I think the two key things to remember are that "failure will happen" and Blackstone's principle. We have to, as a society, decide which direction we want to fail (modes of failure). We also have to decide what amount is acceptable (having 0 crime is a good goal, but we will never get there and need to be realistic). I think it is clear which way the founders of the country wanted failure to happen, which is Blackstone's principle. "A hundred guilty men should go free before a single innocent man is is deprived of his freedom."

I think everyone here is familiar with Pareto. Capturing 80% of criminals is easy. Catching the next 10% is harder than catching that first 80%. Catching that last 1% takes significant amounts of resources, way more than the previous 90%. So it just isn't economically viable to stop it all (exponential curve and we don't have infinite resources).

So I'm not sure that saying

> A number of horrible things will happen as a result of pervasive end to end encryption.

But I don't think it is necessarily wrong either. I think encryption enables it, but this sentence implies causation (which is the rhetoric of those that want to remove encryption: causation).

How I read the horsemen comment is that these topics are used as boogie men. Because what sane person wants that stuff to exist? OF COURSE we want 0%. How can you be against stopping child trafficking? (practically) No one is against that! These are also topics we care VERY much about. Because frankly we should do everything we can to stop child exploitation. But we know the goal is unobtainable and to get only a handful more than we currently get (which is almost all of them!) requires huge violations of privacy and significantly more resources to be allocated. The horsemen are being used to get us on board and make us not ask if these methods are meaningfully effective or ask what the costs are. It also says that anytime you hear officials talk about the horsemen that you should perk your ears up and start asking serious questions. How effective is this? Does it actually help? What are the costs? The Patriot Act is a good example. It is not clear that it meaningfully reduced terrorism in any way and yet we gave up a significant amount of privacy (I can quote founding fathers on this too).

So it boils down to "if giving up the privacy does not do an effective job at making any meaningful reduction in actual child trafficking <insert horseman>, why should we give that privacy up? There's clearly benefits to privacy. So is this issue really about child trafficking or is something else at play here and are they just feeding off my emotions?"