[wkat4242]

> No one can deny there is a problem with pedophile material and to say to protect the purity of free speech all such issues have to stay unaddressed is just a position blind to reality.

This is not about free speech at all. Free speech is about the government not censoring public speech and publication. Publishing this kind of material is already an exception of free speech and nobody disagrees with that.

This proposal is about the private communication of all citizens. Not only is it a disproportional measure, it's also ineffective. It will not reduce the demand for this material and will only stop a particular method of distribution. The bad actors will just move to other methods including non-digital or steganography, on unmonitored or hacked devices. Just like the war on drugs doesn't work, they will find a way.

But in the meantime this will deeply undermine the privacy of all people and this tooling will inevitably be used for more purposes than originally proposed. As this linked article shows.

And in order for this to work it will basically have to make FOSS operating systems illegal because as long as the user can modify their OS they can remove this scan. This is one of the reasons I consider it disproportional. Or if implemented on the messaging side only (which is easier to bypass than in the OS), it will make open messaging apps illegal.