No. Don't make that excuses for them. If it were true it would be a shocking revelation which might result in thousands of cases being overturned.
If the NCMEC searches by providers are being done as a result of government coercion then the fourth amendment requires there be a search warrant. Since there isn't one, these searches would all be unlawful if there was coercion.
Thus far, tech companies like Google and AOL have gone out of their way to testify that there is no coercion (I haven't found a case involving Apple).
If there were coercion it would be a shocking conspiracy. I wouldn't argue that it's impossible: The USG has done some shockingly unethical and illegal things in the past but it fails occams razor.
Moreover, the excuse doesn't actually make apple look better: Instead of being a corporation compromising user privacy and security for commercial gain, they'd be an active participant in a conspiracy to violate the US constitution.
Apple is doing this because they believe they'll make more money this way, and because they believe the complaints raised here about people rejecting devices betraying their trust are fundamentally inconsequential.
Show them otherwise, don't make excuses. Don't blame the government. The government may well be to blame too, but Apple's actions are apple's fault.
This comment is as if the 2001-2010 decade never happened. Secret wiretaps. Secret Evidence. Overseas torture facilities. Imprisonment without charges. What makes you think that checks and balances would miraculously appear after having disappeared for over a decade.
NOTE: this is a USA-centric viewpoint
Those are USA-centric examples.
I'm sure the viewpoint is just as valid across five eyes and even worse in places like Saudi Arabia, Turkey, China et al.
I'm from Australia, allegedly a 1st world democracy - and secret wiretaps, secret evidence (and even secret trials!), overseas torture facilities, imprisonment without charges - are all public policy, covered my the media, and enshrined in laws passes by both of the two-party political system.
Don't forget raiding journalists homes and public broadcasters (using illegal warrants!) for reporting on proposed secret spying and hacking laws.
Nice "democracy".
If the conspiracy exists Apple is an active participant in secretly and illegally undermining the constitutional rights of well over a hundred million Americans. If the conspiracy does not exist, then they're simply lawfully invading people's privacy in order to improve their profits.
But you're right, none of the people who broke all the laws Snowden showed us were getting broken has suffered any consequences.
Not a US citizen, so I’m not familiar with this argument. As I understand it the government isn’t searching anything themselves so would the requirement for a search warrant apply?
I think what the US government is requiring is that if a service provider comes across CSAM they must report it. Since I don’t see why searching your own service would be anything to do with search warrants either, is it constitutional to make such a requirement for other reasons?
Finally even if Apple could avoid this requirement, which they seem to have largely been doing until now, was it viable for them to continue like that? Even without a legal mandate to actively search for CSAM, knowing there must be millions of unreported CSAM images on their service can’t have been a comfortable position to be in.
What is permitted is that if a private entity of their own free will and self interest searches and then finds something, the government can require them to make a report when they found something. Just as you say.
But the government cannot require them to search in the first place, not without extending the fourth amendment protection against search.
Apple can decide that the commercial value of reducing the risk that they're accused of helping perverts is greater to them than the commercial value of respecting the customers privacy. Indeed. But lets call that what it is, and not make excuses that they're forced to search: They're not. They are choosing to search.
> it’s known that illegal content exists
A point of clarification: The system divulges the encryption keys to content when the content's "perceptual hash" matches one in the database the specific user is being tested against. Apple claims that the hashes are provided by NCMEC "and other parties". It is already known that the NCMEC databases has at least some hits for non-illegal content. Who knows what these databases might contain in the future. There is certainly no structural requirement in the system that the content is illegal or some specific kind of illegal.
For users in Thailand the apple database could just as well be full of hashes of cartoons insulting to the monarch (which are illegal there, as I understand it) and no one would be able to tell, at least not before apple users started being rounded up and summarily executed.
On your second point, yes… that’s a very real possibility and one that I’m sure Apple has already considered and has responded to.
For that you'd need a sham court full of rubber stamping judges handing out bogus search warrants for every single questionable and illegal request that comes to them. That seems a stretch of the imagination? What judge would to _that?_
We could call that the FISA Court, right?
Which is quite a modern take on a historically reviled phenomenon, so you should call them for what they are: general warrants.
There's a difference between cops paying someone to break into a suspect's house to steal evidence without a warrant, and a 3rd party that, while doing business, comes across material that might be criminal evidence.
The former case, in the US, falls under the doctrine of the "fruit of the poisonous tree"[1]. Evidence collected illicitly won't be allowed in court, and any evidence or argument based on the tainted evidence can be thrown out, as well.
