Always surprised why politicians get exempted from these kind of rules. You would think they would set the good example
The bad is obviously that they’re immune to their own legislation.
The good is that it prevents incumbents from using this data as part of their campaign. It would be Watergate all over again.
There is also data that probably shouldn’t be public. Locations and status of missile silos, troop locations, etc. In an ideal world, all of that would be on secured channels that are managed by appropriate entities. In the real world, it seems like a struggle to get troops to stop posting selfies with sensitive data on Facebook; I don’t doubt much more exists in private messages.
I’m also about 95% sure our politicians (globally) are incapable of managing the OpSec of having 2 devices, one secured and one not, and using them appropriately. They’ll forget one or the other exists.
I just also think that it's worth considering that there are some communications where the cost of leaking data is higher than the cost of a very low chance of catching CSAM. These exclusions are overly broad in my opinion (the cost of most of these comms leaking is low to non-existent), but there are good reasons for some limited communications to either be excluded or have an alternative system.
A Watergate scenario weakens shared belief in the government/democracy. Leaking nuclear secrets is obviously bad. Leaking troop locations/movements is also very bad. A prosecutor getting access to communications between a defendant and their lawyer would be very bad.
My preferred solution would be to not have the scanning, for various reasons including that exclusions would either be so broad that practically nothing gets scanned or too narrow and we'd eventually have some kind of crisis.
They're not stupid, and they're NOT example-setters (very few exceptions) - for myself.
#never voted, and very proud of it.