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Comment by endgame | Hacker News Reader

Snarky, mostly. So often the people who want to ram through additional surveillance will do so using "think of the children" rhetoric, as though they were the most important thing in the world.

And now we find that when it comes time to actually use these tools to protect the children, the secrecy of the tools is more important.

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The general rule of thumb is if a politician is pushing a law to "protect the children," it's a tell that it's a bad law. That's the only way they can sell it. By bad law, I mean permanently lose your rights kind of law. There have been many, but the war on drugs is a big one. It led to the militarization of the police, no knock raids, out of proportion sentencing, stop and frisk, asset forfeiture with no evidence, aggressive prosecution, etc. These laws that were sold to protect children against drug dealers creep into other offenses as well, like RICO and of course the patriot act. Terrorism is another big seller.

>And now we find that when it comes time to actually use these tools to protect the children, the secrecy of the tools is more important.

I don't want to get into too shaky ground, but if you can de-emotionalize the issue, prosecuting the consumer of the material isn't directly protecting anybody. That picture was taken no matter how many people look at it. You wouldn't expect the government to prosecute everyone who looked at the stolen pictures of celebrities that came out a few years ago. The government is now using this to legitimize surveillance, actively attempt to circumvent security (which is illegal), and to hide the circumvention methods. That's bad for everybody. Child porn is horrible, and horrible things happen to children, but an authoritarian government with massive, legal surveillance power is worse. The road to hell was paved with good intentions.

From the Wikipedia article, "Community, Space and Online Censorship (2009) argued that classifying children in an infantile manner, as innocents in need of protection, is a form of obsession over the concept of purity."

I believe I see what you mean, however in a case of child pornography do you not think that it's in a human's best interest to keep something from abuse of naivety?

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