[frankluntzPOLLS]

Thank you for these citations. I'm not a legal expert, but I appreciate the response. I don't know what the correct thing to do for apple or others is, but it seems like apple has far more authority than most people suspect to do things like hash checks and law enforcement notification. The general tenor of most complaints is that this is a violation of first amendment or constitutionally protected privacy rights. But I don't know if that's true, and from your response, it would seem like there is some precedent for corporations being protected in their right to act on crimes they are aware of.

[singleshot_]

Protection from liability when aware of a crime and responding accordingly; that’s exactly what 18 U.S.C. 2258A gives corporations, in the context of child sexual exploitation materials.

Sadly, I think you will find we don’t have any constitutionally protected privacy rights. We used to have some, and that’s where the protection for abortion rights came from, but the current court (at least in my interpretation) believes that interpreting the Constitution that way was a huge mistake. We still have some remnant of these rights, but as they come up for review by the Roberts court, they will be abolished one by one until they run out of time or we run out of patience with them and enshrine these rights in statutes.

But I think when you say privacy rights you mean “fourth amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure” and insofar as that’s the case, I agree with you: Apple has a lot more power to violate these rights than most people think, because they have smart lawyers who have advised them exactly how much leeway they have before they become “state actors”; their software stops just shy of that point.

I think one thing that’s important to remember is that Apple has a lot of power but only because we give it to them. All you have to do to avoid this hash scanning nonsense forever is just throw away your iPhone. (The problem is, at least for me, I’m not ready to do that).