Greed Fuels Anti-encryption "NGO's" Like Ashton Kutcher's Thorn

🚨 It's NOT "For The Children".

🏦 💸 Greed Appears To Fuel Ashton Kutcher's Thorn: Client-Side Scanning For Profit From Corporate Interests Using NGO Fronts

QUOTE: "An investigation uncovers a web of influence in the powerful coalition aligned behind the European Commission’s proposal to scan for child sexual abuse material online, a proposal leading experts say puts rights at risk and will introduce new vulnerabilities by undermining encryption.

In early May 2022, days before she launched one of the most contentious legislative proposals Brussels had seen in years, the European Union’s home affairs commissioner, Ylva Johansson, sent a letter to a US organisation co-founded in 2012 by the movie stars Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore.

The organisation, Thorn, develops artificial intelligence tools to scan for child sexual abuse images online, and Johansson’s proposed regulation is designed to fight the spread of such content on messaging apps.

“We have shared many moments on the journey to this proposal,” the Swedish politician wrote, according to a copy of the letter addressed to Thorn executive director Julie Cordua and which BIRN has seen.

Johansson urged Cordua to continue the campaign to get it passed: “Now I am looking to you to help make sure that this launch is a successful one.”

That campaign faces a major test in October when Johansson’s proposal is put to a vote in the Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament. It has already been the subject of heated debate.

The regulation would obligate digital platforms – from Facebook to Telegram, Signal to Snapchat, TikTok to clouds and online gaming websites – to detect and report any trace of child sexual abuse material, CSAM, on their systems and in their users’ private chats.

It would introduce a complex legal architecture reliant on AI tools for detecting images, videos and speech – so-called ‘client-side scanning’ – containing sexual abuse against minors and attempts to groom children.

Welcomed by some child welfare organisations, the regulation has nevertheless been met with alarm from privacy advocates and tech specialists who say it will unleash a massive new surveillance system and threaten the use of end-to-end encryption, currently the ultimate way to secure digital communications from prying eyes.

The EU’s top data protection watchdog, Wojciech Wiewiorowski, warned Johansson about the risks in 2020, when she informed him of her plans.

They amount to “crossing the Rubicon” in terms of the mass surveillance of EU citizens, he said in an interview for this story. It “would fundamentally change the internet and digital communication as we know it.”

Johansson, however, has not blinked. “The privacy advocates sound very loud,” the commissioner said in a speech in November 2021. “But someone must also speak for the children.”

Based on dozens of interviews, leaked documents and insight into the Commission’s internal deliberations, this investigation connects the dots between the key actors bankrolling and organising the advocacy campaign in favour of Johansson’s proposal and their direct links with the commissioner and her cabinet.

It’s a synthesis that granted certain stakeholders, AI firms and advocacy groups – which enjoy significant financial backing – a questionable level of influence over the crafting of EU policy.

The proposed regulation is excessively “influenced by companies pretending to be NGOs but acting more like tech companies”, said Arda Gerkens, former director of Europe’s oldest hotline for reporting online CSAM.

“Groups like Thorn use everything they can to put this legislation forward, not just because they feel that this is the way forward to combat child sexual abuse, but also because they have a commercial interest in doing so.”

If the regulation undermines encryption, it risks introducing new vulnerabilities, critics argue. “Who will benefit from the legislation?” Gerkens asked. “Not the children.” Privacy assurances ‘deeply misleading’"

READ FULL ARTICLE: https://balkaninsight.com/2023/09/25/who-benefits-inside-the-eus-fight-over-scanning-for-child-sex-content/