Petition against EU chat control
I&#x27;d like to advance a more productive argument for pro-privacy tech people. Often the reply is to claim that governments are lying when they try to &#x27;protect children&#x27; and the like.<p>Having at least some experience with international police orgs, I can say that significant resources are dedicated to online crime (including CSAM) and their &#x27;lived reality&#x27; is very much expending significant resources because e2e prevents low-cost surveillance.<p>So the attack line that &#x27;none of this is sincere&#x27; is actively unhelpful -- since so much of it is sincere, it comes across at best naïve.<p>A better line, imv, is this: assume <i>present</i> goverments are entirely sincere. It doesnt matter. We cannot know the intentions of <i>future</i> governments. And we have good reasons to suppose that governments, in general, require extraordinary systems of checks-and-balances to be prevented from abuse of power.<p>So I&#x27;d advise not attacking people who are, very often, actually thinking of the children -- you&#x27;re just antagonising the people <i>in power</i>. Rather, invite them to help you defend the liberal order of individual human rights that prevent state abuse of power. As a matter of fact, they really arent actually trying to create a secret police.<p>Enabling state abuse of power has a far far higher negative outcome than marginal increases to the difficulty of policing some crimes. In many cases, police agencies <i>can</i> find ways into criminal networks and can access messages using traditional policing.<p>A better rhetorical strategy here is supporting policing, providing significant additional tech expert resources to police, significant funding for &#x27;online detectives&#x27; -- whilst at the same time explaining the high risk against mass state incursion into all aspects of our lives.