[matthewdgreen]

I know a number of people who have gone down this route, including Senators. For example, here's Senator Wyden's proposal to add $5 billion in mandatory funding to investigate and target sexual abusers [1]. The problem with these efforts is that they're expensive: fighting child exploitation requires enormous amounts of funding.

Guess what doesn't require billions of dollars? Mandatory scanning paid for by tech companies, followed by dumping the billions of hits they produce [2] on overworked police and clearinghouses that mostly ignore them.

[1] https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-eshoo... [2] https://www.hstoday.us/subject-matter-areas/cybersecurity/su...

[slg]

Then fund the initiative by taxing those same tech companies. "This problem is hard or expensive to address" does not assuage the desire to fix the problem.

There are countless reasons to be against these chat controls, but it's easy for a layperson to understand how they would address their specific concerns. The only way to effectively counter that is providing an alternative that does a better job.

[Eddy_Viscosity2]

> Then fund the initiative by taxing those same tech companies.

The politicians needed to change tax laws are owned by the tech companies. This is why its a hard problem. The tech companies set the rules now. Getting politicians elected that aren't owned by tech companies is also hard because tech companies effectively control all the information.

[slg]

If this is your belief, the only reasonable conclusion is that time spent on fighting these chat control initiatives is wasted because it's all downstream of the power of the tech oligarchy. That's the battle you should be fighting rather than trying to play whack-a-mole on individual proposals like this.