[tedks]

> I wonder how many of the people on that think of the children side were either affected as kids, had children who had some awful experience, or are of close relation to someone who was or had kids who did. Because I could easily see something like an awful event happening to a child really warping a persons world view in a strong way.

I know more than a few people who were abused as children, but none of them have become think-of-the-children anti-privacy advocates. It's probable that it's a selection effect, since the prior for my knowing someone who disagrees with my politics so deeply well enough to know their abuse history is low. But at the same time, I'd expect to run into at least one person by now.

I think that most people with first-hand experience around child abuse are probably not anti-privacy advocates. At that level it becomes clear that the real problems are social conventions that adults can exploit (family and professional relationships with defined subordinate roles for children), enabling them to commit abuse. Having secure communications doesn't help with this much. In fact, if a child thought they could tell someone about abuse without their abuser knowing, it might be helpful.

I think that the anti-privacy activists are actually people who are rather far away from the societal evils they claim to oppose privacy to protect against. The people who have opinions about the NSA reading email or encrypted messaging tend not to be personally affected by social instability from terrorism, or the drug war, just by basic socioeconomics. Child molestation is probably a similar, far-off evil. It's enough for these people that these systems could hide evildoing, and because of that they clearly need to be compromised so that the state and legitimate community forces can hunt evildoers. I think the real motive is simply a naive belief in the goodwill of those community forces.

This in turn can be explained by a naive moral system, where it is moral to obey rules. This is the 3rd or 4th level of the Kohlberg moral development scale, and the level Kohlberg conjectured most people remain at during their lives. Background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg%27s_stages_o...