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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.
Are they currently claiming they do this today? My understanding of homomorphic encryption (admittedly a bit outside my wheelhouse) is that it's nowhere near as well-trod a space as, say, RSA. When I last looked, it was possible -- with a bunch of caveats -- to do simple things with a whole bunch of overhead, and certainly no equivalent of a NIST standard (if you trust those: say "Dual EC" with me) for it.
I didn't think the technology to do this well was ready for prime time today, but maybe I'm just a bit out of date. Do they have a white paper, or, better, a bunch of academic papers?
My general take is that the main use of homomorphic encryption is to make cryptocurrencies look respectable by comparison.
It's main purpose seems to be to get people to move their data into the cloud, while pretending that you can do useful computations on the data without learning anything useful about it, because it is all encrypted.
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