> Be careful what you wish for. We could enforce client-side scanning on the OS. Everything that appears on the screen is scanned and reported.

Nope. Criminals can still just build their own devices with their own operating systems. We have existing OS without spying, people have them as ISO on their harddrives. You can't stop criminals from installing an old Lineage OS build.

Legally you can't stop anybody from using encrypted channels if they are motivate unless you go out and erase the knowledge.

Implementing filters that go on all communications is undemocratic. Any future authoritarian government can use the same filter to immediately target their opposition, not just in theory, in practise. We have designed our democracies with division of powers for the simple reason that we have learned through history that giving any single kind of entity that kind of power leads to tyranny. That means whenever we give the government new superpowers we are changing a carefully setup balance. What does the citizen get for that trade? Nothing. If your power only works as long as it is in the hands of the good ones and becomes dystopian once it gets into the hands of the bad guys, maybe that power shouldn't exist.

Since we want to obviously prevent childrem from being sexually abused the best way to start according to most child-protection organizations is to start at the root. That means educating kids early on in child-suitable ways and investing in prevention and psuchological help for potential pedophiles. If children have the possibility to signal such a thing happened to adults or other persons of trust, you don't need mass surveillance.

But my guess is that CSAM is just the symbolic reason, in reality this is meant to do more. It would be perfect to target small movements as they are emerging for example.