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> ... because the law is fucking dumb, and my rights matter more.

If they aren't _everybody's_ rights then they aren't really your rights either. They are at best a privilege, and at worst something you have just been able to get away with (so far).

> The law can ban E2EE, cryptocurrencies, and privacy, but so long as we have some degree of technical freedom we can and will give it the middle finger.

Sure, in that scenario techies can secretly give it the middle finger right up until the authoritarian government they idly watched grow notices them.

If someone is seriously concerned about that happening, they could always consider trying to divert the government away from such disaster by participating.

> When the governments of the world demand that Apple become an arm of the dystopia, Apple will comply, and its users will have no choice but to go along with it.

Government demands of this sort are normally referred to as legal and regulatory compliance. Corporations, which are a legal concept allowed by the government, generally have to conform to continue to exist.

> Apple, knowing that it is a private company completely and utterly incapable of resisting serious government demands (ie GCBD in China) should never have developed this capability to begin with.

IMHO, having some portion of a pre-existing capability doesn't matter when you aren't legally allowed to challenge the request or answer "no".

> The point is that with a Purism phone or custom ROM on my Android phone, I could disable these "legally required" features, because the law is fucking dumb, and my rights matter more.

But if we assume a government is determined to do this, can't they find other ways to do it? If you were using Google Photos with your Purism phone, it doesn't matter what you do on your device. And you can say "well, I wouldn't use that," but maybe your ISP is convinced (or required) to do packet inspection. And then you can say, "But I'm using encryption," and the government mandates that they have a back door into all encrypted traffic that goes through their borders.

And I would submit that if we really assume a government is going to extreme lengths, then they'll make it as hard as possible to use an open phone in the first place. They'll make custom ROMs illegal. They'll go after people hosting it. They'll mandate that the phones comply with some kind of decryption standard to connect to cellular data networks. If we assume an authoritarian government bound and determined to spy on you, the assumption that we can be saved by just applying enough open source just seems pretty shaky to me.

So, I certainly don't think that a purely technological solution is enough, in the long run. This is a policy issue. I think hackers and engineers really, really want to believe that math trumps policy, but it doesn't. By all means, let's fight for strong encryption -- but let's also fight for government policy that supports it, rather than assuming encryption and open source is a guarantee we can circumvent bad policy.

> And then you can say, "But I'm using encryption," and the government mandates that they have a back door into all encrypted traffic that goes through their borders.

And then one can compromise and infect millions of such backdoored devices and start feeding (much cheaper than the government enforcement implementation) spoofed data into these systems at scale on these backdoored devices that act like "swatting as a service" and completely nullify any meaning they could get from doing this.

I'm personally really interested in router level malware + 0days on devices as distribution vectors rather than the typical c&c setup.

> They'll go after people hosting it.

Not too hard to imagine one being able to distribute such things across millions of ephemeral devices that are networked and incentivized to host it, all across the world, regardless of illegality in any particular jurisdiction. Technology enables this, without such, it wont be possible.

> I think hackers and engineers really, really want to believe that math trumps policy, but it doesn't

I don't think that at all, I think it comes down to incentives. I was listening to a talk the other day where someone mentioned that for the longest time (since at least wwII), governments pretty much had a monopoly on cryptographers and now there are lots of places/systems that are willing to pay more to apply cutting edge research.

> but let's also fight for government policy that supports it, rather than assuming encryption and open source is a guarantee we can circumvent bad policy.

Much more cheaper for an individual, with more immediate feedback mechanisms doing one vs another. One can also scale a lot faster than another esp since one is very much divorced from implementation.

> Apple, knowing that it is a private company completely and utterly incapable of resisting serious government demands (ie GCBD in China) should never have developed this capability to begin with.

You are basically arguing that an iphone be incablable of doing any function at all.

Dont want the government demanding the sent/recieved data - no data sending and recieving funcitons.

Dont want the government demanding phone call intercepts - no phone call functionality.

Dont want the government demanding the contents of the screen - no screen.

The pandoras box was opened the day someone inseted a radio chip and microphone into a device. It has been open for a very long time, this is not the moment it suddenly opened.

When the governments of the world demand that Apple become an arm of the dystopia, Apple will comply, and its users will have no choice but to go along with it.

I would argue that Apple is creating systems so they can't become an arm of the dystopia.

For example, even if a government somehow forced Apple to include non-CSAM hashes to the database, the system only uses hashes from multiple child protection agencies in different jurisdictions where the CSAM is the same.

So Apple only uses the hashes that are the same between org A, B and C and ignores the rest.

This, along with the audibility Apple recently announced and the other features makes it so there's literally nothing counties can do to force Apple to comply with some dystopian nightmare…

Of course, with potentially more open operating systems, it would be trivial by comparison for state actors to create a popular/custom ROM for Android that's backdoored.

>I would argue that Apple is creating systems so they can't become an arm of the dystopia.

For the life of me I can't see how catching child molesters is part of a dystopia.

One way to catch child molesters would be to have everyone wear a body cam at all times. Would that be dystopian enough for you?