The "true enemies" are the folk scheming in backrooms who hope to succeed by the ignorance of the rest of the folk you listed. Are my neighbors, coworkers, etc. a problem in this battle? Yes, absolutely, but they're not the ones acting with malicious intent.
It's not ignorance, it's malice. "The people" are much smarter, but much more evil, than commonly assumed.
And ironically, the false idea that the population is ignorant of every important issue is yet another argument for invasive, controlling regulation of everything...
The majority of the population does not have the background to consider the implications of say, banning E2EE, they do have the background to understand that CSAM is bad. Thus, when told that banning E2EE might make CSAM harder to distribute, of course they're going to prefer it. That doesn't make them malicious or evil.
The entire point of representative democracy is that the elected representatives are the ones who work with subject matter experts to reach solutions that work best for the people. Thus, it is the representatives who are, at worst, malicious/evil for not listening to subject matter experts in favor of their political games.
Yes, that is, in fact, how the banality of evil works. Everyone is capable of doing evil, without "feeling" evil, if they can self justify its perfectly fine.
> The majority of the population does not have the background to consider the implications of say, banning E2EE, they do have the background to understand that CSAM is bad.
This is all still just framing and you're only falling into the trap.
One of the many strong arguments against this kind of government surveillance is it's the sort of thing authoritarian governments use to commit atrocities. People can certainly understand that Nazis are bad and technologies that protect people from Nazis are good. Now all you need is to point to the proponents of the scanning and ask why they want to help Nazis.
It's the same tactic they're using. And then they use counter-tactics, like weaponizing Godwin's Law even in cases when you actually are discussing authoritarian government policy.
It has nothing to do with the nature of the issue and everything to do with the fact that the proponents of these measures are professionally trained propagandists who know exactly what they're doing.
Maybe we need a corollary to Godwin's Law. Let's call it Lovejoy's Law:
As the length of a policy debate increases, the probability that someone implores you to Think Of The Children approaches 1, and the person to do this loses the argument.
This is exactly what I mean about framing. The Nazis used infamously broken encryption. We have to make sure our codes can't be broken, unlike the foolish evildoers. The Germans were never able to defeat the Navajo code talkers, and then we won the war.
It's ignorance. I can't expect Grandma to fully understand the importance of E2EE, but I can absolutely expect her to vehemently oppose CSAM. Same goes for the Joe and Jane Blows that have no technical background.
No. People are driven by fear, real or unfounded. Only a very small part of the population could be labeled as inherently evil and that part is usually psychologically impaired.
The "true enemies" are the folk scheming in backrooms who hope to succeed by the ignorance of the rest of the folk you listed. Are my neighbors, coworkers, etc. a problem in this battle? Yes, absolutely, but they're not the ones acting with malicious intent.