Children and the Net

[Jim Dixon]

In message <199408021705.NAA22137 at bb.com> "L. Todd Masco" writes:
> Am I the only one that's struck by the similarity between the propaganda
>  about the Waco massacre and the propaganda preceding the Persion Gulf
>  massacre?
...
> [Not obviously C'punk related, but it really is: we must understand the
>  propaganda machine that the US government has working for it if we
>  hope to oppose them successfully on crypto issues]

It's a much more general phenomenon that that.  Two or three years ago,
two doctors working for the National Health Service in the northeast of
England began applying new diagnostic techniques routinely while examining
children.  They found that some children had been sexually abused and the
children were taken into care.	They began widening the use of the
techniques and more children were taken into care with formal charges
against parents etc being prepared by the police.  The number of people
involved expanded rapidly until it became clear that the two doctors
were claiming that at least 20% (and climbing) of the population were
sexually abusing their children.  At this point credibility disappeared,
support vanished, and the doctors were moved to new jobs.

At the high point, children who fell off their bikes were being snatched
out of emergency units, checked for "signs of sexual abuse", and usually
found to have them.  Then they were transferred to social workers who
used extremely suggestive interrogation techniques which confirmed the
doctors' [wacky] diagnoses.  The doctors and social workers claimed to
have the interests of the children in mind, and they looked sincere.
But at some point the insanity of what they were doing became utterly
apparent.  They took children away from their parents because they were
being abused.  The children were put into foster homes.  The doctors
examined them again and found that they were still being abused.  So the
children were moved again.  It became apparent that soon all of the
children in the North East were going to have to be put into care, and
most of the adults were going to be charged with child abuse.  The
people at the center of the affair never saw that they were wrong.

At more or less the same time, social workers raided an island off the
Scottish coast and took most of the children, claiming that the
islanders were engaging in devil worship.  The same type of aggressive
interviewing techniques were used -- suggestive demonstrations,
questions repeated on into the night until the 'right' answer was
supplied, sweets and other rewards given for telling the right story.
Although a commission later found that the charges were without
substance, many of the children still have not been returned.

It's not just the US government.  Personally I believe that some
fraction of the population is authoritarian in temperament and some
fraction is credulous, and that these attributes are uncorrelated and
distributed at random.	The credulous authoritarian types can be very
dangerous.  They like uniforms.

--

Jim Dixon