If a hacker gets access to this golden key, they can use data gleaned from your child's phone to stalk or hurt them.

Also, I agree that it's shitty, but sometimes you can only fight fear tactics with scarier fear tactics.

It seems to me, politicians and other people have long sought for the most emotional arguments to wipe away the wings of freedom -- and thus making the victims of pedophiles, bombing and kidnapping victims again!

(BTW: In Germany, pedophiles where also used as argument for internet censorship. Organisations of those victims protested against these attempts, because they clearly saw, that this legislation did not help (and where never intended to) those victims or help to prevent anything.)

The topic changes but the story never does. We still have rock music, teenagers, acid, dungeons and dragons, hippies, video games, atheism, firearms, meth, Islam, gays, texting while driving, basically all the good things in life, and we'll always have thousands of things in the future that are not cool with the conformist old people and will be blamed for everything bad whenever possible, and aside from a lot of journalist click bait nobody will really care.

It's even more of a whitewashed canard than those other things you listed.

It's frustrating that TPTB don't actually care about these cases at all, apart from their political potential. Amber alerts are usually issued in response to non-custodial parent custody disagreements, which phenomenon is 95% driven by divorce lawyers, and involves very little risk that isn't created by the police themselves. In the rare actual stranger-danger case, "authorities" routinely allow multiple hours to pass between the kidnapping and issuing the alert. Of course by that time the child is beyond help.

http://www.kansascity.com/news/government-politics/article34...

Also, the government spends quite a lot of effort on the investigation and prosecution of child pornography, as documented here, for example: http://www.justice.gov/usao/waw/press/categories/childporn.h... To what degree this should be a factor in encryption policy is open to debate, but your charge that 'TPTB don't actually care about these cases at all' is baseless and does a disservice to the people who investigate such crimes.

Pedophiles (or more specifically: child pornographers) routinely use strong cryptography and effectively nobody cares.

I think that I'm more than capable of detecting most forms of propaganda, but I hold no illusions as to my ability to judge _everything_ that comes my way in a fully informed manner.

I can look back and see cases where too little information, bad information, or even just a misunderstanding lead me to believe in things that just weren't true. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.

Do the math. Shoes = Evil.