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Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

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Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#161

Post by juanani »

szc wrote: post #95
sneak wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't pull out. Apple discloses over 30,000 customers' data each year without a warrant under PRISM (aka FISA 702) as disclosed in their own transparency report (listed under "FISA orders"). PRISM is just the internal NSA name for it. It continues unabated.

FISA orders are written by a Judge. Only judges can write these, this is the literal definition of a warrant. Warrants require specifics - Person X, person Y. These are enumerable. There is paperwork. PRISM, based on the data available, is all about consuming data WITHOUT a warrant -- vacuuming data associated with identities that are not associated with ANY identities subject to a court order. Violating laws and pos…

I can't figure it out, are you a corp shill or gubmint? Dang allows both if they are playing our side so this is truly confusing. Can't tell where they've pinned you, jeez they probably give out degrees for that level mental gymnastics.

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#162

Post by unicornfinder »

occamrazor wrote: post #104

There is another information leak that I have not seen mentioned in any news report. If an image hash matches the CSAM database, then it is sent to Apple, encrypted and with the “safety voucher”. Apple can decrypt the image only if they receive enough vouchers, and so they claim that they do not have any information about the user in case the number of vouchers is lower than the threshold. But actually they do have i…

Thing is, iCloud Photos are already not E2E encrypted, so it's sort of irrelevant if they're requiring "vouchers" in this case.

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#163

Post by ayewo »

koopmenistan wrote: post #139
laserlight wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, just because there are sick and terrible people, we should give away our freedom and privacy?

It’s quite telling that my story described graphic sexual assault of children and you immediately forgot about the victims and made it about the perpetrators. Probably because if you had instead asked: “So, just because children are being raped, we should give away our freedom and privacy?” ...your ground wouldn’t be as perceptibly firm, even though it’s exactly the question you’re asking. I’m also not going to respo…

You write that:

> It’s quite telling that my story described graphic sexual assault of children and you immediately forgot about the victims and made it about the perpetrators. Probably because if you had instead asked:

“So, just because children are being raped, we should give away our freedom and privacy?”

I think the frame being used to discuss the issue is the problem.

CSAM is the product of abuse/exploitation of children and that in turn is a symptom of a more serious problem: the growing prevalence of people with depraved minds who only get a slap on the wrist when they are caught, instead of a being punished with a strong deterrent.

Once the punishment for child abuse or exploitation is commensurate with the crime, demand for CSAM will plummet.

Blanket scanning of people's devices is a technological solution to a problem that is inherently social—it is trying to treat the symptom instead of the actual ailment.

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#164

Post by nicce »

cageface wrote: post #159
nicce wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is strong evidence, that E2EE backups are coming. How about hold our horses until actual release of iOS 15?

What is the evidence for this?

In iOS 15 beta, there is option to recover backup with some authentication key. There is no use for that without E2EE.

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#165

Post by goekydoeky »

nbzso wrote: post #87

Let me tell you my perspective as a screeching minority long time Apple user. You may be right. We as professionals that evangelized a lot of people for Apple, don't have power or influence over core target of Apple of today. Yep. But I can assure you that I personally, as my colleagues will do everything in our powers to hurt Apples public image and brand, to give real information to our clients, friends and familie…

Wow. The misalignment of priorities and character deficiencies one requires to actually type this message and mean it is simply breathtaking.

Talk to someone, please. You are unwell if this message is genuine. Even if you grant every argument against this system it’s still just poking through your photos at the end of the day. Get angry enough to tell people “go to hell” about half the planet being on fire or something, anything but technical policy that ultimately matters quite little against other challenges we face as a species.

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#166

Post by 3pt14159 »

tsherr wrote: post #149
gabrielblack wrote: post #96

My opinion about: 1. Every pedophile know about the existence of this system, so I don't think it will be useful to fight those monster, maybe only marginally; 2. Anyway, is that legal ? Even if some crazy store material on his Apple hardware isn't that illegal search non usable in law courts ? 3. Child abuse is often used as Trojan horse to introduce questionable practice. What if: - the system is used to looking fo…

As I understand it, in Canada, having a picture of your child in a bathtub is child porn. So I can see this going horribly wrong.

