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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

Child abuse is an excuse. It is a red herring.

The thing about weaponising child abuse to destroy democracy and privacy, is that no one can openly protest against it, because who the hell is against protecting children from abuse? Especially in Britain, where the spectre of child abuse happening basically in plain sight, is still fresh in anyone's mind (Savile & co.)

Child abuse is the trojan horse. Any resistance and fight for privacy has been on a ticking clock since legislators discovered they have the ultimate weapon to pass any form of anti-democratic regulation. Slap "it's for the children!" on top of it, and the masses will applaud and cheer for more spying and more profiling by the government.

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So what _are_ they supposed to do about the children? The alternative (doing nothing) is not good.

Or do you think that government should shrink their responsibilities and everyone should watch out for their own kids?

Couldn't we ask same thing about financial fraud. That is should government have AI to scan every single message send by everyone to see if they are responding to some scam? Maybe direct those matching certain criteria automatically to teams of people who are allowed to read through that correspondence?

That too would be doing something. And maybe even net benefit for many individuals.

But that's expanding government's role even further to cover even more forms of abuse. Are you saying "if they're going to scan for CP they might as well scan for fraud too"?

No I am asking wouldn't that be as good reason. Or even protect lot more people.

First thing would not to vote for Starmer who probably was involved in covering up polically inconvenient child abuse.

Better start with that or few people will believe your intent.

In most Western countries, you don't have many choices these days: conservatives, conservatives disguised as Liberals, the idioticly popular populist party that sets the agenda because it tops the polls, the crazy far left. Any in any case it's always the blue Tories or the red Tories that win.

To quote a Spanish punk band, en esta democracia, siempre gobiernan los mismos, solo cambia el maquillaje.

You didn’t mention the greens, who typically are moderate left-progressive, environment focused, and used to working in coalition.

I put the greens, the party of NIMBY anti-nuclear loons, together with the crazy far-left. They're too busy faffing about with ideology and identity politics to achieve anything worthwhile. And I say this as a left-leaning tree hugging hippie.

On tech forums you're supposed to pretend that child abuse doesn't exist and that it can always be waved away as an excuse. Granted, once they have the ability to snoop they will, but it's a legit reason in this case.

The vast majority of CSAM, terrorists and criminals don't practice any Infosec at all. Even if that were the case, just because someone uses a particular technology for nefarious means that doesn't mean I or anyone law abiding shouldn't have the right to use said technology.

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