Apple Has Opened the Backdoor to Increased Surveillance and Censorship • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by salawat » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 1:33 PM UTC

nicce wrote: post #198

cageface wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is your source for this information?

I don't want to call names, but here is something: 1. On-device scanning is leaked by some well-known people 2. It gets massive attention 3. Not long after, Apple releases their announcement in very odd time 4. If you read all of their material, there are typos and some are clearly in WIP level 5. It does not make sense to announce, since there is reserved event for all of this in the very close future

Uh, no.

Technical docs often live long term with typos. This is a perfectly timed leak to take pressure off regulation pushes by waving one of the biggest honking carrots in front of Western political establishments.

This has political quid pro quo written all over it, and anyone who thinks this type of backhanded signalling isn't common isn't paying enough attention.

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

#212

Post by adventured » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 1:33 PM UTC

nullc wrote: post #203

threatofrain wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple isn't the Dutch East India Company. It is better to ask the citizens of the American democracy to keep their government accountable than it is to ask Apple to be so powerful that it can shrug off national governments. You don't want CSAM scanning in the USA? Then ask your national government to change its laws requiring companies to be so vigilant against CSAM. Or we can ask that Apple become so powerful that t…

The US government is NOT forcing Apple to scan customer data, in fact the entire legal framework of this scanning in the US critically depends on Apple performing the scanning without Government coercion. If the Government forced the scanning or even substantially incentivized it, then it would require a warrant per the fourth amendment.

> The US government is NOT forcing Apple to scan customer data

Unfortunately we do not know that for certain. Companies were compelled to sign up to PRISM against their will. Yahoo in particular tried to resist and were threatened with financial destruction [1]. The Feds can essentially levy any sum of daily fines on a company like Yahoo or Apple any time they see fit, with a rubber stamp from the FISA court; they effectively demonstrated that with their confrontation with Yahoo. And it clearly terrified Yahoo.

We have no idea if what's being put into place by Apple is the start of a new program by the powers that be and Apple has little choice but to comply realistically, or be hammered financially (or worse, the Feds might just get dirty and target executives personally). If they were working on PRISM 3.0 and attempting to implement it, we would never know it at this juncture.

It's worth being suspicious of what's going on given the one certainty is we know very clearly what the authorities want, what they'd like to see happen, and that they never stop trying to prod things in that direction. They're always up to something shady, always looking for ways to advance the surveillance state. The Biden Admin years will see that effort turbo charged once again, as with the Bush & Obama years. Whatever they're up to right now (again, they're always working on new programs like PRISM, always), you can be sure it's big, likely illegal and a gross violation of human rights.

https://www.wired.com/2014/09/feds-yahoo-fine-prism/

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

#213

Post by GeekyBear » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 1:34 PM UTC

Unklejoe wrote: post #202

GeekyBear wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has been scanning your entire account for kiddie porn for the past decade. >a man [was] arrested on child pornography charges, after Google tipped off authorities about illegal images found in the Houston suspect's Gmail account https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/06/why-the-gmail-scan-that-le... Their system can easily be abused by governments or malicious actors to frame innocent people.

Once again, this scan takes place on _their_ servers on data that is stored on _their_ servers. It does not take place on the device itself, which is the case with this new Apple thing.

Once again, the notion that everything on the device is scanned under Apple's system was never true.

Only photos you attempt to upload to Apple's iCloud are scanned. If you turn off iCloud photos, NOTHING is scanned.

>Q: So if iCloud Photos is disabled, the system does not work, which is the public language in the FAQ. I just wanted to ask specifically, when you disable iCloud Photos, does this system continue to create hashes of your photos on device, or is it completely inactive at that point?

A: If users are not using iCloud Photos, NeuralHash will not run

https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/10/interview-apples-head-of-p...

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

#214

Post by fortran77 » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 1:35 PM UTC

daenz wrote: post #6

An Apple recruiter recently reached out to me. I am in a fortunate position to turn down opportunities, so I made sure to explain that I am not interested in working for a company that is at the forefront of enabling further infringement on people's privacy. If you are able to push back, do it in any small way that you can.

Also, after you're hired, a group of Apple employees can sign a petition saying something you wrote 10 years ago--from which they saw an excerpt--bothers them....and Apple will fire you.

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

#215

Post by GeekyBear » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 1:36 PM UTC

adventured wrote: post #205

GeekyBear wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has been scanning your entire account for kiddie porn for the past decade. >a man [was] arrested on child pornography charges, after Google tipped off authorities about illegal images found in the Houston suspect's Gmail account https://techcrunch.com/2014/08/06/why-the-gmail-scan-that-le... Their system can easily be abused by governments or malicious actors to frame innocent people.

