Even if scanning for the content is not explicitly required by law, what happens when a pedophile ring hoarding thousands of images of CSAM on iCloud is busted,

Even if scanning for the content is not explicitly required by law, what happens when a pedophile ring hoarding thousands of images of CSAM on iCloud is busted, and the news gets out? The article at [1] makes it sound like Apple choosing not to scan any of its users' videos in iCloud was seen as evidence of Apple lagging behind the status quo of companies like Facebook that were proactively reporting CSAM. According to that article, in the last year Apple only submitted 265 reports to the NCEMC while Facebook submitted 20 million. Would law enforcement believe they'd be missing out on catching abusers after seeing this disparity? If a company is found to allow criminals to store CSAM on their servers for extended periods of time, the law is going to want to know why they let it pass, irrespective of the extent the company chose to scan for it. Apple probably doesn't want to deal with that fallout, so maybe they figured that being proactive about scanning for CSAM in a way that could enable the use of E2EE wouldn't hurt, and that pushing the privacy narrative would satisfy enough people - which it didn't. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/05/technology/apple-iphones-privacy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/05/technology/apple-iphones-...