Edward Snowden (who fled to -Russia- for his freedom, let's not forget)
speaks about the new Apple "child safety" spyware.
If you're an enterprising pedophile with a basement full of CSAM-tainted iPhones, Apple welcomes you to entirely exempt yourself from these scans by simply flipping the "Disable iCloud Photos" switch, a bypass which reveals that this system was never designed to protect children, as they would have you believe, but rather to protect their brand. As long as you keep that material off their servers, and so keep Apple out of the headlines, Apple doesn't care.
So what happens when, in a few years at the latest, a politician points that out, and—in order to protect the children—bills are passed in the legislature to prohibit this "Disable" bypass, effectively compelling Apple to scan photos that aren't backed up to iCloud? What happens when a party in India demands they start scanning for memes associated with a separatist movement? What happens when the UK demands they scan for a library of terrorist imagery? How long do we have left before the iPhone in your pocket begins quietly filing reports about encountering "extremist" political material, or about your presence at a "civil disturbance"? Or simply about your iPhone's possession of a video clip that contains, or maybe-or-maybe-not contains, a blurry image of a passer-by who resembles, according to an algorithm, "a person of interest"?
Pretty much my take on it. No one objects to Apple keeping child porn off their servers. Pretty much everyone with a functioning brain objects to a corporation filtering their photos, running facial recognition on their videos, downloading and storing files off their phone (and laptop, and PC, and iPad, and Apple-TV, and etc.) without permission, and so forth.
Apple scanning stuff I store on their iCloud is objectionable, but ultimately up to me. I make the choice if I want to send it to the cloud. If I don't want it scanned and stored forever to be used for other purposes at their convenience, I won't send it to them.
Apple scanning my phone, whether I send things to their cloud or not, that's different. Now they're screwing with my hardware, that I bought.
And let us not pretend, as Snowden says, that this intrusion will remain forever limited to child porn prevention.
That's bad enough, after all. No more pictures of your little kids, ladies and gentlemen. If it has a kid in it, a cop is liable to show up at your house. This is known as "function creep." A process whereby they need another child-porn arrest this month so they can make their budget, so they tighten up the algorithm another notch. Before long, a diaper advertisement on a billboard you drove past while taking video of the scenery is getting you a visit from the constabulary.
But function creep is a wide ranging thing. All it takes is a court order to Apple and suddenly every phone in the world gets scoured for... pretty much anything they want. Location data, photos, text files, videos, telephone conversations, game data, whatever is in there.
Currently that capability does not exist. But in September, it will.
Time to go buy a film camera for your family photos, before the inevitable price jump. It's very difficult for Apple to scan Polaroids. They have to physically come to your house.
This is why, just like I put a piece of tape on my Apple product's camera. It's harder for them to spy on you when you cover the sensor with tape.
Sarah said: "They didn't know Afghanistan, a place that is like our primordial tales where parents are served a stew of their children, a place that not only has never been civilized but relishes barbarism, would fall that fast."
Okay, you pushed my button Sarah. Here doth ensue a rant:
Can we all stop pretending these people are stupid? They're not. They are the very smartest of the smart, and they are EATING OUR LUNCH.
This fall of Saigon II is not a mistake. Not a miscalculation. Not a screw-up. It is quite deliberate. Everyone involved, for the last 20 years, knew this would happen. The Afghans knew it, the Taliban knew it, NATO knew it. They fucking well knew.
I'm not going to pretend that I knew it, but as news reports stop being able to lie their way out of this fiasco, reports keep popping up of documents and officials in and out of government who called this right from the start. They knew.
So why the surprise now? Why turn Trump's orderly and gradual withdrawal into a rout with people falling off airplanes? Because now they can pin the disaster on the doddering old man in the White House who can't find the bathroom on his own. Perfect fall guy.
Deeper issue, why let it happen at all? Because what happens in Afghanistan is not important. They don't care. As long as their gravy train keeps running and those biscuit wheels keep sopping up all that beautiful wonderful gravy, they do not give a single shit about guys falling off the outside of C-17s trying to escape the Taliban. They don't care about the world-wide reputation of the United States. They don't care about soldiers dying for nothing. They don't care if inflation drives the whole middle class into poverty, destroys your savings and fucks over the whole nation for 20 years.
Those things are not important, okay? They don't care.
And how do we know this? We know because we've seen it before! Anybody out there old enough to remember John F. fucking Kennedy playing chicken with Nikita Khrushchev over the Cuban Missile Crisis? It was revealed in his memoirs that Khrushchev turned those ships around because he finally understood that Kennedy was insane. Kennedy wasn't paying any attention to Khrushchev, he was busy positioning himself to win the coming election.
It wasn't important to Kennedy what the Soviets did. It wasn't important if a war started. It wasn't even important if nukes were launched. He didn't care. It was only the next crooked election that mattered. All those Joint Chiefs of Staff guys and the whole Cabinet knew that, and they let him do it.
Okay? That's what this really is. We are the stupid, clueless idiots who go along and let them do it.
Here endeth the rant.
Update: Support for my thesis is showing up.
Yeah. We've seen them do this shit before. They're doing it all the time now.
You really think the US Border Patrol can't secure their southern border? They can! They've just been told not to. You really think the Portland cops can't stand up against Antifa? They can! They've just been told not to.
You really think it's an accident that the USA abandoned Bagram air-force base with its fortifications and multiple landing strips because they couldn't stand up to the toothless hillbillies called the Taliban? You really think that the US military would -choose- to stage out of the single landing strip of Kabul airport? No way. This is an arrangement.
Whoever is pulling Biden's strings ordered this. I assume because they have to. I must assume this is because they're all guilty of things that will earn them the death penalty, and have nothing to lose. I think the big movers and shakers in DemocRat Washington have been doing shit that if we all knew about it, there'd be no crack deep enough for them to hide in. Pizzagate, if true, would be the least of it.