Total surveillance through the back door: Apple's fatal fall from grace

Apple announces a kind of total surveillance for child protection with CSAM scanning, setting a fatal precedent.

 "It's an absolutely appalling idea because it will lead to distributed mass surveillance of our phones and laptops," comments security luminary Ross Anderson on Apple's latest foray into "security." Cryptography professor Matthew Green warns of a dam breaking. There's really nothing to add to that.

This is not about Apple searching for child porn on its servers and reporting it to the police. That's what all service providers like Google, Microsoft or Facebook do. It's about the fact that Apple now even wants to search for these images on the iPhones of its customers. Special search programs run secretly in the background on the devices without the owner's knowledge. Constantly and without any particular reason, for everyone. This is new. And it's frightening.

The IT group, of all people, which likes to adorn itself with the image of the defender of our privacy, is allowing itself to be harnessed to the surveillance state. The iPhone scanning for child porn involves nothing less than bugs embedded in the system that permanently search our devices for incriminating content! Exactly what they are looking for is, of course, a secret. But what can go wrong?

No, it is not enough to leave it in the dark. I'd rather list a few things that will go wrong:

1. After initially scanning only images in the cloud, the process will be extended to all content. Otherwise, the whole thing makes no sense at all.

2. The list of things to be searched for will be continuously expanded. Initially, it's child pornography - as always when you need the broadest possible consensus for new surveillance options. Then they look for terrorists, human traffickers, drug dealers, and so on and so forth. These are at least the ostensible targets. Secretly, of course, we are all being monitored - all the time.

3. States demand and get influence on the search criteria and of course access to the alarms triggered with it. So not only the USA and Germany. But also China, Russia, Hungary, Belarus, Saudi Arabia and so on. After all, a company has to comply with the law. And, of course, the manufacturer wants to continue selling its equipment.

4. Other manufacturers follow suit and build in similar functions. And at some point, this form of monitoring will even become mandatory. And why limit it to smartphones and notebooks? Why not monitor cameras and game consoles as well? The entire Internet of Things is becoming one surveillance nightmare.

5. Ways will be found to hack the search process. So targeted images or documents that are actually harmless, but still trigger a hit. And those will be foisted on people to discredit them.

Equipping our cell phones and computers with a permanent monitoring function that reports any misbehavior of any kind to the manufacturer is a terrible idea. It is a dam-breaker that will lead to unprecedented total surveillance. Anyone even considering such a thing must face massive headwinds.

That's why everyone should get behind it now:

"APPLE, DON'T DO THIS!"