India, Sept. 13 -- Every surveillance apparatus we ever build 'for the children' has a way of outliving the emergency that justified its birth, and of getting inherited, eventually, by whoever happens to be holding the keys once the crisis has gone quiet.

I spoke on this at a child safety event recently, and something happened to me in the weeks of reading that preceded it that I didn't expect and haven't fully recovered from-I went in gathering material, the usual accumulation of cases and statutes and numbers you assemble before a podium, and I came out the other side actually frightened, in the specific way you're frightened when a thing you'd filed under "policy problem" turns out to be closer to the bone than that. Let me say plainl...