I replied to the parent comment here to say that governments HAVE set up CSAM detection services. I linked a review of them in my original comment.

• They’ve set them up through commercial partnerships with technology companies… but that’s no accident. CSAM fighting orgs don’t have the tech reach of a major tech company so they ask for help there.
• Those partnerships a limited to major/successful orgs… which makes it hard to participate as an OSS dev. But again, that’s on-purpose as the same access that would empower OSS devs to improve detection would enable CSAM producers to improve evasion. Secrecy is useful in this race, even if it has a high cost.

Plus with the flurry of hugely privacy-invading or anti-encryption legislation that shows up every few months under the guise of “protecting the children online”, it seems like that should be a top priority for them, right?! Right…?

This seems like inflammatory bait but I’ll bite once.

• Improving CSAM detection is absolutely a top priority of these orgs, and in the last 10y they scope and reach of the detection tools they’ve created with partners has expanded in reach from scanning zero images to scanning hundreds of millions or billions of images annually. It’s a fairly massive success story even if it’s nowhere near perfect.
• Building global internet infrastructure to scan all/most images posted to the internet is itself hugely privacy invading even if it’s for a good cause. Nothing prevents law-makers from copying such infrastructure for less noble goals once it’s been created. Lemmy is in desperate need of help here, and CSAM detection tools are necessary in some form, but they are also very much scary scary privacy invading tools that are subject to “think of the children” abuse.