With this much bad PR (and Apple hates bad PR), why is Apple pretty much holding its position?
For example imagine creating a new tax for 1% of purchases. People would be outraged. Now imagine raising sales tax instead by 1% (ex 7% to 8%.) Sure some people would be upset, but it would be a smaller number than the "new" tax. The reason is because people are already used to paying a sales tax. What is "normal" is more easily accepted.
If Apple can get past the initial outrage (like when sales tax was implemented in many countries in history) they can increase the surveillance once scanning local files becomes the "new normal".
It's quite simple: the culture of bureaucrats that have dominated Washington DC and its policies in the post WW2 era, they acquired a position of power the likes of which has rarely been seen in all of human history. Now, ask yourself: do you really think they're ready to give that power up? They're ready to stop treating the rest of the planet like it's their toy, to do with as they please. Then ask yourself: what do you think they're prepared to do to stave off risks to that power? The risk that they might lose their precious. And there you go, you have your answer. They're willing to do many of the same things other authoritarians have been willing to do. The US isn't Soviet Russia, that's not the suggestion; it doesn't need to be to start putting political opponents (fringe rabble rousers; whether libertarian or socialist - see: Clinton vs Sanders; that's globalist establishment vs domestic socialist) into prison and surveiling everyone in a desperate attempt to retain their power. That kind of power is an intense drug, they're addicts of the worst kind, you can tell by how they behave in regards to the rest of the world, how they treat the rest of the world.
To ensure they keep their power, to keep their globalist forever war machine (and everything that goes with it), they need to put the boot on rising domestic risks to that power.
a) it means they have to publicly admit that what they did was a bad idea, which will fuel another news cycle
b) backing out of it will get them criticized for "protecting pedophiles", maybe even the NCMEC (who privately praised them in the "screeching voices of the minority" memo) will now publicly criticize and shame them to get what it wants
c) now that they've put this idea on the table, there will be even more government pressure to mandate/implement it. Even if they back out of the implementation, just by bringing this proposal up, Apple may have just destroyed not just the privacy of their users, but of everyone.
If the problem is "We need to scan stuff on iCloud for CSAM" then "Let's build a client-side scanning agent and distribute it to hundreds of millions of devices and figure out a way to protect the hashes from the end user and then figure out a way to lock it down so it can't be used to scan other things even if we wanted to or somebody ordered us to" is a singularly (and suspiciously) inelegant solution to the problem.
Just scan the files on your own servers, like everybody else does. Anything else is rightly going to make people suspicious that you've got some ulterior motive.
Right now, they have to hand over anyone’s photo library if they are ordered to do so.
If they turn on E2E that will no longer be possible, and this will be strictly better and harder to abuse.
That doesn’t mean this mechanism isn’t offensive. It just is better from a privacy point of view for them to do this and enable E2E.
So the reasonable approach is to make clients that only upload photos that are not CP. The problem is that the implementation of that feels creepier than they anticipated.
Lets push that idea so allies in the government can go looking and void it
I think they commented because they expected a brief storm of outrage that quickly dies down, but instead it has become a growing wave that is spilling into mainstream media, with a mostly negative reaction, and threatening to completely destroy their "Privacy. That's iPhone" mantra that has been the core of their marketing campaign this year.