Take your argument one step further - the government knows this and starts issuing warrants for exactly these situations. Now, Apple is in a position where they have to violate their user’s privacy and share content in order to comply with the search warrants. The new system allows them to comply with warrants without ever knowing or needing to know what the contents of users’ phones are and only in cases where it’s known that illegal content exists. Apple can’t divulge any other content from the users’ devices because it doesn’t have it or know what it is in the first place.

A warrant must name the specific persons/places/things to be searched. A automatic dragnet search isn't required with a warrant.

> 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.

Yes but the criteria for a warrant can be nothing more than reasonable suspicion. So a warrant could be issued for access to someone’s entire device regardless of whether objectionable content exists on it or not. Theoretically, a government could issue a warrant for every single person’s phone and get what they want. This prevents anything even close to that from happening because users aren’t required to provide the keys and Apple won’t have them unless that content matches what’s on the list.

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.

> Theoretically, a government could issue a warrant for every single person’s phone and get what they want.

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?

No, you need just one: "every phone connected to at least two of these N base stations over this 48-hour window".

Which is quite a modern take on a historically reviled phenomenon, so you should call them for what they are: general warrants.

Glad I’m not the only one.