liberty baby out with the sexual predator bathwater.
You also don't want to search on any of those words in proximity to any of the others, or you'll get on a list.
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"You don't want to throw the liberty baby out with the sexual predator bathwater."
A WHOLE LOT of people do. And most people only believe in liberty for themselves anyway.
As hard as the (quoted part of the) article tries to slime the company, it manages to make them sound pretty good. There is the presumption that corporations should spy on their customers that is remarkably offensive. No doubt Telegram is a bad actor, but I'm not convinced by the propaganda here.
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how is there no doubt telegram is a bad actor. I'm not saying you're wrong, just haven't something concrete that puts them in that category. do you mean it attracts bad actors or they did x which makes them a bad actor.
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Re:Badd Faithh: a good name for a hair-metal band (Score:4, Insightful)
How is there no doubt telegram is a bad actor?
Because the government says they're bad, so it must be true.
Who's next? CSAM is on every social media platform (Score:3)
Are the Telegram charges the start for every social media platform? CEOs better not fly outside the US
BTW, WAPO is little more than a press office for the CIA. This has been known for some time. It is suspected that Bezos was asked to buy WAPO if he wanted to keep his federal AWS contracts flowing. How else can you explain a business with such bad financials not going under?
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The issue wasn't the presence of CSAM. The issue was their refusal to remove it when it was pointed out to them.
Gov/Tech hates not being about to spy on you (Score:1)
That is what this is actually about.
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The relevant group channels were not encrypted.
To get an end-to-end encrypted chat, it can't be a group chat and you have to select it when starting the chat.
Well Now We Know What They Think Of Free Speech (Score:1)
Putting it in the same sentence with CSAM either means free speech is doomed or CSAM is fixing to be made legal. I wonder which shit path they are heading.
No one likes cops (Score:2)
The problem is a lot of people simply just hate law enforcement because they act like entitled little bastards. Stalking their girlfriends and exes, shooting their partners and murdering their family excusing it on PTSD. Harming uninvolved public like me.
Ill always hate them after being blocked from a Pizza parking lot when going to pick up my order. I asked to get by and immediately got attitude. After a few minutes and a pizza getting cold inside I got out and walked way around and was stopped and tickete
Re: No one likes cops (Score:2)
Also, even better as I have the whole thing on video. They told me not to record because their body cameras would, but I was smart enough to reply. No, you donâ(TM)t release yours.
Turns out when I called the records office they said they would not release anything without an FOIA request. And after I made one of those, they said, the footage was lost.
No shit it was lost. It was proof of my Federal rights being violated.
Even more messed up is that I cant release it with his information, name, or face. E
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All police practice thuggery, who's going to stop them? Those in power need police for protection, they're not going to bite the hand that arrests angry villagers.
US police are closer to a criminal-gang than servants of the justice system. It's why US police have a "fraternity" or a "brotherhood", not a union. (When suffering negative publicity, the fraternity pretends it is equal to the Teacher's Union.) Police in one city have been caught running their own version of Abu Grahib [theguardian.com] and these police have
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(When suffering negative publicity, the fraternity pretends it is equal to the Teacher's Union.)
Which is hilarious given what some people in the US think of teachers....
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My 18 year old niece and her 17 year old coworker had a county sherif straight up try to intimidate her for enforcing local COVID protocols that they just didn't feel like following in the ice cream shop she worked in. Fucker didn't want to wear his mask and regardless of what you think of measures like that the fact is this cop thought he was above the law and was so entitled in this opinion he took to threatening legal action against a couple of kids working in an ice cream shop.
My niece stuck to her guns
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She sounds like a Karen. I'd never shop there again.
No shit (Score:5, Insightful)
It's long been understood that free speech and policed speech exist at opposite ends of the spectrum. And just as "Down with Reagan!" is speech one could make freely, so is "Step into my white van."
Just as there are obvious downsides to letting the p3d0s run wild, there are different and also obvious downsides to preventing people from speaking without prior authorization.
Welcome to the real world, where there is no absolute good or absolute evil, only a choice among different kinds of headaches.
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Yes it is. If you run a free speech venue, you will disproportionately attract the witches who are banned everywhere else. This is why unmoderated platforms always get coverage about how they allow nazis, pedos, communists etc.
You can either be reddit, or you can be 4chan. There is a tradeoff happening on a spectrum where one extreme is "safe corporate PR" and the other is "a den of evil and villainry". 4chan tries to remove CSAM; reddit tries to allow original thought in niche subs; but we all know where e
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> if you run a free speech venue
A distinction has to be made. "Free Speech" is really free thought. You can think whatever you want, even in a highly repressive place
However,
Speech is when you move your lips and make vocal sounds. When you freely speak to your friend, or even a group of people your reach is limited by the size of the venue and number of people.
Telegram, for instance is a social media platform, which
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So its a questi
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It's long been understood that free speech and policed speech exist at opposite ends of the spectrum.
It's long been understood that right wing nutjobs will oversimplify any issue in order to try to drive an agenda. In the same way that you can't have the freest market possible without some controls that prevent the worst actors from dominating every exchange, you can't have the freest speech possible without some controls. Fraud has to be illegal. Sharing other people's private information for reasons other than their benefit or the maintenance of society, likewise.
"9/11 Terrorists are using the Interweb" (Score:5, Insightful)
"We need to tap ISPs and bodyscan you at the airport"
"Maybe that's a bad road to go down..."
"You support Islamo-fascist terrorists?"
"No, but do you see how-"
"HEY THIS GUY HERE IS A TERRORIST SYMPATHIZER"
We need to backdoor your encrypted chats
"Maybe that's a bad road to go down..."
"You support right-wing terrorists and CHILD MOLESTERS?"
"No, but do you see how-"
HEY THIS GUY HERE IS A CHILD MOLESTER SYMPATHIZER"
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It's Planet Earth, Stupid (Score:1)
Planet Earth has made it one of the havens for BILLIONS of people, some of whom are child molestors.
QUICK, blow up the earth and it's CEO.
Stupid Day On Slashdot (aka "weekend with the mods who will allow anything no matter how stupid".)
Time to disable root (Score:4, Funny)
Password: childporn
user@freedoms:~#
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OMG you logged on as root! Get this joker of Slashdot!
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user@freedoms:~# rm -rf /
Isn't it ironic .. (Score:3)
Next target: Big Beer (Score:2)
If it wasn't for beer, there wouldn't be bars... and bars are used by criminals to meet, and by sexual predators to seek their prey.
Therefore, by the same logic used to arrest Durov, they must close all bars and arrest the CEOs of the breweries.
And child molestors are also on⦠(Score:1)
Have you ever seen... (Score:2)
No, no we are just reporting about it.
What CSAM? (Score:1)
Police departments get wind of these groups and deal with only these groups, and while it's unfortu