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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.
There are tiers of government access. The NSA and CIA guard their tech closely and certainly don’t hand it out to every law enforcement agency that wants to catch petty drug dealers and degenerates with stuff saved on a switched off iPhone. The fact that the FBI had to physically grab Ulbricht’s unlocked laptop, that they still try to grab unlocked phones and that intelligence sources regularly discuss ways of working around Apple’s encryption suggest that, if useable hardware back doors into this kind of hardware exist, they’re limited in usage to the absolute most pinnacle of intelligence or criminal investigation operations against political enemies of the state, foreign governments and alleged terrorists. All of those should know that they’re under constant surveillance and every thought they utter is being recorded somewhere in Langley. High level backdoors are hoarded by the relevant agencies and - if you’re an enemy of the state to the extent you need to be worried about them - you’re probably already fucked and the powers that be can likely already manufacture the relevant pretext to ruin/arrest/kill you.
Well, parallel construction is a thing.
Of course, a spook will not crack phones of random suspects in police custody (because this would confirm to the police that they have this ability), nor will they risk their precious 0-days to infect phones of suspects in ordinary criminal cases, but if drug dealers who have incriminating messages on the Apple cloud had an above-baseline rate of being 'randomly' checked when crossing the border, I would not be surprised.
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