The number of people abusing social systems is a rounding error.

At least in Germany, there are so many barriers in place to prevent ““leeches”” that people who are actually in need of social support don’t have any access. Which is the entire point of erecting barriers might I add.

Not quite. Reuploading is at the very least an annoying process.

Uploading anything over Tor is a gruelling process. Downloading takes much time already, uploading even more so. Most consumer internet plans aren’t symmetrically either with significantly lower upload than download speeds. Plus, you need to find a direct-download provider which doesn’t block Tor exit nodes and where uploading/downloading is free.

Taking something down is quick. A script scraping these forums which automatically reports the download links (any direct-download site quickly removes reports of CSAM by the way - no one wants to host this legal nightmare) can take down thousands of uploads per day.

Making the experience horrible leads to a slow death of those sites. Imagine if 95% of videos on [generic legal porn site] lead to a “Sorry! This content has been taken down.” message. How much traffic would the site lose? I’d argue quite a lot.

I’d be surprised if many “producers” are caught. From what I have heard, most uploads on those sites are reuploads because it’s magnitudes easier.

Of the 1400 people caught, I’d say maybe 10 were site administors and the rest passive “consumers” who didn’t use Tor. I wouldn’t put my hopes up too much that anyone who was caught ever committed child abuse themselves.

I mean, 1400 identified out of 1.8 million really isn’t a whole lot to begin with.

It doesn’t though.

The most effective way to shut these forums down is to register bot accounts scraping links to the clearnet direct-download sites hosting the material and then reporting every single one.

If everything posted to these forums is deleted within a couple of days, their popularity would falter. And victims much prefer having their footage deleted than letting it stay up for years to catch a handful of site admins.

Frankly, I couldn’t care less about punishing the people hosting these sites. It’s an endless game of cat and mouse and will never be fast enough to meaningfully slow down the spread of CSAM.

Also, these sites don’t produce CSAM themselves. They just spread it - most of the CSAM exists already and isn’t made specifically for distribution.

It’s perfectly legal to compress something to a single bit and publish it.

Hell, if I take and publish the average color of any copyrighted image that is at least 24 bits. That’s lossy compression yet legal.

Trading is already taxed though. Otherwise no company on this planet would ever purchase anything and switch to gold as a currency.

Just because it’s personal data traded for a service doesn’t make it any less of a taxable trade.

It does increase the likelihood - marginally.

Fingerprint readers always got to balance between false positives and false negatives. If you want to reduce false negatives, false positives must be increased.

This shouldn’t really matter though. False positives are very low as-is so increasing them a little has nearly no impact on security.