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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.
That article does not say it was a lie. It says that there is an "Apple-owned private key", but that's a matter of interpretation. Apple destroys its copy of this key before the phone is sold, so the key only exists on the device itself. They say Apple COULD make a law-enforcement accessible version, not that the version they actually make is law-enforcement accessible.
I'm not sure what you think Enhanced Visual Search proves. Certainly it has always been technically feasible for Apple to search your phone for child porn. No one said it wasn't, as far as I know; Apple announced they were doing it in 2021 and backed off. Enhanced Visual Search is controlled destruction of privacy.
False positives and false negatives aren't the main issue. The main issue is it's not a proper role of the government (whether itself or through agents) to go rifling through my data looking for crimes.
Precisely as I claimed.
Oh my. I'm not sure what rock you've been living under.
Right. Anyone paying attention back then should have knocked it off with the "it's technically infeasible" song and dance, but sooooo many people haven't.
It sounds like you're in about the same camp I am; we just have different judgments regarding the extent to which people have been claiming technical infeasibility all the time. That's one of those 'sense of the discourse' things that is basically impossible to prove, because one would have to set weird standards about, "Oh, it needs to be person of this much prominence," etc. Probably the easiest way to see how pervasive the meme still is, even if some voices have started to shy away from it, is to peruse /r/technology.
But not the opposite of the claim that Apple has made. If I encrypt some data and burn the key, it is technically infeasible for me to decrypt the data. I could have just not burned the key, that's obvious, but I did burn the key.
Right. That's the this part:
Apple's claim is fine. It just also demonstrates that other schemes are not, in fact, technologically infeasible. Actually, there is slight quibble; the quoted bit isn't entirely true. Apple doesn't destroy the only copy of its key. It destroys the mechanism by which they can access the key (they put the cards in a blender); there remains a copy of the key (or the key ("Apple's key") that unlocks the key ("user's key"), to be strict) in the HSM that they keep possession of. They just believe that there is no longer any way for them to access it (short of theoretical attacks like decapping the HSM).
The disagreement is: having made a phone that works this way, it is now technically infeasible to search it. It was not technically infeasible to build the phone another way, but Apple also never claimed that. After all, they did this deliberately, as a sales pitch.
That is a claim, but it's in a different debate. One is, "The government wants Apple to get into this existing phone right here, right now." The other is, "The government is considering passing a law that would require Apple to build future devices which would allow them to perform searches." I don't think anything that anyone has said so far in this thread is really relevant for the first debate; I certainly haven't said anything about that. It's the latter debate that is the context for so many of the poor applications of, "...but that's technologically infeasible!"
The only thing I ever saw Apple commenting on is the first one. Did they say it's technically unfeasible to build a surveilable phone anywhere? Cause that's dumb.
I doubt Apple ever officially used those words, because it is dumb. But all sorts of tech industry/press folks say variations on the theme. The link I gave to the CKV/"AKV" debate was a back-and-forth with people who are still very prominent, who were absolutely actually claiming that it was technologically infeasible (to get there, you need to add certain qualifiers as to what "it" is). Reading that whole back and forth is probably the most useful for understanding where people try to draw the battle lines.
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