"The problem with "mind scanning" is that it would quite likely only be able to vaguely guess at what you were thinking of at the exact given moment you were being "scanned", making it extremely unreliable."

We aren't talking about HAARP conjecture or the 9/11 Truther rejection of engineering standards here.............

Facial recognition software can tell adult from child. Eye-tracking software can determine patterns of gaze ( even unconscious to the one gazing. ) FMRI can tell when the pleasure centers are aroused and when the mind instructs the genitals to engorge in anticipation of coitus.

But you are right. No threshold has been set for "how stimulated" qualifies the person passing through a FMRI doorway to be detained for having gazed at the erogenous zones in a prepubertal child.

"Furthermore, I gravely doubt that normal folk would just sit back and let the government rummage through their brains unopposed just to hunt some half imagined boogieman. For that to happen the entire world would have to turn into 1984 overnight and the very concept of human rights would have to be erased from existence."

Post-sentencing incarceration? Human Rights have already been successfully erased for some without any successful challenge. Unless the challenge succeeds the technology to expand these "legal" programs will develop.

You might've had a plausible argument pre-9/11. But not at present.

And no, it won't just be us. It will be all the SOs; with our patterns of arousal qualifying us as SOs. ( If lines on paper and words can be rayped children for the purpose of CP incarceration, then surely a lingering glance at a clothed LG crotch [ measured in nanoseconds ] will qualify. ) But just because we won't be alone, doesn't mean that we'll feel any better than did the Jews who were encamped with criminals.

I am a little more optimistic for the US. But knowing what I do about total State surveillance in the UK; I fear for the worst there.

And the sad part is that WWII taught that the cultural losses incurred by exiling or exterminating a generation of talented artists, scientists &tc, made a negligible bump in the postwar recovery. Apparently it actually takes a Cultural Revolution to destroy a culture; not a genocide unspecific to the talented.

Dante