No. A registered charity called The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children controls the hash list.

Yes, they are partly government funded, but I highly doubt they'd let their mission be compromised by allowing the government to inject non-CP hashes. Doing so would compromise all the work they've performed over the last four decades.

These people are (rightfully) very passionate about their work and can't be easily paid off.

There are many, many valid concerns about this Apple initiative. But, "The government" injecting non CP images into the CP databases is not one of them.

> by allowing the government to inject non-CP hashes

I don't think "allowing" is the concern here, because I highly doubt they get to generate the hashes themselves.

I think you misunderstand the Center’s role in this. They review and categorize the images. They maintain the database and provide access to different organizations for the purpose of catching CP. Why wouldn’t they also generate the hashes?

Since they are the only ones legally allowed to possess the images, one can surmise that they must be the ones to create the hashes.

Why not? How can we know this isn’t the case? What technical or practical prevention would there be?