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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

#91

Post by [deleted] »

88840-8855 wrote: post #9
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.

I don't want to be that guy, but for this job there were lining up 300 more people. Nobody except of a tiny group of nerdy guys (including myself, ofc) is against this apple csam move. Just ask your parents or your non-tech friends if it's "ok" to scan people's phones to find those "bad pedophiles" in order to jail then up for the rest of their life. You will be surprised how much support Apple's initiative has in th…

[deleted]

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

#92

Post by trangus_1985 »

88840-8855 wrote: post #9
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.

I don't want to be that guy, but for this job there were lining up 300 more people. Nobody except of a tiny group of nerdy guys (including myself, ofc) is against this apple csam move. Just ask your parents or your non-tech friends if it's "ok" to scan people's phones to find those "bad pedophiles" in order to jail then up for the rest of their life. You will be surprised how much support Apple's initiative has in th…

> but for this job there were lining up 300 more people

let them take it then. I try to minimize the blood on my hands.

>Just ask your parents or your non-tech friends

My parents were unhappy with it - they're non technical and not particularly concerned with privacy. I don't think they'll switch but they did ask how to mitigate it. I'm currently scrambling for a (friendly) alternative to icloud photos.

> They don't really care for the 3% of people who we belong to

Welcome to cyberpunk dystopia! Grab a devterm by clockwork (no affiliation), and log in, cowboy.

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

#93

Post by lovelyviking »

Pushing Spyware Engine is literally abuse to all people including children and it's much worse then any problem they would claim to fight. Even if you believe them.

By this move people are indoctrinated with the idea that being watched by someone big and powerful is Ok. They learn to accept such abuse and what can be worse for any safety of anyone than learning that? If one is serious about any safety one should learn to walk away from such abuse first just like with any other abuses.

It is an attempt to legalize such Spyware Engine installation. Nothing more. The story is just to sell this move using emotional response from naive people. Because high emotions is when people do poor thinking for the long term consequences. Think about Vendetta and consequences of it.

Those people should be educated what the real abuse is and they should teach their children to recognize it because abuse by Apple is already there and it is much worse then the problem they claim are trying to solve. People need to understand that it will get much worse with the time.

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

#94

Post by gary17the »

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 malicious actors attack" on your iPhone/iPad and the injected content simply gets deleted. You take a (false positive) photo with your iPhone/iPad - and it simply disappears (making you retake). No private content is ever sent anywhere, no horrible accusation is ever made, no CSAM ever gets uploaded to iCloud. Simple.

Why doesn't Apple do that?

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

#95

Post by szc »

sneak wrote: post #77
xyst wrote: post #2

I am beginning to wonder if this was the plan all along. Back in 2013 via the Snowden leaks, it was revealed Apple was associated with the NSA domestic surveillance program, PRISM. It appears they (NSA and Apple, et al) pulled out due to the level of negative PR. After 8 years, the intelligence community and tech companies figured out they could sell their surveillance through a thinly veiled effort to “protect X gro…

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 possibly (USA) constitutional rights in quite a few ways. PRISM likely exists.

I ask of "sneak" to confirm their assertion that "PRISM == FISA orders" is true. Please present this "evidence" and the evidence of connection. If you cannot you are, by default, distributing mis-information, bad logic or at worst tying to mislead.

(my naive searching suggests that "sneak" is definitely not in a position to make these claims)

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

#96

Post by gabrielblack »

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 for dissidents: I look for people that have a photo of Tiananmen Square protests on their pc, for example;

- for espionage: I have the hash of some documents of interest, so all the PCs with that kind of documents could be a valuable target;

- profiling people: you have computer virus sample on your PC -> security researcher/hacker;

I think that the system is prone to all kind of privacy abuse.

4. this could be part of the previous point, but, because I think it's the final and real reason for the existence of that system, I give to this point its own section: piracy fight. I think that the one of the real reason is to discourage the exchange of illigal multimedia material to enforce copyrighs.

For the listed reasons, I think that is a bad idea. Let me know what are you thinking about.

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

#97

Post by wruza »

skinkestek wrote: post #68
madaxe_again wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know how in history, occasionally the good old king would die and his crazy nephew would take over and burn all the peasants? This was possible because the king had absolute power. Now, you might argue that this absolute power in this case is being used for good - but given the brush the US just had with accidental Nero, it’s worth being wary of how tools and powers might not only be used by current powers, but b…

Exactly. If you don't want weapons of mass destruction to exist, don't create them and definitely don't tell anyone (too late). If you don't want tools of mass oppression to exist, don't create them. (We are here now.) The fight against Japan in 1945 was important, as is the fight agains child abuse today. But we will have to live with the choises we make, in the short run like I wrote about above and also in the lon…

We are here now

As a sibling commenter noted, we are long past that. I see points of all of you in this subthread and I agree, but this doesn’t answer my last question. Tools of mass everything are already here for more than a decade, ready to deploy and use. And when these are used to do an actually good thing (stopping dickpics to minors), everyone wakes up and blames them for the possibility that could always be deployed overnight without any prior notice.

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

#98

Post by occamrazor »

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”.

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

#99

Post by samrolken »

skinkestek wrote: post #17
88840-8855 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to be that guy, but for this job there were lining up 300 more people. Nobody except of a tiny group of nerdy guys (including myself, ofc) is against this apple csam move. Just ask your parents or your non-tech friends if it's "ok" to scan people's phones to find those "bad pedophiles" in order to jail then up for the rest of their life. You will be surprised how much support Apple's initiative has in th…

> Just ask your parents or your non-tech friends if it's "ok" to scan people's phones to find those "bad pedophiles" in order to jail then up for the rest of their life. You will be surprised how much support Apple's initiative has in the broad public. My Dad is an old teacher today and was formerly a farmer. My view is he clearly understands these issues and has done since I was a teenager sometime in the last mille…

> 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 the update doesn’t include a ZIP file scanner or a blasphemy-scanner. This has always been the case, even before the introduction of the CSAM voucher mechanism.

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

#100

Post by deepstack »

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.

As a long time Apple user and developer (since black and white Apple II), I have witness the rise/fall/rise again/and now fall again of Apple. The future computer I WILL be Linux/FreeBSD for all important stuff.
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