Comment by Nevermark

Democracies building the tools of total autocracy. Real but fringe threats used to create the ultimate centralization of leverage.

Can we actually think of the children? All the children? Their future?

When democracies forget that government is the greatest natural threat to freedom, they forget and undermine the reason we have democracies.

Technical solutions to zero-knowledge proofs of age-of-adulthood without loss of anonymity are recent but available now. The strongest argument for these is to take the wind out of alternatives.

Strangely, promoters of surveillance avoid these solutions.

Even stranger: the bizarre but prevalent counter argument that anonymity protecting solutions won't work, because the surreptitious goal of other solutions is precisely to strip anonymity. We apparently shouldn't do that, because the abusers won't like the wind being taken out of their "front" problems, with real but freedom-preserving solutions!