I feel a bit odd posting this. My HN news identity is tied to that of mine in real life – something that I am proud of, but something I might change shortly. Apologies in advance for the very long sentences.

In many ways, my childhood was horrific. Bullied from a young age for being very different to my peers, I had my bones broken by older children aged 8, 9, and 13; scratches and bite marks from the age of about 5. Older children did "things" to me that definitely count as sexual assault with adult eyes; I'd rather not get into all of it as I was never groomed, but I was certainly abused. One memory I have is of sitting on the sofa with my arm in plaster, freshly broken, and playing the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on my N64. A teacher visited, out of the blue, and asked my mum not to sue the school I was at. Several of the teachers I had as a teenager are now convicted paedophiles -- convicted because they had sex with students (of my gender). I remember one talking about getting large erections in class.

When I went to Oxford, to read physics, after years of being beaten, bullied, spat at, stamped on, urinated upon; after having to battle my school to pay for someone to invigilate my entrance exam paper (they refused -- I did it in the head of the sixth form's office); after being threatened with expulsion for cracking their WEP key to read wikipedia in class; after having faeces thrown at me, a firework placed in my locker, stolen property put in my coat pocket to frame me, and other boys putting what would now be considered "extreme pornography" in the UK in my coat pocket, or changing my unlocked computer's desktop picture to horse porn; or being shown videos of pigs being decapitated with a chainsaw because I was vegetarian -- after all that, when finally, I was welcomed into a place where learning was encouraged, and the others were like me, I frankly thought I'd died and gone to heaven. I've hung onto it, tooth and nail, trying to do good in the world (and let others like me have their chance).

I therefore feel that I'm uniquely qualified to comment this government's attempt at disrupting E2E encryption. I understand the maths (but I am not a cryptographer) and I very much feel like I would be in the target demographic.

Banning or breaking end to end encryption won't help.

Targetted abuse is, I believe on the part of the abuser(s), entirely psychological, and that process leads to physical violence. The medium is a lesser concern. I had seven shades of shit beaten out of me in the era before 2004 -- at AIM and Jabber's height -- and snooping my messages would not have helped.

People who are sexually attracted to children are very rare, and the allegations take a long time to come out because your state of mind only really develops fully about the whole process years later. The medium of communication matters -- and having some sort of post facto evidence chain is undoubtedly helpful -- but breaking disappearing messages is not what this PR campaign is about. It's about increasing the ability of the security services to snoop.

The proposals are something I vehemently disagree with – there is a very large difference between a complaint being raised, that complaint being investigated, and as part of that evidence gathered (and message databases recovered); and proactive, untargetted investigation of crime. The UK's town of "Scunthorpe" famously fails most "bad language" filters and it blights the lives of its residents. Having the police investigate children proactively without talking to them is...immoral. I very much believe that, complete with the five-years-non-negotiable key disclosure law in the UK, encryption moves the burden of duty appropriately onto the police: they can investigate matters when a complaint is raised, but not before.

Any further goes too far towards the surveillance (Stazi-style) police state, in my opinion, with children being investigated by the empowered, frightening apparatus of the state because they said something naughty. We already know what happens to children who look like they might happen to be carrying drugs on their way to school, when the police have the powers to stop and search. It hasn't ended well, either for the police (wherein trust is rapidly falling), or for the children in question. Let's not make the same mistake again with what is, fundamentally, maths.