1984 SpyVeillance: Apple Adding Mandatory NeuralMatch Scanner and Full-Take Infrastructure, Pegasus

Fri Aug 27 00:54:08 PDT 2021

What, or Who, got to Tim Cook? That is the real question.

Tim Cook is gay, which implies a default interest in privacy
stance somewhat prevalent in his age-time of reference,
or implies out-gay social non-privacy communal "movement".
Is Tim Cook a gay pedophile? Are there pictures?
Is there Corporate dirt, taxes, cooperating with some "enemy",
perhaps to enable spying against unapproved US entities, or
turned Spy for foreign countries? Commie sympathizer?
What exactly is the dirt... the blackmail?
Or is the guy and corp squeaky clean, but just clueless,
an asshole, or a Stalinist dirtbag, or weak and or old and
fell down the "think of the FHOTI+" trap slope that anti-privacy
and State always slides down into more invasions? Or worse?

There is ALWAYS an angle to such assaults on privacy,
such power grabs for control. Question is... what is it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/apples-plan-think-different-about-encryption-opens-backdoor-your-private-life
https://thishashcollisionisnotporn.com/
https://www.twitter.com/elizableu/status/1424062486433648640
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_yet_it_moves
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/19/apple-csam-abuse-encryption-security-privacy-dangerous/
https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/deep-dive-end-end-encryption-how-do-public-key-encryption-systems-work
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusive/exclusive-apple-dropped-plan-for-encrypting-backups-after-fbi-complained-sources-idUSKBN1ZK1CT
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_of_Providence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQUO1DSwYN0  Craig Federighi: Face
Voice Body Language of a Lying Scheming Apologist Shill?, if so For
Who?

Anyway,
Snowden's latest take...

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/all-seeing-i

The All-Seeing "i": Apple Just Declared War On Your Privacy

Authored by Edward Snowden via Continuing Ed,

By now you've probably heard that Apple plans to push a new and
uniquely intrusive surveillance system out to many of the more than
one billion iPhones it has sold, which all run the behemoth's
proprietary, take-it-or-leave-it software. This new offensive is
tentatively slated to begin with the launch of iOS 15⁠—almost
certainly in mid-September⁠—with the devices of its US user-base
designated as the initial targets. We’re told that other countries
will be spared, but not for long.

You might have noticed that I haven’t mentioned which problem it is
that Apple is purporting to solve. Why? Because it doesn’t matter.

Having read thousands upon thousands of remarks on this growing
scandal, it has become clear to me that many understand it doesn't
matter, but few if any have been willing to actually say it. Speaking
candidly, if that’s still allowed, that’s the way it always goes when
someone of institutional significance launches a campaign to defend an
indefensible intrusion into our private spaces. They make a mad dash
to the supposed high ground, from which they speak in low, solemn
tones about their moral mission before fervently invoking the dread
spectre of the Four Horsemen of the Infopocalypse, warning that only a
dubious amulet—or suspicious software update—can save us from the most
threatening members of our species.

Suddenly, everybody with a principled objection is forced to preface
their concern with apologetic throat-clearing and the establishment of
bonafides: I lost a friend when the towers came down, however... As a
parent, I understand this is a real problem, but...

As a parent, I’m here to tell you that sometimes it doesn’t matter why
the man in the handsome suit is doing something. What matters are the
consequences.

Apple’s new system, regardless of how anyone tries to justify it, will
permanently redefine what belongs to you, and what belongs to them.

How?

The task Apple intends its new surveillance system to
perform—preventing their cloud systems from being used to store
digital contraband, in this case unlawful images uploaded by their
customers—is traditionally performed by searching their systems. While
it’s still problematic for anybody to search through a billion
people’s private files, the fact that they can only see the files you
gave them is a crucial limitation.

Now, however, that’s all set to change. Under the new design, your
phone will now perform these searches on Apple’s behalf before your
photos have even reached their iCloud servers, and—yada, yada, yada—if
enough "forbidden content" is discovered, law-enforcement will be
notified.

I intentionally wave away the technical and procedural details of
Apple’s system here, some of which are quite clever, because they,
like our man in the handsome suit, merely distract from the most
pressing fact—the fact that, in just a few weeks, Apple plans to erase
the boundary dividing which devices work for you, and which devices
work for them.

Why is this so important? Once the precedent has been set that it is
fit and proper for even a "pro-privacy" company like Apple to make
products that betray their users and owners, Apple itself will lose
all control over how that precedent is applied. As soon as the
public first came to learn of the “spyPhone” plan, experts began
investigating its technical weaknesses, and the many ways it could be
abused, primarily within the parameters of Apple’s design. Although
these valiant vulnerability-research efforts have produced compelling
evidence that the system is seriously flawed, they also seriously miss
the point: Apple gets to decide whether or not their phones will
monitor their owners’ infractions for the government, but it's the
government that gets to decide on what constitutes an infraction...
and how to handle it.

For its part, Apple says their system, in its initial, v1.0 design,
has a narrow focus: it only scrutinizes photos intended to be uploaded
to iCloud (although for 85% of its customers, that means EVERY photo),
and it does not scrutinize them beyond a simple comparison against a
database of specific examples of previously-identified child sexual
abuse material (CSAM).

If you’re an enterprising pedophile with a basement full of
CSAM-tainted iPhones, Apple welcomes you to entirely exempt yourself
from these scans by simply flipping the “Disable iCloud Photos”
switch, a bypass which reveals that this system was never designed to
protect children, as they would have you believe, but rather to
protect their brand. As long as you keep that material off their
servers, and so keep Apple out of the headlines, Apple doesn’t care.

