Now though, Apple is already saying "We'll take this database of illegal image hashes provided by the government and use it to scan your phone." It's now quite trivial for a government to say "We don't have a special database of just CSAM, and a different database of just Winnie the Pooh memes. We just have one big DB of 'illegal images', and that's what we want you to use to scan the phones."
Have been whining about big data for and ML recognition systems for years.
At last in Apple's case, ML is used only if a minor child (less than 13 years old) who is on a Family account where the parent/guardian has opted-in to the ability to be alerted if potentially bad content is either sent or received using the Messages app.
Because it’s something to push back against governments by saying « I can’t ». But it’s a societal issue if a corporation can say « I don’t want » to a government.
It’s really not the same thing and Apple just burned their « I can’t » card and are implying they can just say « no » to governments. Which is quite an even more dystopian thing.
The statement from Apple is that they will say no. Whether that actually ever happens is something we will see, one way or another.
Do you really think they would care in the slightest about banning iPhone?
Or that Putin cares more about people not being able to buy what amounts to a luxury item, than being able to hunt down opposition supporters?
Ohh... oops.
Any chance this is already operational there?
And, in all honesty, there's a lot of those.
Sounds like political suicide on either side: government interference with the country's largest company, an iconic brand, for no reason other than to hopefully spy more on your citizens.
I can guarantee that some industry bigwigs are salivating at the prospect of this tech. Imagine youtube copyright strikes but local to your device.
That really depends. And is quite a strange, perhaps worrying, take.
Because, for many people, copyright strikes are the least of their problems.
Not that I disagree on it being an issue.
Democratic countries are much more of a danger because Apple has offices in them and cannot easily pull out of the market if they feel the laws are unconscionable.
(Yes, I know, it sounds like I'm splitting hairs distinguishing between copyright maximalism and copyright trolling. Please, humor me.)
What copyright maximalists really want is an end to the legal protections for online platforms (DMCA 512 safe-harbor) so they can go after notorious markets directly. They already partially accomplished this in the EU. It's way more efficient from their end to have one throat to choke. Once the maximalists get what they want, platforms that want to be legitimate would be legally compelled to implement filters, ala YouTube Content ID. But those filters would apply to content that's published on the platform, not just things on your device. Remember: they're not interested in your local storage. They want to keep their movies and music off of YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, and Facebook.
Furthermore, they largely already have the scanning regime they want. Public video sites make absolutely no sense to E2E encrypt; and most sites that deal in video already have a content fingerprinting solution. It turns out it was already easy enough to withhold content licenses to platforms that accept user uploads, unless they agreed to also start scanning those uploads.
(Side note: I genuinely think that the entire concept of safe harbors for online platforms is going to go away, just as soon as the proposals to do so stop being transparently partisan end-runs around the 1st Amendment. Pre-Internet, the idea that an entity could broadcast speech without having been considered to be the publisher of it didn't really exist. Publishers were publishers and that was that.)
But bad people will always have power.
Prior to motorised vehicles and the telegraph for example, borders were almost impossible to enforce on the general population without significant leakage.
Ironically in spite of powered flight, freedom of movement is in a sense significantly less than even 200 years ago when it comes to movement between countries that do not already have diplomatic ties to one another allowing for state authorized travel.
Incidentally, this is part of why many punishments in the medieval age were so extreme - the actual ability of the state to enforce the law was so pathetically limited by today's standards that they needed a strong element of fear to attempt to control the population.
Borders in medieval Europe weren't nearly as necessary because the physical ability to travel was limited. Forget traveling from Germany to France - just going to the next town over was a life-threatening affair without assistance and wealth. Legally speaking, most peasant farmers were property of their lord's manor. But practically speaking, leaving the manor would be quite difficult on your own.
Many churches railed against motor vehicles because the extra freedom of movement they made possible also broke sexual mores - someone might use that car to engage in prostitution! You see similar arguments made today about birth control or abortion.
Prior to the Internet, American mass communication was effectively censored by the government under a series of legally odd excuses about public interest in efficiently-allocated spectrum. In other words, this was a technical limitation of radio, weaponized to make an end-run around the 1st Amendment. Getting rid of that technical limitation increased freedom. Even today, getting banned from Facebook for spouting too much right-wing nonsense isn't as censorious as, say, the FCC fining you millions of dollars for an accidental swear word.
