What reason do we have to trust that the NSA won't knock on the door of apple and ask for a small expansion, as a matter of national security + here is your NDA outlining that any canary tampering will result in jail time? It's a closed system so we would have no way of knowing.
Sure, but that has nothing to do with this mechanism or this discussion.
They could have done that at any time in the past, and could do so in future.
‘NSA could force Apple to do something in secret’ is an evergreen fear just like ‘think of the children’. Such comments get added to every thread about Apple and privacy or security.
It’s one thing to have a company build and keep secret such a system from everyone, from the ground up.
It’s a different thing entirely to do a minor extension to a system that they rolled out publicly that already essentially does this!
The first one will almost certainly be noticed, and will be clearly illegal/violate contracts, and can therefore be identified and rooted out.
The second one you could do for groups of people or targeted individuals trivially and would be under the radar and probably never noticed - and could be denied unless truly rock solid evidence existed. Which would be easy to avoid existing if you used the same mechanisms (but different types of matches) you were public about - in a closed ecosystem with a Secure Enclave, for instance. It’s not like anyone is going to be able to do step-by-step instruction debugging on the code running on their iPhone!
There is a long history of this happening. Not everyone is as blatant as the stasi - and even then, no one knew who was working for them or what was tapped until the whole system collapsed and their records became public. It still took a long time to unravel.
> The first one will almost certainly be noticed, and will be clearly illegal/violate contracts, and can therefore be identified and rooted out.
Well since they have made very detailed public statements about the limits of this system and. not letting it be misused, they would certainly be in violation of contracts if they did start misusing it.
> if you used the same mechanisms (but different types of matches)
What kinds of ‘different matches’ do you think this mechanism can be used to make?
