I think you’re right, but from another angle. In the state where I lived way back when, a state representative put forth a bill to explicitly make e-CSAM illegal. I guess it was already illegal for print media and this covered a gap in the law about cell phone pics, etc. Thing is, it had no allowance for the age of the picture taker, or even whether the picture taker was the photo subject. If a 16 year old girl took a nude selfie and sent it to her boyfriend, she was a felon.

I wrote to the rep and explained my concerns. I wholeheartedly agreed with the intent of the law, but the code was buggy. To my surprise, he wrote back in horror to say he hadn’t considered that and pulled the bill immediately. I’m proud of having done that.

I’m 100% pro yeeting child pornographers into the sun. I still don’t want to throw kids in prison or remove all traces of a right to privacy in our haste to sun-yeet them.

I completely agree with you, but I do think that these teens do not have good opsec around these photos. It’s like the revenge porn problem but way worse. A teenager sending a nude selfie to a friend who then later shared these images non-consensually is a much bigger problem than if the same thing happened to adults.

I don’t have any ideas for a solution, but I suspect that the heightened focus on CSAM is really compensating for the fact that we don’t have solutions for revenge porn.

The proposed CSAM scanning used perceptual hashing to try to identify CSAM material known to law enforcement.

It was not a tool to identify private images as being underage. That’s an impossible task.

Are there statistics backing up the "VAST" majority claim?

While on statistics, I wonder, are there reliable statistics about child abuse of different types? Studying correlations with other social metrics, like sex education, liberal/conservative, policies regarding prostitution, and others can provide support for/against decisions.

Not that I hope these will impact people's and governments' choices, but I want to challenge my intuitions.

Children cannot legally consent to most things in most places, especially until near the end of their teen years.

Do you have a citation for that? Sounds plausible, but I'm not sure I've ever seen it stated that way in any of the related media reports on CSAM efforts.

I won't pretend to be so knowledgeable about how so much CSAM is being created, but keep in mind, there are laws against distribution & mere possession, too. Revenge porn is an obvious thing to be mindful of in this context in addition to other types of distribution. Consent to create doesn't imply consent to distribute (probably even to cloud storage) & is completely immaterial to issues of possession if it ends up in some 3rd party's hands. So the scope goes way wider than you're letting on. If you're saying all of these these laws are being abused, like they exist primarily to punish a state senator's daughter's ex-boyfriend, I would ask for something to back that up.

Yes, poor and unprivileged children can't really defend themselves here, but this is the system working to find some legal mechanism to do what it can, as a more powerful force. Protecting people from exploitation is a good use of government. If this was shot down for legal reasons, OK, the system is working and I hope there is a way to expand protections that fits into our system.