I'm not going to push too hard on this, but I do want to quickly point out:
> Well they didn't /ban/ it for a start [...] and they didn't explicitly weaken it
Does not match up with:
> urges the industry to ensure lawful access for law enforcement and other competent authorities to digital evidence, including when encrypted
If you're pushing a company to ensure access to encrypted content based on a warrant, you are banning/weakening E2E encryption. It doesn't matter what they say their intention is/was, or whether they call that an outright ban, I don't view that as a credible defense.
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My feeling is that we have a lot of evidence from the past and present, particularly in the EU, about how filtering/reporting laws evolve over time (EU's CSAM filters within the ISP industry are a particularly relevant example here, you can find statements online where the EU leaders argue that expanding the system to copyright is a good idea specifically because the system already exists and would inexpensive to expand). I also look at US programs like the TSA and ICE and I do think their scope, authority, and restrictions have expanded quite a bit over the years. I don't agree that those programs came out of nowhere or that they're currently static.
If you don't see future abuse of this system as credible, or if you don't see a danger of this turning into a general reporting requirement for encrypted content, or if you don't think that it's credible that Apple would be willing to adapt this system for other governments -- if you see that stuff as fearmongering, then fine I guess. We're looking at the same data and the same history of government abuses and we're coming to different conclusions, so our disagreement/worldview differences are probably more fundamental than just the data.
To complain about some of the more extreme claims happening online (and under this article) is valid, but I feel you're extrapolating a bit here and taking some uncharitable readings of what people are saying (you criticize the article for "implying" things about the FBI, and the article doesn't even contain the words FBI). Regardless, the basic concerns (the "chilling effect of surveillance, the chance of slippery slope progression, the nature of proprietary systems, the chance of mistakes and bugs in code or human interception, the blurred line between 'things you own' and 'things you own which are closely tied to the manufacturer's storage and messaging systems'") are enough of a problem on their own. We really don't need to debate whether or not Apple will be willing to expand this system for additional filtering in China.
We can get mad about people who believe that Apple is about to start blackmailing politicians, but the existence of those arguments shouldn't be taken as evidence that the system doesn't still have serious issues.