Executive Summary: "They", as in, whoever will have access to all this gathered information, will not know how to use it. Therefore, it is inevitable that this gathered data will not be used intelligently or responsibly. Law enforcement bodies in any country on the planet just do not possess the smarts to handle it.

They don't know how to read, and these politicians want to give them more books.

I've mentioned the below a few times on HN because, for me, it was a traumatic incident with an outcome that was essentially an unknown for 8 months of my life: My house was raided by police for suspicion of distribution of CSAM.

Skip-to-the-end: They took about $10k worth of my homelab gear, had it for 8 months, and then I was told I could come and pick it up. No charges, no nothing.

There are pages and pages of things I've written to document this incident, these are a couple of notables:

They didn't know to expect there to be children in the house. At ~7am on a school day. That's the amount of additional investigation they do into the 'subject' prior to raiding their property. ie. Fucking None. I have two teenaged children that have impeccable school attendance and academic results that I'd assume would be easily accessible to law enforcement, had they cared to do any background research.

This was a traumatic event for MY CHILDREN caused by quote-unquote Law Enforcement.

They said the raid was based on information provided from an overseas (I'm assuming US-based, I'm in Australia) source (private company, law enforcement, intelligence, I have no idea) that identified my household's street address via an IP address, and this "evidence" was gathered over a number of years.

They asked my eldest "does your dad use your computer", he replied "no" (truthfully), and they didn't take it, didn't even look at it. I pointed out a laptop on the breakfast table that I said was was my wife's (truthfully) and they didn't take, didn't even look at it (as far as I recall). I specifically asked if this was about "me, personally" (since they showed no interest in my wife's laptop), and they repeated their (what became somewhat of a mantra) of "this specific address, not your neighbour's address, this address". And yet they had no interest in computers identified as not belonging to me.

One of the first things they asked me was "do you use a VPN?" I answered "no". Which was true then, and is sure-the-fuck not true now (split routing, the fucking works) - as a learning outcome, to protect myself from further blind police incompetence.

As part of the phone call when I received the "good news" that I could come and pick my shit up (I guess they came out of their way to pick it up from my place, I had to return the favour), the detective in charge of the investigation gave me the impression that she thought that she / the system couldn't be wrong about me. She made a point to say the following three things:

- Use of virtual machines is suspicious

- MEGA is almost exclusively used for CSAM and they found evidence that I'd downloaded things from MEGA (I think I may have used MEGA to download android ROMs)

- They found "TOR" installed on one of my computers

The last one. Where do I start? It's so incorrect an understanding that it was a 'cherry on top' data point that I didn't really need to confirm how hopelessly out of their depth law enforcement is with technology.

To repeat: They don't know how to read, and these politicians want to give them more books.

One of the ironies is (because I've got this sort of sense of humour) if I was living in an actual panopticon, I'd have easily been exonerated as I'm far too boring a person without enough spare time to engage in any of that behaviour.

In addition to the above, my better half is a teacher. Teachers in Australia have a "Mandatory Reporting" responsibility to report possible cases of child abuse based on their observations as a teacher.

The suicidally depressing thing about it is, the organisations responsible for visiting the homes and families that have been reported are so under-staffed and under-funded that they only have the time to investigate cases where the child is in immediate life-threatening danger.

Combine the two above anecdotes together and you've got a society that's gone wrong and is still applying increasing pressure to the accelerator.

Politicians calling for laws against encryption who are not also calling for massively increased budgets to child protection organisations are pushing an agenda that has nothing to do with real, actual protection of children, and they should be called out.