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Apple has yet again betrayed the fact that "it's not technically feasible" is bullshit when it comes to government access
They said it concerning device access, and that was a lie. They said it concerning private cloud compute, and that was a lie. Hell, they said it concerning even the conceivability of secure backdoors, and that was probably a lie, too (not even getting into the fact that they definitely already have magic numbers that can overtly tell your phone to execute arbitrary code).
Apple has now introduced Enhanced Visual Search, technomagic which whizzes your photos (even the ones not in iCloud) off to Apple servers, using all sorts of mathematical goodies like homomorphic encryption to keep them private while allowing them to tag said photos with labels like, "What is this landmark in this photo?" It would be strictly easier to design a system that looks for stuff like child porn and alerts them.
Yes yes, you will rapidly object. False positives, false negatives. I grok filtering theory. Who will have the authority to do what with the information? Sure sure. Who will have to maintain the databases or filters that look for it? Yup, I hear ya. Those are not technical objections. Those are process objections.
I have never supported having the government involved in any of these things. I understand the significant nature of the tradeoffs at the societal level. But I have routinely said that the cry of, "This is just technologically/mathematically impossible," is total bullshit. It's just not true. Several other influential voices in the tech privacy world are coming around sort of slowly to this. They're seeing the deployment of these systems and saying how they're taken aback. How, well damn, if you can do that, then you probably can do this other stuff. But of course, doing the other stuff seems socially problematic, so they don't know how to feel.
It's actually easy to know how to feel. Just drop the lie that these sorts of things are technologically impossible. They are possible. But there are process tradeoffs and there are potentially huge liberty concerns that you can focus on. The more you continue to try to push the Noble Lie, the more likely you're just going to harm your own credibility in the long-term. Better to fight on the grounds of true facts with, "We don't want it," win or lose, than to prepare the grounds for a complete credibility crisis, such that when the time comes, no one is able to responsibly push back.
Well, there are some caveats there - if they are actually using homomorphic encryption to run the classifier, that means that Apple's servers do not at any point learn what the landmark is. If the goal is to report it to the FBI if a picture being sent has been labelled "child porn", accordingly, the phone would have to be wired up to report/send the image if the data it received, once decrypted, indicates that it was classified as such. How do you stop people from blocking this reporting functionality on their end? Adding additional user-unmuteable snitching logic to end-user devices comes with all sorts of legal, technological and security risks (and quickly puts you in a league with North Korean computing equipment that comes with daemons watermarking every document you touch, which they make it illegal to disable).
That being said, I see your argument at least insofar as the case for "it can't be done" is overstated and oversold, but I am not enough of an idealist to agree with this "just be truthful to the ruling classes and try to defend what you want on principle, the truth always wins in the end" thinking. I'm pessimistic about the prospect of a principled stand - we'll get the mandatory surveillance rectangle reporting on wrongthink eventually, because the powers-that-be really want it, and the majority of our fellow citizens probably already want it as well, or else the ruling classes will have all the opportunity on their side to manufacture the conditions that will make them want to, be it by propaganda, dissolving the cohesion of their opposition (note how effectively they split the tech anarchist scene into those who still want to keep the government out and those who think that the Nazis who want to keep the government out are the real danger) or creating real problems to which they are the solution (people want less government spying -> import scary foreigners into what to them is a scary foreign land -> old natives want more government spying to keep them safe from scary newcomers, newcomers want more government spying to keep them safe from racist natives). As far as I am concerned, the better choice at this point is just to lie and obstruct all the way. This buys time for some technical or societal deus ex machina solution to emerge, or else at least lets us spend a bigger fraction of our remaining time on this mortal coil out of bondage.
If they were designing a system to enable this, they might not include all of the features they currently have. It would probably be easier to just make one that does it than to start from what they have and add it in. For example, they wouldn't go to all the trouble to try to hide the correspondence between a device ID and the encrypted bag of photos, either (or they'd have to similarly specially puncture it).
Also, most of the concerns about "can't people just turn it off" forget how strong Apple's control is over their walled garden. Ultimately, this usually descends into arguments over Apple's update process, which is where they are the strongest. I'm mentally skipping some steps, but I could imagine designing a system where, when the device requests the latest update, their request must come with certain proofs, and one could imagine building in that those proofs show that they're doing things that Apple wants (it can check by, say, leaving a blob on their server, one that still doesn't reveal the contents of the photos, but can be used to verify that they're being truthful about them), and denying the update if they can't prove that they're doing what they're told. (Probably still easier to just do it the first time, though.)
That discussion usually descends into questions of society, not tech. Whether people will still use Apple devices. Whether people will eschew updating their devices with Apple software and try to go their own way, etc. All of those discussions mostly amount to, "Yes, you can leave Apple's walled garden and go your own way," but that's true of any piece of electronics if you try hard enough. For any devices that stay in Apple's walled garden, Apple is nearly omnipotent (absent possibly nation state level efforts).
Fair enough on the strategy piece. One clarification, though. I did not say:
Often times, the truth doesn't win. Many of those times, it's because the people who could have the credibility to fight have publicly burned it until the truth doesn't matter anymore.
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