Can someone explain how Apple being coaxed or coerced into searching all of our personal devices for illegal files by federal law enforcement is not an unconstitutional warrantless search?
Law Enforcement can also get access to that metadata -- it's called a mail cover. See U.S. v. Choate.
"A mail cover is a surveillance of an addressee's mail conducted by postal employees at the request of law enforcement officials. While not expressly permitted by federal statute, a mail cover is authorized by postal regulations in the interest of national security and crime prevention, and permits the recording of all information appearing on the outside cover of all classes of mail."
This cuts both ways. Our laws not evolving with technology is also the reason why tapping and intercepting secured digital communication is orders of magnitude more difficult than tapping someone's analog phone line, or why decrypting a hard drive is far more difficult for the police than sawing apart a safe.
Agreed. Technology has allowed abusive images to thrive and reach new consumers. Any pressure to "evolve laws with technology" will surely lead to more draconian anti-privacy measures.
probably depends more on the kind of old lawyer. I've actually noticed that in general older people tend to be more privacy conscious than younger ones. Old people at least still know what secrecy of correspondence even is. It's not even a concept that exists any more for a lot of gen z.
In particular American supreme court arguments often stand out to me in how clearly the judges manage to connect old principles to newer technologies.
Meanwhile, it's predominantly young people who freely hand their information to mega-corps to be disseminated and distributed. Outside your (our) bubble young people don't give two craps about privacy.
It has nothing to do with them being "old". Saying that is a very ageist thing to say. I know a bunch of old techies who are completely against this. It's about lack of technical knowledge and how this is being twisted to seem okay. Your average millennial doesn't give a damn about it either.
They aren't being coaxed or coerced. If they were forced-- or even incentivized-- by the government to perform these searches than they'd be subject to the fourth amendment protecting against warrantless searches.
Apple is engaging in this activity of their own free will for sake of their own commercial gain and are not being incentivized or coerced by the government in any way.
As such, the warrantless search of the customer data is lawful by virtue of the customer's agreements with Apple.
> Apple is engaging in this activity of their own free will for sake of their own commercial gain and are not being incentivized or coerced by the government in any way.
Honest question: how do you know this, for sure? Or is your comment supposed to be read as an allegation phrased as fact?
I'm assuming you're kidding here, but if you look at the list of countries already selling/supporting iPhones, what's not on the US export ban list that's a totalitarian regime?
My money is this is secretly about nuclear, bio, chemical or other WMD or “dangerous” material. I can’t imagine that Apple would be so stupid to open such a Pandora’s box to an Orwellian state and crimes against all children in the name of making no statistical difference in the porn problem. There has got to be a hidden story here and severe pressure on top executives, otherwise I can’t see how the math makes sense. Please keep digging, journalists!
It's most likely a demand by China so that they can create an infrastructure to locate political dissidents. Oh look, a Winnie the Pooh Xi meme ended up in your gallery/inbox. Why is there a knock at the door? I'm pretty sure thats the real reason.
My ears perk up whenever I hear a "Just think of the Children" argument because after Sandy Hook, I'm pretty certain the US could careless about children. There's a real reason behind this.
Whenever someone makes a "think of the children" argument it has absolutely nothing to do with whether they actually care about children. They just want to make it extremely difficult to counter-argue without being labelled as pedophile adjacent. It is a completely disingenuous argument 99% of the time it is used.
I feel like there’s a fallacy for this but I’m not sure. Either way doesn’t matter the logic here isn’t that the US could careless about children , it’s that the US cares more about Gun rights than it does children , but that doesn’t say anything about the minimum level of care they have , only the maximum.
I don't know about the suggestion that it's the government of China pushing for the feature itself, but the fact the feature now exists and WILL be used by authoritarian regimes to scan for political content is clearly understood by Apple employees. From the article:
> Apple employees have flooded an Apple internal Slack channel with more than 800 messages on the plan announced a week ago, workers who asked not to be identified told Reuters. Many expressed worries that the feature could be exploited by repressive governments looking to find other material for censorship or arrests, according to workers who saw the days-long thread.
Apple isn't being pressured from China, but criticizing the CCP as the brutal dictatorship it is is not racist (and that idea is done verbatim CCP propaganda).
Randomly suggesting that every authoritarian decision taken unilaterally by an american company was made to please the evil chinese government while offering no substantial proof is not "criticizing the CCP", it is just shoehorning US's far-right talking points into a thread that has nothing to do with it.
