Neither courts nor legislative bodies are capable of explicitly requiring the invention of technology that doesn't yet exist, although in some cases they could make it an implicit requirement of a law.
At least in the US most lawmakers are varying shades of technologically illiterate and don't have a grasp of what is possible or not possible. If technology doesn't exist yet, you can say to them "this is impossible", and with enough of a bribe, they will believe it.
Apple by building this technology, has put it on the map and announced that this technology both possible and is ready.
If you think it's bad that Apple can push software updates to iPhones, then by all means make that argument. But "the only way to prevent bad changes to this system down the road is for this first version of the system to never exist" is a very poor argument, given that the only "system" that needs to exist is the ability to push software updates, and that system existed long ago.
Thus this is seen as a marketing backdoor to the actual backdoor. This is seen as a ploy that later gives Apple the plausible deniability argument that the government is making them do it (other forms of content) even though they created the means (on device scanning) for the government to exploit.
Why limit it to content that will be uploaded to iCloud? Why limit iMessage scanning to kids? Why not also let the government know? Why limit it to child porn since the system works for any image? Why limit it to 30 hits?
Any sane marketing person would try to find a way to sugarcoat it first.
Apple relied on that argument 5 years ago successfully.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FBI–Apple_encryption_dispute
Apple could always go ahead and add that functionality in an update, but then there would be a big backlash and the opportunity to not update or switch providers.
Isn't that exactly what is happening now?
I guess I don't see the huge difference between the surveillance code existing on the phone but not used for objectionable purposes versus the line of code sitting in a different branch in git and not deployed on actual phones (yet).
I'm completely against this move by the way -- I'm not trying to defend it. But I want to be able to argue effectively against it.
Then someone says "what if they change it so it sends the video if someone says 'do you want some pot?'"
And your argument would be "wouldn't you just move if they did that?" - this argument is pointless, because it's not the "help" part that bothersome, it's the always recording camera in a black box, for which you never know what's recording and what's it sending to apple. Let's say hypothetically they do this, and modify the database to trigger on the "tank man" photo, and give that photo such weight, that it triggers manual review by the CCP observer (remember, apple data for chinese users is hosted in china) - you'll never know the image got flagged, you'll never even know that it was sent anywhere, but your social score will go down and you might "vanish" during the night. Imagine some new wikileaks happening... 15 journalists around the world get the data, NSA/CIA/FBI has hacked one of them and found some photos of USA doing something bad.... add those photos to the database, have apple scan all the phones, you find the other 14 journalists, and possible even the leaker who took the original photo. If this is expended to macbooks (which it probably will), even worse, because people keep more sensitive stuff on ther computers than their phones.
And all this for what? Child molesters and rapists (the worst of the pedos) create new photos and videos, that are in none of the databases, so you never catch them. Their direct sponsors (paying customers) get the photos first, and again, before they're in the database. So all you've caught is someone browsing 4chan.
I hadn’t considered that. This would seem to create a market incentive to abuse more children and create a greater variety of new abusive content. Has that been considered at all?
> The only way to prevent all this is for the system not to exist.
I've been having trouble following this argument over the last week. Isn't it clear that the capability already exists? Whether or not Apple goes through with its CSAM plan, the capability is evidently there.
In other words, since Apple is a closed system, the capability was there before they announced the CSAM plans. Their announcement has changed nothing about capability other than reminding people that Apple has privileged access to the data on iPhones.
I guess the question is, if Apple does the CSAM program does that make them more likely to cave to government pressure to search for other things? And to do so without telling users?