Whether or not a technology actually winds up increasing or reducing freedom depends more on how it's distributed than on just how much of it there is. Technology doesn't care one way or the other about your freedom. However, freedom is intimately tied to another thing: equity. Systems that economically franchise their subjects, have low inequality, and keep their hierarchies in check, will see the "technology dividend" of increased freedom go to their subjects. Systems that impoverish people, have high inequality, and let their hierarchies grow without bound, will instead squander that dividend for themselves.
This is a feedback effect, too. Most technology is invented in systems with freedom and equality, and then that technology goes on to reinforce those freedoms. Unequal systems squander their subjects' ability to invent new technologies. We didn't see this with Nazi Germany, because the Allies wiped them off the map too quickly; but the Soviet Union lost their technological edge over time. The political hierarchy they had established to replace the prior capitalist one made technological innovation impractical. So, the more you use technology to restrict, censor, or oppress people, the more likely that your country falls behind economically and stagnates. The elites at the top of any hierarchical system - aside from the harshest dictatorships - absolutely do not want that happening.
Capitalism is completely compatible with hierarchies and censorship - indeed one could argue that capitalism is completely incompatible with a true flattening of hierarchies since it rests on the ability of an owner class holding a monopoly over the means of production. The majority of dictatorships around the world use capitalism as the basis of it's economy. Following the dissolving of the USSR, Russia continues to be authoritarian and arguably more so than the USSR was past the Stalin era.
Aside from that, I think it's a little premature to frame the internet's ultimate effect on the world as reducing the ability of the government to censor the population when it's only been around for less than 30 years and we are already seeing mass adoption and development of both censorship and surveillance tech that goes beyond even the wildest dreams of 20th century era dictators.
I don't really buy the argument that most technology is invented in systems with freedom and equality either. It just sounds more like something we want to believe than something borne out by data. The internet and rocket ships were the product of the military - an institution that has more to do with using force to enact the will of it's host nation on others and limiting their freedoms than preserving the freedoms of their own, especially for superpowers like the USA and the CCP, which are effectively immune to conquest by military force.
This is in fact the same for the Silicon Valley and most private industry, you only think all this tech is the product of your freedom and equality because all of the actual extreme inequality and lack of freedom is kept compartmentalised to the global south through long and convoluted supply chains. It's not really freedom if only 10% of the actual people involved in the sustaining of an economy have any semblance of it -leaving aside the observation that for even this 10% that represents the average US citizen, their actual democratic agency in the state or in their job is vanishingly low.
First, the Soviet Union didn't have a prior capitalist hierarchy; the whole reason for Leninism as such was that Russia was a feudal, agrarian society, which in Marx's theory had not progressed to the stage of capitalism and therefore could not progress to communism.
Second, food shortages and mass poverty did not end with the establishment of the Soviet Union; in fact, they became enormously worse. Even before being invaded by Germany in WWII, the Soviet system caused the Holodomor, a famine unprecedented in the history of the Ukraine.
Third, the internet has been around for 52 years, not less than 30. I've personally been using it for 29 years, and I can tell you that it already had a long history when I started using it. One of the founders of Y Combinator first became well-known as a result of breaking significant parts of the internet 33 years ago, an event which resulted in a criminal trial.
Fourth, the internet was the product of universities, although the universities were funded by ARPA. Rocket ships have a long evolution including not only militaries but also recreational fireworks, Tipu Sultan of Mysore, Tsiolkovsky, Goddard, the peaceful space agencies, H. G. Wells, and possibly Lagâri Hasan Çelebi.
Fifth, I don't think the argument is that the technology is necessarily produced by systems with freedom and equality, but that it is invented by them. This is somewhat dubious, but not as open-and-shut wrong as your misunderstanding of it. Goddard's rockets were put into mass production as the V2 in Nazi Germany using slave labor, but he invented them at WPI and Princeton. Tsiolkovsky lived in the Czar's Russia and then the USSR, and his daughter was arrested by the Czar's secret police, but he himself seems to have had considerable freedom to experiment with dirigibles and publish his research (but no slaves to build rockets for him), and indeed he was elected to the Socialist Academy.
