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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

Not necessarily.

These bad bills keep coming up in an effort to address serious real problems, like child porn. People are going to keep proposing bills to address these problems until something passes.

By just concentrating on shooting down bad bill after bad bill without devoting any effort to getting good bills proposed the next bill after each defeated bad bill will be another bill from the same general set of people. Maybe the new one will address some of the issues in the prior ones but the chances are good that it won't address all of them.

Just telling everyone else what is wrong with their approach to solving a problem instead of also offering up your own better solutions tends to not work well in the long run.

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Child porn is a serious problem in that it is abhorrent.

I have not seen any evidence that it is a serious problem in that it has significant impact at a societal level.

These bills are not being introduced to significantly reduce child porn. They're meant to further enhance surveillance powers or earn easy political points. Any actual effect on crime is a side benefit.

Let's not forget that the same people that propose these bills are the ones hanging out at Epstein's private island.

>I have not seen any evidence that it is a serious problem in that it has significant impact at a societal level.

>Let's not forget that the same people that propose these bills are the ones hanging out at Epstein's private island.

The implication in the last sentence of your comment would seem to contradict your initial premise.

There are only a few hundred people in Congress. Even if all of them were partaking this still wouldn't be a societal impact level issue.

Your comment seemed to imply that a network of pedophiles in Congress was tailoring these laws specifically to weaken law enforcement's ability to prosecute people like them. That would certainly lead to a societal impact, as it would by design empower and entrench child pornographers and pedophiles across the board.

What if they wanted to deflect attention from themselves to large numbers of relatively minor criminals?

Ah I see. What I meant to express was that based on the fact that there appears to be a higher preponderance of child abusers among the rich and powerful, it's unlikely that actions they take are actually "to protect the children"

> to address serious real problems, like child porn

Can you quantify the size of this problem? It sounds like military defense spending during the cold war. "You just have to take our word for it that child porn is a massive problem affecting 1 out of 4 children, so we need to crush the tech industry."

> Just telling everyone else what is wrong with their approach to solving a problem instead of also offering up your own better solutions tends to not work well in the long run.

How would you think the introduction of a competing bill would fare, if it still needs the support of the first bill proponents? Wouldn't they believe that anything short than the original bill is not worth supporting?

I don't think the issue is that there are no better ways to deal with, say, child porn. I do believe that many politicians, if not most, refuse to acknowledge that there are better solutions out there, and for that there are several factors.

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