I think the line is blurred with the system in the OP, where it seems like it kind of fits the latter case. It's fuzzy to me when parties are working in tandem with law enforcement, even going as far as running law enforcement's own systems voluntarily, or collecting or giving up information without a warrant when simply asked. To me, that seems a lot more like former case, where the government persuades someone to collect evidence on their behalf without warrants or subpoenas.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree
In the US, that is currently where we've drawn the line.
They can cooperate, but it has to be voluntarily and the private party can't be government-by-another-name (e.g. not NCMEC which has a special legislative permission to handle child porn and is overwhelmingly funded by the government), but an actual private party.
https://olemiss.edu/depts/ncjrl/pdf/PrivateSearchDoctrine.pd...
In the US, if the Government were to mandate Apple search the users content, then Apple would be acting as an agent of the government and the searches would require a warrant per the fourth amendment. This is the unambiguous case law.
If Apple is being forced they should say so explicitly rather than secretly participating in an unlawful conspiracy to violate their customer's fourth amendment rights.
Other providers, such as google, have been unambiguous in their testimony in court that they are not being coerced, for example quoting US v. Miller (6th Cir. 2020):
> Companies like Google have business reasons to make these efforts to remove child pornography from their systems. As a Google representative noted, “[i]f our product is associated with being a haven for abusive content and conduct, users will stop using our services.” McGoff Decl., R.33-1, PageID#161.
> Did Google act under compulsion? Even if a private party does not perform a public function, the party’s action might qualify as a government act if the government “has exercised coercive power or has provided such significant encouragement, either overt or covert, that the choice must in law be deemed to be that of the” government. [...] Miller has not shown that Google’s hash-value matching falls on the “compulsion” side of this line. He cites no law that compels or encourages Google to operate its “product abuse detection system” to scan for hash-value matches. Federal law disclaims such a mandate. It says that providers need not “monitor the content of any [customer] communication” or “affirmatively search, screen, or scan” files. 18 U.S.C. § 2258A(f). Nor does Miller identify anything like the government “encouragement” that the Court found sufficient to turn a railroad’s drug and alcohol testing into “government” testing. See Skinner, 489 U.S. at 615. [...] Federal law requires “electronic communication service providers” like Google to notify NCMEC when they become aware of child pornography. 18 U.S.C. § 2258A(a). But this mandate compels providers only to report child pornography that they know of; it does not compel them to search for child pornography of which they are unaware.
Besides, if they could get the warrants they could get access to all the data in any case (e.g. by getting access to the users backups to steal the users credentials and then accessing the icloud accounts).
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/amendment-4/p...
Because the scanning is happening without a warrant, if the government compelled apple to perform the search the search would be illegal. It is only legal for Apple to perform this search because it is in no way compelled by the government.
The government cannot obtain a blanket warrant against everyone. This kind of dragnet scanning has to be voluntarily performed by a private party for it to be lawful.
By all means! please prove to us that the government secretly has ordered Apple and other companies to scan users private data: If you do so it will result in overturning tons of convictions due to the unlawful searches which were concealed due perjury by the government and tech companies who have consistently claimed that the scanning by the tech companies is completely voluntary in in their own self interest.
This planned system means less violation of privacy in cases where a warrant exists, and more violation of privacy where there is no warrant. That's not exactly an amazing tradeoff.
And depending on what's in the database, signatures and thumbnails can be really bad.
Isn't Google a company with billion dollar government contracts? No coercion required...
If that were the case and Google honestly testified that they performed the searches based on the belief that the government would withhold business from them it is likely that the warrantless searches would be disallowed. Courts have found that even covert encouragement can apply. What matters is that the if it's functionally the government's choice if the searching does or doesn't happen, then its subject to the fourth amendment.
Doesn't need to be fear. Doesn't even need anybody to insinuate something threatening.
The conflict of interest is enough, to willingly do anything you're asked and play the good boy out of greed - to keep/get more contracts.
And possibly, as mentioned in an earlier post on HN, as a defense against Anti-trust litigation.
Ben Thompson's suggested approach for them in this article is to just do the unencrypted iCloud model with normal CSAM reporting like FB does and make that the tradeoff.
Apple actually wants things to be more secure by encrypting everything e2e with this CSAM hash approach to still fulfill that obligation (and protect themselves from future regulatory requirements that are more broad).
Reasonable people can disagree on these approaches to policy, but it's not obvious that Apple's move here is strictly worse for end users - if they do make moves to e2e then it's arguably better for user privacy to do it the way they're doing it.
Furthermore, since the end is compromised, it's no longer a true end. The true end is the user and a system compromised in this way doesn't offer any guarantees to the user.
