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Comment by atlgator | Hacker News Reader

> A foreign government could, for example, compel a service to out people sharing disfavored political speech. That's no hypothetical: WeChat, the popular Chinese messaging app, already uses content matching to identify dissident material. India enacted rules this year that could require pre-screening content critical of government policy. Russia recently fined Google, Facebook and Twitter for not removing pro-democracy protest materials.

This sums up the concern. CSAM is just the excuse because who would come out against protecting children, right? But this will absolutely be used for political purposes.

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> pre-screening

Pre-screening would be the kind way of implementing this feature. They could make it so if CSAM is detected, just don't upload those files to the cloud and delete them locally. Then they are still doing due-diligence to prevent that material from entering their cloud and to remove that material from circulation, but they don't get random people arrested for false positives. When they detect hash matches on a device, they are under zero legal obligation to do anything about it because it could easily be a false positive (as the public has demonstrated on HN and elsewhere), so they'd be in the clear with this approach. This will have the effect they desire without pissing tons of people off.

Instead they have taken the aggressive stance of manual review + tipping off law enforcement, which goes against their entire mantra of protecting privacy. Your phone will now be an informant against you. If you are an activist or a whistleblower, a false positive could be enough to get your device searched and seized.

@sam0x17, are you aware of this finding?:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

> Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.

Especially the part with "policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans" made me think that it is not only those elites who do this or businesses. Does this mean that the government (NSA) doesn't care what we want? They are allowed to essentially patronize us because we do not know any better? Can you explain to me why the NSA is spying on us despite it being unpopular? We didn't ask to be spied on, right? I don't understand politics or the role of government anymore. I am utterly confused. Politics is so contradictory I cannot wrap my head around it. Or perhaps, I am missing something?

I think the practical effect, if not intended design purpose, of a republic is to launder responsibility. To create a layer of indirection and uncertainty between the people who have power and the popular perception of who to hold accountable. The wealthy write the rules and use politicians as patsies. In return for their service to the elite, politicians are offered some privileges and a degree of protection from the angry mobs. The mobs are made to believe that the most effective way to effect change is to vote in new politicians, allowing the old ones to peacefully retire. The economic elite rest easy, knowing the new politicians will serve their interests just as the old ones did.

Sometimes a renegade politician who earnestly has the interests of the common people gets voted into power, but the 'damage' such a renegade can do is regulated by term limits (and sometimes assassination: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracchi) Other times, the public believe they are voting for such a renegade, but accidentally empower a tyrant who aims to usurp the elite and have true power for himself. But by in large, a republic regulates the system, maintaining the status quo to the benefit of those who already have power in the status quo.

> Sometimes a renegade politician who earnestly has the interests of the common people gets voted into power, but the 'damage' such a renegade can do is regulated by term limits

Interesting to view the term limit, as a way to protect the wealthy from the public

To be fair, term limits also protect the public from whatever tyrants they might accidentally vote into power. But this too has the effect of stabilizing the status quo, which benefits those who like the status quo the most (the wealthy.)

> term limits also protect the public from whatever tyrants they might accidentally vote into power

Yes, and "everyone" is aware about that, so that is not interesting :-)

Yes I completely agree with this analysis. The only solution in my opinion is to elect leaders willing to dismantle this structure a bit, i.e. there are a number of senators and house members on the far left (and probably even on the right) that would vote for a bill that sets a per-entity yearly political donation cap at $500 if given the chance (meaning an individual or a corporation can only donate $500 per candidate per year). Centrists would never do this because they get tons of corporate money, but if we remove the incentives completely through legislation, we'd probably see a much less corrupt governmental structure at the end of the day.

The NSA's mandate concerns sigint, so that's what they do. Other entities (eg the PCLOB and federal courts) can constrain it, and the NSA constrains itself proactively to avoid embarrassments. The current result is a tradeoff between surveillance/security and privacy: NSA policy is that they can listen to foreign suspects' conversations, including if Americans are on the call. Metadata is collected on calls two "hops" from a suspect. Whether it's the right tradeoff is an interesting debate.

The more I think about it, something that concerns me greatly is the silent use of this for political purposes.

