The idea of pervasive spying has been around forever. The want, and why. Apple mainstreamed, normalized the discourse, and demoed the concept of pre-scanning in the face of E2E. Apple provided the answer for the how.

Apple didn’t mainstream anything, indeed they withdrew the plan after the discourse was overwhelmingly opposed to the idea.

Apple tried to come up with a method to still do e2e and also scan for CSAM, a noble goal if grossly flawed. It blew up in their face so they did the right thing and canned it.

Before that this sort of legislation was just straight asking for a skeleton key or a ban on e2e, many laws still do. Apple trying a thing and failing didn’t fundamentally change anything because these laws aren’t asking for a specific technology, they’re asking to be able to see all your messages no matter the method. That’s literally the politicians level of understanding “want read read messages”.

If Apple had never thought up the CSAM scanner concept they’d still be pushing to just break the encryption. Hell they may even stumble upon the “well just send us a copy or scan it for all these fingerprints before you encrypt it” concept themselves, it’s not really a tough concept.

HN commenters leave so much context out of the discussion. Google is already scanning photos for CSAM. Meta is already scanning photos for CSAM. Dropbox, OneDrive... EVERY storage provider is scanning your photos for CSAM. And yet confusingly you only complain about Apple.

It's amazing how many times this has to be repeated. Meta/Google/DropBox can scan to their hearts content on their own machines. They own their machines, they can do whatever they want with them. Apple normalized the notion of having your own hardware spy on you at the government's behest.