One Bad Apple

> Think of it this way: Your landlord owns your property, but in the United States, he cannot enter any time he wants. In order to enter, the landlord must have permission, give prior notice, or have cause. Any other reason is trespassing. Moreover, if the landlord takes anything, then it's theft. Apple's license agreement says that they own the operating system, but that doesn't give them permission to search whenever they want or to take content.

This viewpoint is like thanking your landlord for warning you that they are going to enter your home and root through your private items, all in the name of some greater good. Let's not spin it as if the landlord is doing us a favor in this scenario.

Now that the technology is on-board the device, how many lines of codes do you think it will take to scan the full photo-roll?

Do you think that this ability will not tempt LEA, law makers, governments, to push for that ever-so-small change to the code, either for blanket monitoring (see if China is not tempted, using their own database of "illegal" content) or for targetted monitoring (some specific users, with or without valid court orders).

The main issue is that the wall has been breached: monitoring data that was otherwise only on-device is now possible with little to no change as the feature is now embedded in the OS.

You can argue we're not there yet and can trust Apple to do-the-right-thing and that the Rule of Law will protect citizen against abuse, but that's a big step into a worrying trend, and not all countries follow the Rule of Law and have checks and balances to avoid misuse. Don't forget that Apple abides by the laws of countries where it sells its devices. That means they will -forced or not- do what they are told.

CP is rape porn. People who produce or knowingly distribute actual rape porn (of children or adults) should be going to jail for 25+ years. I would not rule out life for extreme cases that also involve other forms of abuse.

Yet as far as I know this isn’t what is being pushed for. Instead we get a dragnet to try to catch low level offenders who will probably barely see prison because sex crimes are just not punished much in our society.

Secondly… look into some of the people who have set up fake CP honey pots. These have included both vigilantes and security researchers trying to get a sense of how much CP is on Tor. Turns out most of these people are imbeciles and catching them is easy. Why don’t police do this more? Because… well… as I said sex crimes are just not a priority.

I really feel like the whole argument is in bad faith. If they really cared about the children there are so many other things that would be both easier and more effective.

I think the article is wrong about this. Or, right-but-situationally-irrelevant. As far as I can tell from Apple's statements, they're doing this only to photos which are being uploaded to iCloud Photos. So, any photo this is happening to is one that you've already asked Apple to copy to their servers.

> In this case, Apple has a very strong reason to believe they are transferring CSAM material, and they are sending it to Apple -- not NCMEC.

I also suspect this is a fuzzy area, and anything legal would depend on when they can actually be said to be certain there's illegal material involved.

Apple's process seems to be: someone has uploaded photos to iCloud and enough of their photos have tripped this system that they get a human review; if the human agrees it's CSAM, they forward it on to law enforcement. There is a chance of false positives, so the human review step seems necessary...

After all, "Apple has hooked up machine learning to automatically report you to the police for child pornograpy with no human review" would have been a much worse news week for Apple. :D