If you're ignorant or malicious the same thing happens: the government kindly informs you that someone is using your website to break the law, and then you can either do something or become clearly guilty of knowingly supporting them. (The government knows you know because they know they told you.)
Law enforcement, typically tasked with enforcing laws, would not ignore the new cases. Individual citizens enforcing laws themselves is nice but overall we don't depend on vigilantes.
Parent presumably means if the person in the moderator position ignores new cases.
To which it seems like a fair response would rely more on free speech perspectives.
Essentially, can it be said that the majority of the platform is used for illegal activities? Or are the illegal activities a minority of some other, lawful activities?
I'd want a system where Reddit is in the clear, but CreditCardSkimmersChat is not.
> Parent presumably means if the person in the moderator position ignores new cases.
Which is what they're supposed to do. They're not the police, the police are the police.
> Essentially, can it be said that the majority of the platform is used for illegal activities? Or are the illegal activities a minority of some other, lawful activities?
This doesn't work because it ends up prohibiting the lawful things anyway. You have a platform that promises witch hunts and the innocent victims of witch hunts get evicted from there, and you have a platform that promises no witch hunts and those people go there but so do all the witches and then you get calls to shut it down because there are many witches. You're left with nowhere for the innocent victims of witch hunts to go.
> I'd want a system where Reddit is in the clear, but CreditCardSkimmersChat is not.
They tried this with SESTA and it was a monumental failure. It turns out when you do this, CreditCardSkimmersChat.com goes away and is replaced with CreditCardSkimmersChat.ru and all that does is make law enforcement's job harder.
You want CreditCardSkimmersChat.com to carry on existing, because that's the place you send your agents to camp out in the chat with a logger and execute a warrant to have their ISP capture all their traffic, and investigate anybody who shows up from your jurisdiction, and collect stolen credit card numbers to report to the credit card companies before they can be used for fraudulent purchases.
You don't want to shut it down because once you know it exists it's a honeypot with a previous reputation for not being a honeypot, and all shutting it down will do is cause it to reappear in Russia or on Tor or at a new site you haven't rediscovered yet meanwhile lots more credit card fraud is happening, which only makes law enforcement's job harder and less effective.
It's like finally discovering the phone number of the crime boss and calling the phone company and ordering them to disconnect their phone.
> That's supposing law enforcement has viable ways to leverage knowledge of its existence into investigation and prosecution.
Which they do, because that's their job and they do it all day long.
We're somehow talking about both end to end encryption and moderated public forums, but those are two different things. If you have a public forum where anybody on the forum can read the messages then anybody on the forum can read the messages -- including law enforcement. So they join the forum and start investigating in all the usual ways, and get a warrant to have the ISP upstream from the site start logging its traffic so they can start locating the users and getting warrants to bug their homes etc.
When you have end to end encrypted communications, the only people who have the message are the sender and the receiver. Then there is no dedicated CreditCardSkimmersChat site, they can use any generic secure messaging software for that. But this isn't any more difficult for law enforcement than criminals who communicate in person -- you still have to come by some reasonable suspicion of them to begin with somehow, and once you have you get a warrant to install bugs, which overcomes end to end encryption because then you're collecting data at one of the endpoints.
> Which they do, because that's their job and they do it all day long.
With varying degrees of success. Let's not pretend an encrypted-everywhere world (which includes e2e, onion routing, and other options) opens up like an oyster at the first sign of a warrant.
What would your opinion be if CreditCardSkimmersChat advertised itself as a place to meet other people involved in credit card skimming? With all conversation taken to e2e chats as soon as two people were introduced
Not constructing a pathological case here. Am really interested in how folks feel about the social responsibilities of serious encryption.
