Re: If they can do why do they not tell us how?
"available which includes hashes of child porn images"
The problem with a hash is that it is a mathematical equivalence. Is this picture the same as that picture?
Well, couldn't that essentially be broken by scaling the image, say, 5% either way? Or compressing it a little more? Or gently messing with the colours? It wouldn't take much ingenuity at all to batch convert a bunch of images from known matches to unknowns.
Plus, with only a result and no actual image to work with, how does one train a machine to be able to recognise such a thing in this case? It'll be like that judge who said that he couldn't define pornography, but he'd know it when he saw it. Well, we would have to teach a machine to know, and given the hysterical responses a lot of people have (not to mention the malignant behaviour of the police these days) we would have to teach it to be accurate and have a low rate of false positives, yet protect children by catching everything that is bad. In other words waffle-waffle-magic-waffle-done. There, that was easy, in government land.
Meanwhile, in reality...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