So what happens when, in a few years at the latest, a politician
points that out, and—in order to protect the children—bills are passed
in the legislature to prohibit this "Disable" bypass, effectively
compelling Apple to scan photos that aren’t backed up to iCloud? What
happens when a party in India demands they start scanning for memes
associated with a separatist movement? What happens when the UK
demands they scan for a library of terrorist imagery? How long do we
have left before the iPhone in your pocket begins quietly filing
reports about encountering “extremist” political material, or about
your presence at a "civil disturbance"? Or simply about your iPhone's
possession of a video clip that contains, or maybe-or-maybe-not
contains, a blurry image of a passer-by who resembles, according to an
algorithm, "a person of interest"?

If Apple demonstrates the capability and willingness to continuously,
remotely search every phone for evidence of one particular type of
crime, these are questions for which they will have no answer. And yet
an answer will come—and it will come from the worst lawmakers of the
worst governments.

This is not a slippery slope. It’s a cliff.

One particular frustration for me is that I know some people at Apple,
and I even like some people at Apple—bright, principled people who
should know better. Actually, who do know better. Every security
expert in the world is screaming themselves hoarse now, imploring
Apple to stop, even those experts who in more normal circumstances
reliably argue in favor of censorship. Even some survivors of child
exploitation are against it. And yet, as the OG designer Galileo once
said, it moves.

Faced with a blistering torrent of global condemnation, Apple has
responded not by addressing any concerns or making any changes, or,
more sensibly, by just scrapping the plan altogether, but by deploying
their man-in-the-handsome-suit software chief, who resembles the
well-moisturized villain from a movie about Wall Street, to give
quotes to, yes, the Wall Street Journal about how sorry the company is
for the "confusion" it has caused, but how the public shouldn't worry:
Apple “feel[s] very good about what they’re doing.”

Neither the message nor the messenger was a mistake. Apple dispatched
its SVP-for-Software Ken doll to speak with the Journal not to protect
the company's users, but to reassure the company's investors. His role
was to create the false impression that this is not something that
you, or anyone, should be upset about. And, collaterally, his role was
to ensure this new "policy" would be associated with the face of an
Apple executive other than CEO Tim Cook, just in case the roll-out, or
the fall-out, results in a corporate beheading.

Why? Why is Apple risking so much for a CSAM-detection system that has
been denounced as “dangerous” and "easily repurposed for surveillance
and censorship" by the very computer scientists who've already put it
to the test? What could be worth the decisive shattering of the
foundational Apple idea that an iPhone belongs to the person who
carries it, rather than to the company that made it?

Apple: "Designed in California, Assembled in China, Purchased by You,
Owned by Us."

The one answer to these questions that the optimists keep coming back
to is the likelihood that Apple is doing this as a prelude to finally
switching over to “end-to-end” encryption for everything its customers
store on iCloud—something Apple had previously intended to do before
backtracking, in a dismaying display of cowardice, after the FBI
secretly complained.

For the unfamiliar, what I’m describing here as end-to-end encryption
is a somewhat complex concept, but briefly, it means that only the two
endpoints sharing a file—say, two phones on opposite sides of the
internet—are able to decrypt it. Even if the file were being stored
and served from an iCloud server in Cupertino, as far as Apple (or any
other middleman-in-a-handsome-suit) is concerned, that file is just an
indecipherable blob of random garbage: the file only becomes a text
message, a video, a photo, or whatever it is, when it is paired with a
key that’s possessed only by you and by those with whom you choose to
share it.

This is the goal of end-to-end encryption: drawing a new and
ineradicable line in the digital sand dividing your data and their
data. It allows you to trust a service provider to store your data
without granting them any ability to understand it. This would mean
that even Apple itself could no longer be expected to rummage through
your iCloud account with its grabby little raccoon hands—and therefore
could not be expected to hand it over to any government that can stamp
a sheet of paper, which is precisely why the FBI (again: secretly)
complained.

For Apple to realize this original vision would have represented a
huge improvement in the privacy of our devices, effectively delivering
the final word in a thirty year-long debate over establishing a new
industry standard—and, by extension, the new global expectation that
parties seeking access to data from a device must obtain it from that
device, rather than turning the internet and its ecosystem into a spy
machine.

Unfortunately, I am here to report that once again, the optimists are
wrong: Apple’s proposal to make their phones inform on and betray
their owners marks the dawn of a dark future, one to be written in the
blood of the political opposition of a hundred countries that will
exploit this system to the hilt. See, the day after this system goes
live, it will no longer matter whether or not Apple ever enables
end-to-end encryption, because our iPhones will be reporting their
contents before our keys are even used.

I can’t think of any other company that has so proudly, and so
publicly, distributed spyware to its own devices—and I can’t think of
a threat more dangerous to a product’s security than the mischief of
its own maker. There is no fundamental technological limit to how far
the precedent Apple is establishing can be pushed, meaning the only
restraint is Apple’s all-too-flexible company policy, something
governments understand all too well.

I would say there should be a law, but I fear it would only make things worse.

We are bearing witness to the construction of an all-seeing-i—an Eye
of Improvidence—under whose aegis every iPhone will search itself for
whatever Apple wants, or for whatever Apple is directed to want. They
are inventing a world in which every product you purchase owes its
highest loyalty to someone other than its owner.

To put it bluntly, this is not an innovation but a tragedy, a
disaster-in-the-making.

Or maybe I'm confused—or maybe I just think different.