[simonh]

>Apple's content review change is explicitly FOR reporting people to police in a way that can be expanded beyond it's currently set purpose (child porn) later.

I think it would be very hard to expand this beyond it's currently intended purpose, for the reasons I've given. It's terrible for identifying dissidents because it only catches them if they upload to iCloud servers. Dissidents are much more likely to be tech savvy than random child molesters. The reports have to go through Apple, and don't go directly to the cops. Also it's a global image profile list so it's not possible to keep country specific updates secret.

An effctive surveillance mechanism would need to change all of these.

[Nicksil]

>It's terrible for identifying dissidents because it only catches them if they upload to iCloud servers.

This is a configuration change. Without knowing the implementation, I'd bet a lunch that, for the time-being, the reason this thing is executed only upon upload to iCloud is because there's some simple business logic buried in there telling it to do so.

>Dissidents are much more likely to be tech savvy than random child molesters.

This is a curious argument. You didn't explain why you think this might be. What is it about a dissident that makes him or her more savvy than some random child molester?

>An effctive surveillance mechanism would need to change all of these.

If true, the obstacles you outlined are trivial to overcome.

[simonh]

>This is a configuration change.

Not it isn't, the check is built into the upload client, they'd have to implement an on-device storage scanning mechanism. That's a different type of system implemented in a different kind of service.

Not that doing that is hard at all, it's not rocket science and they already have full-system indexing and search, but that's also why this isn't a significant step down any kind of technical slippery slope. The problem here is legislative, not technical.