Citation needed. Many parents here have photos of their kids in bathtubs.

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#167

Post by inversetelecine »

gfody wrote: post #16
carom wrote: post #14

This is effectively a virus scanner. Files are hashed (in a fancy way), compared against known hashes, and matches are reported. Your Windows desktop has Windows Defender. EFF lost a lot of credence to me after the Best Buy case. They made this big fuss about how Geek Squad employees were agents of the state for reporting CSAM on a customers hard drive, while doing a requested file recovery. When searched, the defend…

Defender has been killing KMSAuto for years, I wonder what other utils are blacklisted

That's why I moved to using vlmcsd on a rpi.

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#168

Post by dijit »

lmm wrote: post #82
szc wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but I do not believe that is what the leak revealed. There was a slide that indicated that data from Apple and other companies was now part of the PRISM program. I am not trying to deny or refute Snowden's whistleblowing. I think it is highly likely that PRISM exists. What I dispute are the speculations that the companies listed are complicit. The 2012 date is quite suspicious - it is precisely the same year t…

> I personally think that PRISM works by externally intercepting data communication lines running to these facilities. Similar to the rumors that international comms links have been tapped. The companies themselves have not participated, but the data path has been compromised. That wouldn't work without the company being at least passively complicit. Links between datacenters are encrypted. If you want even basic PCI…

There’s a lot of incorrect information here.

PCI-DSS does not mandate encryption between racks or datacenters, maybe your own PCI compatible policy does. I’ve worked in PCI-DSS environments (one of which being tier 1 with on-site cardholder data) and we didn’t need to have encryption between racks.

Site to site VPNs are common for smaller companies too, those are encrypted, but the thing with encryption is that there are physical limits to throughput.

For a standard CPU I think it was 3.5Gbp/s or so in 2018, if you want to get much higher (like 9Gbps) then you need special hardware offloading which is expensive.

What is cheap (comparatively), is laying your own fibre cables.

Then it’s “basically” secure and you can have a single cable carrying 100GBPs over a mile.

This is what google used to do, I suspect this is what Apple used to do- this is what many people do.

Google’s solution does not involve site to site VPNs, Google’s solution was to make all internal network traffic encrypted, but the lines do not get implicitly encrypted because they go over that path, like a vpn would.

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#169

Post by gary17the »

occamrazor wrote: post #98
gary17the wrote: post #94

A question to you legal experts out there: if a potential CSAM match is found during client-side scanning, but such a match has not yet been confirmed by an Apple employee to actually be CSAM, does Apple have the option, legally speaking, to SIMPLY DELETE the "gray-area" content in-place (just like a regular virus scanner), instead of sending it to Apple for further analysis? Someone performs "an implication by malic…

I think that the FBI/NCMEC wouldn’t allow the use of the hashes for this. A criminal could load its image collection, one by one, and see which images are deleted. The result is a collection of images that are “FBI safe”.

But this strongly suggests that the entire Apple/NCMEC initiative is a "suveillance-and-arrest" system first and foremost (preserving hash secrecy at the cost of user privacy), while the goal of "stop-known-CSAM-distribution-in-iCloud" (developing an in-house CSAM database at the cost of scanning effectiveness) being secondary.

Re: Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship

#170

Post by swiley »

tsherr wrote: post #149
gabrielblack wrote: post #96

My opinion about: 1. Every pedophile know about the existence of this system, so I don't think it will be useful to fight those monster, maybe only marginally; 2. Anyway, is that legal ? Even if some crazy store material on his Apple hardware isn't that illegal search non usable in law courts ? 3. Child abuse is often used as Trojan horse to introduce questionable practice. What if: - the system is used to looking fo…

As I understand it, in Canada, having a picture of your child in a bathtub is child porn. So I can see this going horribly wrong.

The Canadian government has really lost their minds, that's where ignoring principles gets you.
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