Apple's new system is scanning personal property that doesn't belong to them and isn't yet in their cloud. Gmail files that get scanned are contained on Google's property, in their cloud, on their machines. Entirely different context. It's the difference between the USPS coming into my home without permission and going through my documents, records, mail - versus if I send mail through their system and they track it,…

> Apple's new system is scanning personal property that doesn't belong to them and isn't yet in their cloud.

Apple's new system only scans photos you attempt to upload to their cloud.

Nothing else is scanned.

Scanning the files on server, the way Google and Microsoft do it, means that false positive data is lying around where it can be subpoenaed and used to incriminate innocent people.

>Innocent man, 23, sues Arizona police for $1.5million after being arrested for murder and jailed for six days when Google's GPS tracker wrongly placed him at the scene of the 2018 crime

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7897319/Police-arre...

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

#216

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 1:41 PM UTC

idunnoman wrote: post #127

samrolken wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> once this system is in place it will be used for anything, not just photos The system seems designed to make it hard to use it for anything else. How will a hash driven by a visual perception based neural net be used on ZIP files? How can you add ZIP files to your iCloud Photo Library? Sure, Apple could possibly do any number of bad and worse things. It’s a matter of trust that every time we update our iPhones that…

I think the main issue is just that Pandora's box is now open. Once you make this move, you can't go backwards. If you'll indulge me, would you bet $1000 that this style of scanning isn't expanded in the next 3 years to include non-CSAM content?

[deleted]

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

#217

Post by Bodell » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 1:47 PM UTC

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…

I just want to add to your number 1.

Not only would this be marginal it also wouldn’t necessarily be catching the real “monsters”. I don’t think if you find someone with old already known about images that it would necessarily equate to someone that actually abuses children. I think about this in a similar way (not exactly) as I do with drugs, just because a person gets busted with drugs doesn’t mean they are a drug dealer or a maker of drugs.

This is not to say that perhaps there are some more active real-time stuff in these databases that maybe with enough searching could make its way back to the perpetrator and indeed maybe even find a victim. It’s just seems that that would be far more marginal and is generally what I’m concerned about when it comes to these issues. For me it’s more important to protect children than it is to bust some weirdos for looking at the wrong porn (these can both be related as well and I do understand that I just think it’s not as cut and dry as we believe it is), further if it keeps said weirdo from actually harming a child then let them have it. We allow these databases to exist for, presumably, the same reason, with the idea that we can stop future victims from happening.

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

#218

Post by websites2023 » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 1:48 PM UTC

EFF conflates the CSAM detection and the iMessage safety features in the first paragraph. Disappointing that they can’t make their case with the facts.

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

#219

Post by markenqualitaet » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 1:48 PM UTC

nicce wrote: post #126

MomoXenosaga wrote: post #80

I don't get people. It's not fucking E2E encryption when it is being scanned. That's just trying to change what encryption means.

While this true, you can’t say that it is worse than current state. (Only server side encryption, plaintext in the eyes of Apple)

It is worse tho. The surveillance apparatus doesn't care much about your actual words and images, but your associations and relations. This makes finding needles much more efficient and pre-encryption exfiltration circumvents user added measures, like third party iCloud encryption. And I am pretty sure this will be baked into the OS deeper than your VPN/DNS's reach. Opening up this side channel isn't undone by trusting some "icloud deactivation". Much less in your mind.

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

#220

Post by Unklejoe » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 1:52 PM UTC

GeekyBear wrote: post #213

Unklejoe wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once again, this scan takes place on _their_ servers on data that is stored on _their_ servers. It does not take place on the device itself, which is the case with this new Apple thing.

Once again, the notion that everything on the device is scanned under Apple's system was never true. Only photos you attempt to upload to Apple's iCloud are scanned. If you turn off iCloud photos, NOTHING is scanned. >Q: So if iCloud Photos is disabled, the system does not work, which is the public language in the FAQ. I just wanted to ask specifically, when you disable iCloud Photos, does this system continue to cre…

> Once again, the notion that everything on the device is scanned under Apple's system was never true.

That isn't what I said.

Also, that's not why most people are so upset. Most people are so upset mainly because Apple has now proven that the capability exists, so they can now be more easily compelled by governments to scan for "extra things".

Prior to this, if a government asked Apple to scan someone's phone, Apple could respond with "we don't have that capability", and it would presumably be a tough legal battle to force a company to add a capability that doesn't exist.

This hurdle is now much lower. The effort has gone from "force Apple to design a new system for scanning phones" to "add these couple of hashes to the pre-existing database".

Also, expanding this from just iCloud upload candidates to the entire device is a very small leap now. I mean, the bad guys could just turn off iCloud, and we must think of the children...

Then you have Apple's "reassurance" that they won't comply with government requests to scan for additional things, which is completely moot considering Apple relies on a third party database and has absolutely no control or idea of what the hashes really are.