Isn't that no greater risk than the status quo, though? Apple already has all these photos uploaded to their servers and knows the keys as iCloud Photos isn't

Isn't that no greater risk than the status quo, though? Apple already has all these photos uploaded to their servers and knows the keys as iCloud Photos isn't end-to-end encrypted, so if a government can coerce them into cooperating with running scans like that, this new system doesn't seem to make any difference. (If the argument is that they can be coerced into changing the new system to scan non-uploaded photos and reporting them outside of the iCloud Photos upload process... that's a threat that applies just as much to every phone. It's an argument for not trusting any OS that you didn't compile from source yourself.) That is to say, it takes this away from the threat the article is presenting as "governments could sneakily use Apple's system to find dissidents despite Apple's best intentions" and into "governments could use the law to make Apple do things".