The wording of the CSAM law is that content should be scanned when uploaded. That condition "upon upload" triggers the 3rd party doctrine.
Apple has gone above and beyond here, not the actual US gov. So, the bill of rights doesn't apply to Apple's decision to scan content on device, just before it is uploaded.
Any chance you have a good link explaining this? I saw the parent comment earlier and wanted to add this. But I only recently learned that the US federal government cannot require or incentivize providers to scan user's private documents, so didn't want to post without clear sources.
Apple hasn't gone above and beyond anything here. The only way they can save face is laugh at the government and not give into their demands to set up a backdoor tool to scan every iphone user.
"The third-party doctrine is a United States legal doctrine that holds that people who voluntarily give information to third parties—such as banks, phone companies, internet service providers (ISPs), and e-mail servers—have "no reasonable expectation of privacy.""
Because it's a contract between you and apple. You don't have to use their phones and they're a corp not the government. Personally I see it as an underhanded attempt for the government to use apple as a police force in everything but actually deputizing them. They're using a loop hole in the 4th amendment to spy on you without a warrant.
As I understand, they're acting as an agent of the government, it's a private company. So, the 4th amendment protecting against unreasonable searches _by the government_ does not apply.
Acting as a agent, used to anyway, mean the 4th amendment attached to the company
if they WERE NOT acting as an agent then the 4th would not apply. I think they way they get around that is not do not report to the FBI but instead to NCMEC a "non-profit"
> I think they way they get around that is not do not report to the FBI but instead to NCMEC a "non-profit"
No. The courts have already explicitly rejected the entity that NCMEC is a private entity. NCMEC can only handle child porn via special legislative permission and is 99% funded by the government.
The searches here are lawful because Apple searches out of their own free will and commercial interest and when there is something detected their employees search your private communications (which the EULA permits).
This is also why Apple must review the matches before reporting them-- if they just matched an NCMEC database and blindly forwarded then to NCMEC then it would be the NCMEC conducting the search and a warrant would be required.
Reporting to the government doesn't make you a government agent, doing the search at the direction of the government does.
If a private citizen, on their own initiative, searches your house, finds contraband, and reports it to the government, they may be guilty of a variety of torts and crimes (both civil and criminal trespass, among others, are possibilities), there is no fourth amendment violation.
If a police officer asks them to do it, though, there is a different story.
> No, the Fourth Amendment applies to private actors acting on behalf of the government.
It applies to private actors acting as agents of the government, it doesn't apply to private actors who for private reasons not directed by the government conduct searches and report suspicious results to the government (other property and privacy laws might, though.)
Why stop there? Instead of getting pesky warrants to search apartments, the government could just contract the landlord to do the search for them. After all, the landlord owns the property and ownership trumps every other consideration in libertarian fantasy-land.
Because for the last at least 80 years the constitution as not been seen as a document limiting government power, but instead as a document limiting the peoples rights
it has literally been inverted from it original purpose
> Constitutional rights can be voluntarily waived.
That...varies. The right to a speedy trial can be waived. The right against enslavement cannot. You can consent to a warrantless or otherwise unreasonable search given adequate specificity, but outside of a condition for release from otherwise-constitutional more severe deprivation of liberty (e.g., parole from prison) I don't think it can be generally waived in advance, only searches specifically and immediately consented to when being executed. But I don't have any particular cases in mind, and that understanding could be wrong. But “constitutional rights can be waived” is definitely way to broad to be a good useful guide for resolving specific isssues.
You can definitely consent to giving up the right to not be subject to warrantless search and seizure. Everyone who ever joins the military under UCMJ allows their commander to conduct random inspections of personal property at any unannounced time.
There are limitations, of course. If you live off-post in private housing, your commander has no legal authority to inspect it. They can only go through your stuff if you live in government-owned housing.
That's not a waiver, that's a space warrantless searches are reasonable under the fourth amendment and Congress’ Art. I, Sec. 8 powers with regard to the military, etc. Otherwise, when we had conscription, conscripts, who do not freely consent, would have been immune.
It's not, but it's one of the few that doesn't have some verbiage along the lines of UDHR:
"In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society."
You can bet they were by the TLA intel agencies, but you will not find that documented anywhere other than "Met with FBI/NSA/XXX for liason purposes". I'm sure they were given an ultimatum and they folded.
