Of course I believe it's important to protect children, and people consuming and producing CSAM deserve pure unadulterated justice. I think we should do everyth

Of course I believe it's important to protect children, and people consuming and producing CSAM deserve pure unadulterated justice. I think we should do everything reasonable to catch and punish such loathsome persons. However, we have other means at our disposal to catch makers and consumers of CSAM that don't require blanket trawling of personal data. I am afraid to surrender privacy in the name of even something very good because surveillance is easy to abuse. I doubt you'd advocate for the extreme of e.g. the police knocking on everyone's door and performing a full search of their house/flat/whatever every so often to search for CSAM on computers or in magazines etc. That would be sure to catch more criminals and protect more children, but the societal cost would be astronomical. No one wants to live in a police state. And I hope you don't understand me as advocating for the complete opposite of that, where no searches are ever performed in the name of personal privacy. That's too dangerous. There's some room between the two extremes. I get nervous about mechanisms that can easily be used to compromise privacy of people who never were under any sort of suspicion. Maybe I'm wrong about where to draw the line. Some of my family lived in East Germany under the Stasi, and what a dark time that was. Perhaps that's part of the source of my aversion to mechanisms like mass digital surveillance.