In an essay on the current justification for authorities in the EU and around the globe seeking to break end-to-end-encryption to fight child sexual abuse and exploitation, researcher Susan Landau discusses the issue in historical context, and explains why breaking encryption leads us in the wrong direction.
“Think differently. Think long term. Think about protecting the privacy and security of all members of society—children and adults alike. By failing to consider the big picture, the U.K. Online Safety Act has taken a dangerous, short-term approach to a complex societal problem. The EU and U.S. have the chance to avoid the U.K.’s folly; they should do so. The EU proposal and the U.S. bills are not sensible ways to approach the public policy concerns of online abetting of CSAE [Child Sexual Abuse and Exploitation]. Nor are these reasonable approaches in view of the cyber threats our society faces. The bills should be abandoned, and we should pursue other ways of protecting both children and adults.”
[Edit typo.]
I disagree with the specifics of what you’re saying but not the point. She is a scientist, she’s speaking her opinion sure, but it’s an opinion based on hundreds of thousands of hours in a field. Identify her as a scientist and an expert.
But, that doesn’t mean you’re wholly wrong. It would be beneficial to us all of journalists came up with a better mechanism to sort learned opinion from study outcome. Some publications are good at this, but on the whole, whether you grock the source of the data from the headline is wildly variable.
I do however have one last point. The headline isn’t the article. You aren’t meant to get all the nuances of an article from the headline, otherwise we wouldn’t call it a headline, it would be the article itself. There comes a point where, so long as the headline writer isn’t deliberately disingenuous, it falls to the reader to follow up on their questions by reading the other 98% of the information in front of them.
[Edit: Misgendered the scientist in question, sleepy brain + skim reading == derp]
@jet @Jaccident
Yes, that’s the whole thing. Although I get @jet’s point, we can’t tell everything in the title, and you’ll need to name the original writer by her profession, even if she expresses her opinion. That’s why I wrote “essay” in the body’s text first sentence. (But I’m open to edit the headline, that’s not the point, just provide a proposal.)