By silent I mean they don't arrest you or put you on any public lists. Instead they just gather information, lots of information, and they use it in future Cambridge Analytica style propaganda campaigns.

I don't mean to imply that only Republicans would do this. After Trump's successful use of this kind of political propaganda every single political party and PR agency on the planet is working on duplicating it.

Arresting people is old fashioned. Modern totalitarianism is built on disinformation, microtargeted propaganda, surveillance, and nudge theory.

What makes us better than China then? Our relative freedoms? What can we do about it?

Princeton also did a study on America not being actually a democracy. I shared it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28249091

Sorry for the off-topic question, but I've been wondering for a while and have been too afraid to ask: what does the green name signify here?

It means they're a newly registered user. (Not sure of the exact threshold, around a few days to a week.)

Nothing makes a country better than another, in absolute. Although, some aspects of life may be more enjoyable in one or another, depending on your taste.

I think most of us can agree living in an abundance of resources (waste!) with some mild political freedom where you're allowed to say anything as long as you don't try to change anything (see: COINTELPRO, Julian Assange, etc) like in the Global North, is more pleasant to live on a daily basis than a hunger-ridden autocracy like North Korea. But even that is debatable and i'm sure many north koreans would disagree.

What can we do about it? Attack the system, day by day and bits by bits. Steal what you can from the rich to redistribute to the poor. Make cooperatives, whether as employees or volunteers, so that more and more people can quit wage exploitation and start to live again, "from each according to their capabilities, to each according to their needs" (old anarchist saying). Form collectives for all kinds of struggles affecting you and your loved ones: anti-patriarchy, anti-racism, accessibility...

Don't accept anyone claiming they're above you. We're all in this together, and those who claim to seek authority to find solutions will create more problems than they will solve, no matter their good intentions. We need to build "power to the people", not "power over the people", as anyone who has studied some history of political repression in the early Soviet Union (and other "dictatorships of the proletariat") can learn. See also Emma Goldman's "Trotsky protests too much" or "There is no communism in Russia" on this topic.

Organize. Organize. Organize.

This event here marks the end of privacy as a right. It’s over.

Privacy can only be maintained by policies and regulation, not by technology. This hashing and scanning client-side, broken as it might be, is merely a technology. Technology to ensure privacy, as established by corporations, can always be legally circumvented by governments and what they allow or require by policy for their region, if said government is part of a large enough market that companies have to pay attention to it. Therefore the only solution is global agreement to privacy as a human right… and that seems unlikely right now. Runner up would be individual alternative apps for privacy (such as a camera app) but those can be banned by policy depending on the region you’re in, or potentially subject to the same rules/policies. In a democracy, if you disagree, your only option is talking to lawmakers, those who decide on policy. But again, it would likely only affect your region…

Apple brand is privacy against other companies competing with them. Apple has always had privacy concerns.

It's been over for a long while for the average consumer

This is definitely false. You can relatively easily live with privacy. It just takes a little bit of effort. It's over if you don't care and take no action.

The average consumer is largely unaware that they've lost their privacy and if they are aware they mostly fail to grasp the severity.

The average consumer already doesn't care and has taken no action.

Apple's system doesn't match content.

You can do stuff like listing top K trending anti gov memes past day and blacklisting them. Thats definitely a content.

You cannot, because the models are shipped the OS image. Apple would have to publish a new OS update every day new memes come out.

If you're talking about photo library scanning, people would have to be saving the memes to their photo libraries, cloud syncing would have to be on, and they would have to save lots of them.

If you're talking about using the iMessage content scanning, this only applies to under-13 accounts, and it only notifies parents associated with the account.

If you are suggesting that Apple would be compelled to modify either of these to do something else, why would they bother with these, which are built with many constraints and multiple levels of failsafes, rather than just implement a new feature? Governments could ban end-to-end encrypted chat like iMessage. They could demand the next iOS update uploads your saved social media passwords to them. It's not very plausible that anyone would want to modify _these_ features rather than just implement something more direct and harder to evade.

