Both Europe and Australia back down on ‘CSAM’ scanning that would kill encryption
Both the EU and Australia have backed down on proposals to force tech companies to implement CSAM scanning within messaging apps, which would have destroyed privacy by killing end-to-end encryption (E2EE).
Clothilde Goujard for Politico:
A vote scheduled today to amend a draft law that may require WhatsApp and Signal to scan people’s pictures and links for potential child sexual abuse material was removed from European Union countries’ agenda, according to three EU diplomats.
Ambassadors in the EU Council were scheduled to decide whether to back a joint position on an EU regulation to fight child sexual abuse material (CSAM). But many EU countries including Germany, Austria, Poland, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic were expected to abstain or oppose the law over cybersecurity and privacy concerns.
“In the last hours, it appeared that the required qualified majority would just not be met,” said an EU diplomat from the Belgian presidency, which is spearheading negotiations until end June as chair of the EU Council.
Australia’s online safety regulator, eSafety, had also proposed a similar requirement for tech companies to carry out CSAM scanning on both cloud and messaging services.
However, The Guardian reports that these plans have now been diluted, with the government explicitly ruling out requiring tech giants to break E2EE.
The UK had also proposed to force companies to break E2EE. However, the government backed down after Apple said that it would withdraw iMessage from the UK rather than compromise user privacy.
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MacDailyNews Take: Victory! For now. Always be vigilant as they are likely to keep trying, probably again using the Think of the Children trojan horse.
In December 2022, after much opposition, including, voluminously, from MacDailyNews, Apple killed an effort to design an iCloud photo scanning tool for detecting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in the storage service by introducing Advanced Data Protection for iCloud, which uses end-to-end encryption to provide Apple’s highest level of cloud data security, users have the choice to further protect important iCloud data, including iCloud Backup, Photos, Notes, and more.
As we wrote previously:
This sounds wonderful at first glance (everyone’s for detecting and rooting out purveyors of child pornography) and horrible once you think about it for more than a second (massive, awful potential for misuse)… It’s a huge can of worms. It’s a backdoor, plain and simple, and it neatly negates Apple’s voluminous claims of protecting users’ privacy. It doesn’t matter what they’re scanning for, because if they can scan for one thing, they can scan for anything. – MacDailyNews, August 6, 2021
Originally, Apple would use one database of hashes from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
Then, after outcry, Apple changed their backdoor scanning to match “two or more child safety organizations operating in separate sovereign jurisdictions.”
Of course, Apple’s multi-country “safeguard” is no safeguard at all.
The Five Eyes (FVEY) is an intelligence alliance comprising the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. These countries are parties to the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence.
The FVEY further expanded their surveillance capabilities during the course of the “war on terror,” with much emphasis placed on monitoring the World Wide Web. The former NSA contractor Edward Snowden described the Five Eyes as a “supra-national intelligence organization that does not answer to the known laws of its own countries.”
Documents leaked by Snowden in 2013 revealed that the FVEY has been spying on one another’s citizens and sharing the collected information with each other in order to circumvent restrictive domestic regulations on surveillance of citizens.
Apple’s claim to backdoor scan only for CSAM was intended to be a trojan horse, introduced via the hackneyed “Think of the Children” ruse, that would be bastardized in secret for all sorts of surveillance under the guise of “safety” in the future.
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” — Benjamin Franklin
The fact that Apple ever considered this travesty in the first place, much less announced and tried to implement it in the fashion they did, has damaged the company’s reputation for protecting user privacy immensely; perhaps irreparably.
Hopefully, if Apple management has any sense whatsoever, is not hopelessly compromised, and can resist whatever pressure forced them into this ill-considered abject disloyalty to customers who value their privacy and security, the company will end this disastrous scheme promptly and double-down on privacy by finally and immediately enabling end-to-end encryption of iCloud backups as a company which claims to be a champion of privacy would have done many years ago. – MacDailyNews, December 23, 2021
(Interns: TTK! Prost, everyone! )
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