Face the book of demons

re: "Facebook accounts for up to 60% of child abuse reports to AFP, data shows" (The Sydney Morning Herald, 2020, July 24) 

Undermining the rights of people to hold private discussions, making it legally impossible to have assured privacy for good people to discuss personal issues, can only be remotely sane if you have absolute trust in the current and every possible future government and official authority. If you have that sort of unreasoning blind faith in all politicians past, present and future unknown, you are truly kooky.

Yes, there are real crimes that encryption can facilitate, but that cannot justify the state, unless you commit to the worst extremes of communism, interfering to disable basic protections for all. There are other solutions to criminal activity that focus on the criminals, not the innocent, and those are the options that a just society pursues, not a blanket dictate of distrust of all by all.

Also worth remembering is that after the famous Christian churches, it is families and family friends who hide the greatest numbers of paedophiles, and you don't need to invade everyone's privacy to get them. You just need to enable children to speak out against the vile relatives, family friends, teachers, priests and other abusive scum.  The way to do that is end blind faith in the traditional institutions beloved of conservative law and order types, the same type whose social consensus of silence to protect the undeserved reputations of traditional institutions enabled so much abuse to go on unspoken for so long.

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The above comment was submitted by Felix Qui to The Sydney Morning Herald article.

It is published there at https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/facebook-accounts-for-up-to-60-percent-of-child-abuse-reports-to-afp-data-shows-20200723-p55ep7.html#comments