Press

The current systems for detecting these child exploitation images rely on bulk surveillance by private companies, and even the most cursory encryption—with “exceptional access” or no—will eliminate this surveillance. If the government is serious about policy changes designed to keep this detection capability in the face of encryption, however, the best policy is not to weaken communication security but instead to mandate endpoint scanning of images as they appear on phones and computers.

Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at UC Berkeley's International Computer Science Institute, summed up much of this criticism by tweeting: “The thing that bugs me most about Apple these days is that they are all-in on the Chinese market and, as such, refuse to say something like ‘A government intent on ethnic cleansing of a minority population conducted a mass hacking attack on our users.’"

Consider the words of Serge Egelman, the director of usable security and privacy research the International Computer Science Institute, which found 1,325 malicious Android apps. "Fundamentally, consumers have very few tools and cues that they can use to reasonably control their privacy and make decisions about it," Egelman said earlier this year. "If app developers can just circumvent the system, then asking consumers for permission is relatively meaningless."

Serge Egelman, director of usable security and privacy research at ICSI, will reportedly be sharing the details of the 1,325 apps that have been gathering information without user permission at the Usenix Security conference in August.