Do you think the main force is misplaced good intentions (which I assume is what drives Ashton Kutcher) or more sinister intentional efforts to harm the public?

Kutcher wrote a letter of support for his friend Danny Masterson who was convicted raping multiple women so if he is truly concerned about abuse of women it doesn't seem to apply when it involves people he knows doing it. When this came to light his defense was that he didn't think anyone but the judge was going to see the letter.

Those are heavily co-mingled. Policing and intelligence agencies in particular view themselves as having good intentions which look like harm from the outside.

Good intentions misplaced into efforts to control other people are sinister intentional efforts to harm the public.

I don't think anyone is that naive to not see the negative implications of the things they are proposing, or helping develop. They might feign ignorance, and excuse themselves with "following orders" but the majority know it's not right in principle.

I tend to follow information in this space, and could talk about it endlessly (though it would still have minimal effect in the end).

From the things I'm seeing right now, in my mind, all this clampdown on privacy is to have better control of the message and discussion in order to preserve the corrupt status quo. To give one example, many leaks and reports initially come in anonymous due to fear of repercussion from those in power. My country (Romania) changed the legislation a couple of years back to prevent people from reporting corruption anonymously (in a highly corrupt state). Maybe that's why Trump said he loves Romanians, recently, he'd like to do that at home as well.

> more sinister intentional efforts to harm the public

Until recently I wasn't the type of person that would entertain the idea of a shadowy organization that tries to puppetmaster the world. Though with the recent Epstein emails release that in black and white stated about Slovakia's 2018 government "the government will fall this week - as planned" (day prior to mass protests that lead to it falling), makes you wonder about the backroom politics of the western world, and why we need more transparency there, and less control from them.

edit:

And of course, any change that is put behind a "think of the children" message, should raise everybody's eyebrows to the max.