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Comment by aj3 | Hacker News Reader

That's a pretty idealistic view. I guess the issue boils down to whether you believe there are things in digital realms that are illegal to possess.

For comparison, it's pretty obvious that there are certain things in physical realm that citizens shouldn't have. So it would be wrong to claim "my things are mine and no one should be able to inspect them or take away from me, no matter what those things are". Examples for things citizens should not posses: weapons of mass destruction and slaves.

Apple et al argue that CSAM should be digital content that nobody ought to possess. So while you're obviously technically capable of storing it, it shouldn't be legal.

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> I guess the issue boils down to whether you believe there are things in digital realms that are illegal to possess.

not at all. I'm pretty sure nobody here thinks CSAM should be legal. The topic at hand is whether that means everyone should be subjected to blanket surveillance by default.

Just because there's child abuse out there doesn't mean you can walk into a random persons house and rummage through their drawers, and by the same logic Apple or anyone else should have no business digging through my phone.

It's not idealistic at all, it's simply opposition to surveillance of people who have done nothing to warrant such suspicion. I don't know about the US, but here in Germany we have the so called Briefgeheimnis. (literally: secrecy of letters). Privacy of correspondence is almost sacrosanct and can only ever be violated under extreme circumstances, not casually or systematically, that's what the Stasi used to do.

The problem with rummaging through someone’s drawers is that this is done by people who in that process will inevitably find out much more about your life than binary “has CSAM / does not have CSAM in their possession”. There’s no viable way of limiting scope of such rummaging and there is no way to make individual officers forget what they’ve seen.

Apple’s system on the other hand provides such guarantees, so I don’t see how it can be compared to these hypothetical rummaging operations.

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