What is actually bad about their plan is the potential for scope creep and might wider scanning in the future. Your own, handwritten messages and personal photos can be secure even while this destroys many freedoms and lives.
Edit: thanks dpkonofa, I made the description vague in the hope that it's more correct.
Personally I've been dying for the next gen of M1 macs to come out. I also wonder if this tech has some magical way of getting around a hosts file and little snitch. If I can't gap my data from Apple it would raise ethical issues with my storing client secrets on the machine.
I don't think that's exactly where the "one in a trillion" claim comes from. Rather, it's that a single matching hash isn't enough to trigger the reporting; there needs to be multiple matches, and when there are enough of them to cross an unspecified threshold, then the reporting is triggered. There's theoretically only a one in a trillion chance of that threshold being crossed without having actual CSAM matches.
If I understand the white paper correctly, this even goes a step farther than that; they can't decrypt the signatures of the images corresponding to the matched hashes until the threshold is passed, because those images form a kind of decryption key together.
On a technical level, I'm actually pretty impressed. They absolutely could set up E2E encryption and still implement this system, and it largely assuages my worries about false matches of innocent photos (with the extremely big caveat that a false match has a very high potential of ruining someone's life). As the linked article points out, though, the real privacy concern here comes from having this matching capability on-device at all, because once it's there, limiting the data set to just this one provided by NCMEC becomes a matter of company policy. If an agency of any government demands Apple add their data set, they can no longer say, "we can't do that without drastically compromising the way our devices and services work," because it will be public knowledge that this in fact how their devices and services work already.
> Facebook is one of the biggest social media services. Back in 2013, they were receiving 350 million pictures per day. However, Facebook hasn't released any more recent numbers, so I can only try to estimate. In 2020, FotoForensics received 931,466 pictures and submitted 523 reports to NCMEC; that's 0.056%. During the same year, Facebook submitted 20,307,216 reports to NCMEC. If we assume that Facebook is reporting at the same rate as me, then that means Facebook received about 36 billion pictures in 2020. At that rate, it would take them about 30 years to receive 1 trillion pictures.
Bad cop: I want access to all your information.
Good cop: Oh, these guys are after you. Let me see if I can intervene for you. I can implement a selective limited search, that make these bureaucrats happy and at the same time will protect you. I am on your side, I hate them too. This is the best practical solution.
I wonder how we ever survived with the level of privacy we had before the advent of the internet. It must've been a living hell. /s
Privacy is not a problem, it is necessary in order for freedom from tyranny to be possible. Even if all the governments of the world mandate that all communication devices must be compromised like this, criminals will still be able to have private communication channels, but lawful citizens won't.
And I doubt this system, which looks for known files, is going to do very much to impact production.
It’s like a double airlock. If your content never leaves your device, there’s no way for them to provide it to someone upon request. It’s definitely a complicated situation but I have yet to see someone provide a solution for how to achieve what Apple has while never transferring your data to them in the first place.
This unfortunately appears to be true, and part of me is impressed by [the idea of] the solution they've come up with. But, like I said in my first comment, it means in practice that I have an opaque and unaccountable surveillance program running on my personal physical hardware, which is undeniably an escalation. Whatever they claim it's doing is both completely unverifiable and probably complicated enough, and subject enough to change, that it's practically impossible to form a complete and persistently correct understanding of the attack surface it exposes—even if it were open-sourced and exhaustively documented, which it isn't and presumably never will be.
I am much more comfortable simply knowing that anything I upload to somebody else's servers is subject to snooping, and anything I keep on my hardware is not. That's how the other cloud storage providers do it, and I may not like it, but it's at least easy to account for when I'm thinking about my own data security and privacy. It's admirable that Apple tried to come up with something better, but (I'd argue) from certain important perspectives it's arguably worse.
Software is a chronic disease. Once you let it in, it never goes away, and changes beyond the scope of "fixes" seem to infallibly make it more intrusive and/or harmful. We are like frogs with many bodies, each being boiled in a different pot by a different chef. I have no interest in yet another unaccountable daemon inhabiting my private person.
This isn't true quite yet. It's pretty easy for me to keep some of my data truly private (e.g. on a secure Linux machine with an encrypted disk, if I'm really paranoid) while still participating in modern society, using the internet, and so on.
Apple has simply removed itself from the set of vendors whose products don't preclude uncompromised local data security.
When it stops being about the children, it'll be about the terrorists. When it stops being about the terrorists, it'll be about whatever the next excuse is. This seems like a compromise between those unfortunate scenarios - upholding privacy (we don't see the content) while still attempting to solve for the problems that privacy inherently allows for (we can still identify CP).