I think we can make an excellent case that certain kinds of intellectual repression, whether grassroots or hierarchical, fall very heavily on the kinds of people who tend to invent things. William Kamkwamba's family thought he was insane, Galileo spent the last years of his life under house arrest, Newton was doing alchemical research that could have gotten him burned at the stake in Spain, Qin Shi Huang buried the Mohists alive, Giordano Bruno was in fact burned at the stake, and the repression of Lysenko's intellectual opposition was a major reason for the USSR's and PRC's economic troubles in the 01950s and 01960s.
Living in the so-called "global south" (a term which I have come to regard as useless for understanding the world system, if not actively counterproductive) I have to tell you that there's very little production of advanced technology going on here. But I live in Argentina, and the situation is different in different countries; Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, etc., have all done significant technical production for the world economy while in the grip of dictatorships, even though Argentina never has. But most countries don't. If tantalum cost ten times as much, we'd still have cellphones, and you probably wouldn't even be able to detect the price difference.
Something strikes me as odd; Why do you say “Russia” but not “Germany”? Why not say “Soviets” or something similar?
Is it because Russia is still portrayed as the bogeyman in the Anglosphere whereas the Germans are cool now?
But what people are afraid of is how little it takes when the technology is there. And how Western governments seem to morph towards that. And how some bastions of freedom are falling
Even a Jew stuck in a ghetto in Nazi Germany enjoyed significantly better privacy at home from both the state and capital than a wealthy citizen in a typical western liberal nation today.
Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany in fact prove the exact opposite of what point you think you're making. They were foremost in using the "magic tech" of their day - telecommunications and motorised vehicles.
Even then, they had several rebellions and uprisings that were able to develop thanks to lacking the degree of surveillance tech found today.
This is incorrect.
Apple has been saying—since 2019![0]—that they can scan for any potentially illegal content, not just images, not just CSAM, and not even strictly illegal.
That's what should be opposed. CSAM is a red herring.
[0] https://www.macobserver.com/analysis/apple-scans-uploaded-co...
1) The list of CSAM hashes is that provided by the relevant US government agency, that is it.
2) The project is not targeted to roll out anywhere other than the USA.
3) The hashes are baked into the OS, there is no capability to update them other than on signed and delivered Apple OS updates.
4) Apple has exactly the same leverage with EvilGov as at any other time. They can refuse to do as asked, and risk being ejected from the country. Their stated claim is that this is what will happen. We will see.
https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...
For example here is a broken PSI protocol in terms of point 3. I don’t think normally in PSI this is considered broken because the server knows the value so it is part of its private set.
Server computes M_s = g . H(m) . S_s
where g is a generator of an elliptic curve, H(m) is the neural hash of the image and S_s is the server blinding secret.
The client computes M_sc = M_s . S_c where S_c is the client ephemeral secret. This M_sc value is the shared key.
The client also computes M_c = g . H(m) . S_c
and sends the M_c value to the server.
The server can now compute M_cs = M_c . S_s = M_sc since they both used the same H(m) values. This allows the server and client to share a key based on the shared image.
However, what happens if the client does it’s step using the ‘wrong’ image. If 3) is to hold it should not be possible for the server to compute the key.
Client computes:
M_sc = M_s . S_c
M_c = g. H(m’) . S_c
Now server computes: M_cs = M_c . S_s = g . H(m’) . S_c . S_s
The secret shares don’t match. But if the server knows H(m’) it can compute:
M_cs’ = M_cs . inv(H(m’)) . H(m)
and this secret share will match
Normally this client side list in PSI is just used to speed up the protocol so the server does not have to do a crypto operation for every element in its set. It is not a pre-commitment from the server.
Also, maybe the way I’m doing it here is just normally broken because it is not robust against low entropy inputs to the hash function.
I've also reversed some of apple's non-public crypto that is used in some of it's services and they have made dubious design decisions in the past they have created weird weaknesses. Without knowing exactly what they are doing I would not try and infer properties that might not exist or trust their implementation.
I think it's hilarious that one of the world' great nations would scan for exactly this.
However, the difference between having a feature enabled based on the value of a seemingly-unrelated user-controlled setting, versus having that feature enabled all the time... is basically zero. Additionally, extending this feature to encompass other kinds of content is a matter of data entry, not engineering. That's the policy angle.
When you don't yet have a capability, it might take a lot of work and commitment to develop it. But on the contrary, policy can be changed with the flip of a switch.