> Personally I would not. That's a political consideration and not something I want to hear a technologist weigh in on while defending their technology.

It’s not. The abuse case flows from their architecture. Perhaps it isn’t as ‘easy’ as getting multiple countries to collude with Apple. If the architecture can be abused the way you think it can, that is a technical problem as well as a political one.

You can't solve the human-bias problem with technology. That's the whole reason Apple didn't want to build in a back door in the first place.

You may not be able to solve the bias problem altogether, but you can definitely change the threat model and who you have to trust.

Apple’s model has always involved trusting them. This model involves trusting other people in narrow ways. The architecture determines what those ways are.

Trusting Apple to not scan my device in the past was easy because as an engineer I know I would speak up if I saw that kind of thing secretly happening, and I know security researchers would speak up if they detected it.

Now Apple will scan the device and we must trust that 3rd parties will not abuse the technology by checking for other kinds of imagery such as memes critical of heads of state.

The proposed change is so much worse than the previous state of things.

> checking for other kinds of imagery such as memes critical of heads of state.

Do you live in a country where the head of state wants to check for such memes?

Probably. You underestimate humans if you don't think any of us will try to squash things that make us look bad.

Does your state not have protections against such actions?

In theory it does. Laws put in place by previous generations do require maintenance to uphold.

They do indeed.