I think that’s in essence what the author is arguing, at least the outcomes are the same. The only difference is maybe none of the 3-letter agencies had to come out and explicitly say it, when Apple is perfectly competent at spotting a bone to toss.

In other words, the author thinks with Apple’s back to a wall, they only needed to make the announcement of this feature for the government to see there are advantages to apple having tight control as well. Now they’ll be able to make that very same argument in court in a public sense, but there’s always a behind the scenes sense with 3-letter agencies as well.

Granted all of that is speculation and who knows what is really driving any of this. The author does have a point that if this first step causes bad guys to move on from these services then that will be future justification to move the scanning further and further upstream to the point where it’s baked into the API’s or something. At that level, Apple would really need a “monopoly” to accomplish such a feat.

It’s certainly an interesting and creative perspective.

This could be aimed at pre-emptively de-fanging one argument against end-to-end encryption.

That’s the best case.

But even in the best case, exists then worst abuse cases. That’s the problem. This WILL be abused.

Apple's a $2 trillion company. If not even they have enough legal firepower to stand up to the three letter agencies, what possible chance does any other private citizen have. This should be a wake-up call.

It's time to start dismantling massive chunks of the intelligence community. It no longer works for the citizenry that's supposedly their bosses. (If it ever did.) It's become a power blackhole unto itself.

Even elected officials, up to POTUS, have found themselves unable to control the unelected and unaccountable fiefdoms that make up the intelligence community.

Most people want the TLAs to be going after child abusers and pedophiles. Good luck using this as your argument for dismantling them.

Similarly, many people want the TLAs to be able to go after $2T companies as well.

Do they? What behavior do they want them to go after?

I imagine the IRS for taxes

Very amusing, although these companies pay their taxes.

The problem isn’t with them, it’s with the loopholes that let them pay less than people would like.

The IRS can’t do anything.

What a messed up world we live in where money and power are the only things that matter to the people that get to make a difference. But has it not always been this way? The show must go on..

This is some guy’s theory, and they can’t even spell “anti-trust” (in the headline, no less). It’s not quite enough to lose all trust in society over.

From what I can tell he is Italian, so spelling should not be a reason to judge imo

The biggest question is who is providing the hashes? Since possession of images is illegal, it has to be the government. So we have to trust the government enough that they won’t abuse it and stick in other hashes. Same government that recommended an encryption method that they figure out how to break it.