People can also distribute heinous things through snail mail, but we are not yet at the point where the government reads all letters looking for wrongthink.

Just because we technically can make a privacy destroying drag net does not mean we should. Had phones existed 250 years ago, I have no doubt the founders would have thought it obvious that a cellphone’s contents were your personal papers which could not be freely searched.

But that's mostly because it's impractical. They do use dogs to sniff for drugs and explosives, so if CSAM smelled or was visible through X-ray then it would probably be a different story. And let's not forget snail mail is by far a more uncommon way to spread that material than the Internet is. The Internet came into broad use just ~15 years after commercial CSAM was openly being sold by mail order in Europe.

Personally, I am on the side of privacy, just to be clear.

More effort should be done to find real-world equivalents of such actions and "think of the children".

An icloud is like a storage locker or a safety deposit box... the owner should go through all your stuff there, just in case you have some CSAM!

Metadata is just tracking info about who, where and with whom... every bartender should take your IDs and log when you came to the bar, who you sat with and how long you talked there.

EU Chat control is like general eavesdropping... every time you sit down and talk with someone, an EU bureaucrat should sit next to you and listen and write down your conversations, just in case.

etc.

Somehow people think that "it's ok if it's on the internet", even when it's stuff they'd never accept in real life.

Police can absolutely open snail mail with an appropriate warrant when investigating traffickers.