>From people who would harm them?
Like who? I really hope you don't mean the kids' parents.
The initial government response can be read as “lol, no”.
It's an unpopular idea because its bullshit. Building secure systems is trivial and at the skill level of a junior engineer. Most of these "hacks" are not elaborate attacks utilizing esoteric knowledge to discover new vectors. They are the same exploit chains targeting bad programming practices, out of date libraries, etc.
Lousy code monkeys or medicore programmers are the ones introducing vulnerabilities. We all know who they are. We all have to deal with them thanks to some brilliant middle manager figuring out how to cut costs for the org.