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Comment by 2Gkashmiri | Hacker News Reader

welp. i am no iphone user, nor a dev. just a random guy trying to wrap my head around the concept of this trojan horse of "CSAM" which WILL be used by tyrants and crony governments to spy and persecute their citizens and apple will "have to obey the law", something they had no business interfering with the rights of customers earlier, now they are active participants.

How much do you want to bet google will bring something similar to this to "keep up with the industry demands and partners requests". That would be the day either i go full lineageOS if they decide to not join the party or a dumb flip phone for ever. i will not subject myself to this because i know the government "WILL" hunt me down for being a dissident.

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Google already implemented much the same thing many years ago. Apple is playing catch-up.

Google and every other cloud storage provider has been scanning images that you upload to their servers. This is perfectly justified, since they would be legally and morally accomplices to whatever illegal thing you were doing. But scanning someone's locally stored images on a device that they own is a completely different situation.

It's the difference between the airport checking my luggage for illegal drugs and the police showing up at every person's house once in a while to check if any drugs happen to be on the premises.

> But scanning someone's locally stored images on a device that they own is a completely different situation.

They're only scanning photos that you upload them to iCloud Photos - this is not (currently) a blanket "we'll scan all your local photos whenever" situation.

> It's the difference between the airport checking my luggage for illegal drugs

... and FedEx/UPS checking your outgoing packages for drugs.

>... and FedEx/UPS checking your outgoing packages for drugs.

Interesting USPS isn't mentioned there. Another example of 4th Amendment workarounds through private industry? Or are you just not aware of what the USPS equivalent program would be?

Genuinely curious.

USPS x-rays many packages - I’d venture almost all of them shipped from a major population center.

Lead foil is a thing.

https://www.amazon.com/lead-foil/s?k=lead+foil

This looks like a good way to get a package marked as suspicious, and suspicious packages have their contents searched.

Until you DDoS the inspection framework. turns out the material is pretty cheap! Heck, I can pay for you to return the lead foil wrapping to be "environmentally conscious by taking on the onus for packaging recycling!" Doubling my in-flight noise ratio, and generating good press.

You have to think big. You need people to open a package, inspect, and reseal it.

I can make a dropshipping business, turn a profit, and swamp your unboxers to the point you stop trying. I'm not out to do that, so I wouldn't bother, but there are ways, and you'll be surprised the hijinks you can get up to when adversarial attack of infrastructure or process is done right. Quite a lot of modern systems that just werk do so because on the whole, people don't spend much time being dicks. Unfortunately, my brain seems to have a part that enjoys the challenge in its idle time.

Measuring is hard. Especially when someone has their hand on the "noise" dial.

This is quite off-topic from the fourth amendment workaround originally insinuated. I agree modern society depends on trust more than one may expect or wish. DDoSing the USPS to prove it doesn’t seem like a very pro-social idea, and I do like society.

> It's the difference between the airport checking my luggage for illegal drugs and the police showing up at every person's house once in a while to check if any drugs happen to be on the premises.

Actually, you're right. That's exactly what it's like. The former is how your Government routinely invades your privacy; the latter is an unequivocal violation of the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution.

As it is with on-cloud versus on-device scanning. If Apple were compelled by the US Government to expand the on-device scanning to search for anything, that too would be an unequivocal Fourth Amendment violation.

Whereas any scanning that occurs on the cloud is not subject to Fourth Amendment protection. It's excepted under the so-called "third party doctrine", which effectively means the Government can rifle through whatever they want for any reason.

Do you have a link?

They have been scanning Gmail for a while using this, as nearly every provider does : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhotoDNA

From what I can tell, that is not used on Android or user devices though. So it's not the same thing as what Apple is doing.

Yes what Apple does is slightly different technically : they run a network on device, then when you upload the picture to their Cloud services, they attach the hash generated to the picture.

It's only on their servers that they will do the check against the database of CSAM content. So in that sense, it's pretty much the same that what other providers do, it remains attached to their online service, and they check the hash against the database instead of checking the picture (as others do).

If you don't use their iCloud service, the hash is never checked.

I still don't think having the client as part of the system is a good thing, but in terms of abuse it's about the same thing.

What Apple's system allow is a way to do a check while keeping the data encrypted in some 3rd party service. That part certainly raises questions should it be extended.

Thanks, that makes sense!

Is this counts?

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tip-from-google-leads-to-texas-...

From the article:

> "He was trying to get around getting caught, he was trying to keep it inside his email," said Detective David Nettles of the Houston Metro Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce reports the station. "I can't see that information, I can't see that photo, but Google can."

"email" here is presumably Gmail, which Google owns and is responsible for. The dude was storing illegal data on Google servers in plain form. His personal devices were only checked by LEOs after a warrant was issued. Definitely not the same as Apple scanning the images on your device (not their servers).

IIRC, Apple will only scans if iCloud photo is enabled:

https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/Expanded_Protections_...

> This feature only impacts users who have chosen to use iCloud Photos to store their photos.

This is a red herring. It wouldn't need to happen on device then, because iCloud Photos are not end to end encrypted and Apple can scan them on the server side today and achieve the same result.

The only reason to scan clientside for a cloud service is to scan files that are not uploaded, or are end to end encrypted.

Apple already maintains an e2e backdoor (in the form of non e2e iCloud Backup) for the FBI and US intelligence agencies. It is extremely unlikely that they will e2e encrypt iCloud Photos.

I think you just hit on exactly what the plan probably was. I suspect this was the first step in making iCloud photos (not backup) E2E encrypted.

I suppose had they not gone down this road, the headlines would have been "Apple makes it easier to share child porn online".

I said unlikely: they maintain an e2e backdoor in iCloud Backup. Technically, e2e encrypting iCloud Photos at this point would be a no-op as Apple is already escrowing the device e2e keys in the backup (eg for iMessage).

I doubt they'd bother doing e2e for iCloud Photos if they're intentionally not doing it for iCloud Backup.

> Apple is already escrowing the device e2e keys in the backup

Citation? I don't believe this is correct, or at least it's an incomplete assertion.

Assuming they do get with the iCloud backup, these keys would be inside the device's Keychain file which is encrypted at rest by the Secure Enclave. Thus even with access to a full, unencrypted backup of your iPhone, the keychain itself cannot be decrypted by Apple

(It can't be decrypted by you either, if it's restored to different hardware. This is why iCloud Keychain exists. And that is end-to-end encrypted.)

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