Governments could make these demands at any point. They do not need to wait for this feature and then spring into action. The Chinese government did regarding where iCloud data is hosted for its citizens. The US government did regarding the San Bernardino iPhone case, and Apple fought back very publicly in court that any kind of modification of the OS was unacceptable.

The image saving is migrated by using apps that autosave received images by default. I.E WhatsApp.

sed -i "s/day/month/" parent

You think Apple will have people downloading an OS update every day?

You think old memes are never reused?

What are you saying? That regular iOS updates will never update the database used for matching?

But it can still locate the originator which is the problem.

This sounds the same as claiming that biometric fingerprint devices don't match user's fingerprints, they just match vectors.

It seems apple devices are a black opaque box: support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 Every thing is encrypted except imap email storage. They have no access to anything except that. They can't do anyting with any data except imap emails stored on their server.

The governments want them to do some thing preventing CSAM, so now they can match a perceptual hash--not content--to known images from an non-governmental organization. That is about the minimum invasive CSAM prevention anybody can do.

Can someone suggest an alternative CSAM prevention which is less intrusive?

It seems the alternative would be to continue to be a black opaque box, or NOT encrypt you photos and rumage through them.

They _can_ rummage through your photos. They are encrypted in transit and on the server but with a key that they have access to.

If it's not explicitly listed in the end-to-end encryption section then assume Apple can access it.

From https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 >End-to-end encryption provides the highest level of data security. Your data is protected with a key derived from information unique to your device, combined with your device passcode, which only you know. No one else can access or read this data.

So messages are opaque but photos are not?

Read the next line: "These features and their data are transmitted and stored in iCloud using end-to-end encryption:"

Notice the absence of photos from the list that follows?

> So messages are opaque but photos are not?

Yes. Unless you use iCloud backup, in which case your key is included in the backup and technically even your messages could be accessed.

The reason I think Apple went forward with it though is that, from their perspective, it's not like they are building a new tool for surveillance. It doesn't take many brain cells for a lawmaker to realize that they could mandate pre-screening of content.

From Apple's perspective... for authoritarian governments like China or India... they are already able to mandate it and are likely to. So they shouldn't be factored into the "CSAM Scanning could be abused!" argument because it was already happening and going to happen, whether the tool exists or not.

In which case, releasing the CSAM tool has only benefits for the abused and doesn't make a difference in preventing surveillance and privacy invasions because it was already going to occur. A cynical view but a possibility.

I don't understand this logic, why would authoritarian governments need to fake political dissident material as child porn for matching? The examples you quoted directly invalidate this argument. The authoritarian governments can directly ban political dissident materials, and they don't need child porn as the excuse.

Because the real concern isn’t that; it’s something like Apple vs FBI where the fact that Apple didn’t have a capability built have them a legal edge against a government with stronger rule of law.

iMessage is E2E-encrypted; the only scanning of the content of the network a state adversary can do is by getting Apple to implement it for them, into the iMessage client.

And Apple until now have had the excuse for not doing so, that they have no mechanism built into iMessage that would or could scan for such things, nor (as the excuse would go) is such a technology likely to be either “feasible” given the E2E-encrypted nature of the communications, or “palatable” to their audience (i.e. an argument like “people buy the iDevices in part because of advertised privacy benefits, so such state-level intrusions would lead to nobody buying iDevices, so nobody would be caught by this scheme anyway, so all you’re really doing by asking us to implement it is trying to destroy our company’s share price, probably to help your domestic phone market—and our government wouldn’t take kindly to that kind of market interference. So if you don’t want to be slapped with even more Huawei-like trade sanctions, kindly go away.”)

The implementation of a CSAM scanner is a clear feasibility proof for the set of technologically-equivalent capabilities (e.g. dissident-material scanning.) The fact that Apple have implemented it, and that their users have accepted it and continued to use their iDevices, means Apple has no leg to stand on when denying governments the implementation of technological enforcement for “banning political dissident materials.”

iMessage does not use the CSAM scanner, only the upload to iCloud Photos does.

The iMessage feature is a local porn-ish detector on sent/received images with a click-through. It is only for children on family accounts, and if the child is under 13 a click-through is reported to the parent.

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