11 ms·

Bugs in our pockets: the risks of client-side scanning

204 points by azalemeth 5y ago

flerchin 5y ago
It's not their device to scan.
- jt_thurs_82 5y ago
  According to the TOS and their enforced end to end control of binaries and user actions, it is. Oops.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  While I don't like client-side scanning, that's overly reductive. "Client side scanning" (both in general, and in the recent Apple kerfuffle) is talking about a network client, that will be talking to servers that are owned by "them." If they wish to enforce rules over what is stored on their server then to enforce that right, the only two choices are to disallow E2EE or to perform client-side scanning. Really client-side scanning is only up for debate when E2EE is used. The Javascript that checks validity of forms before you submit them is a form of client-side scanning, but most of the time[1] nobody cares because it's data that you intend to send to the server anyways. 1: Inadvertent pastes into fields that phone-home for e.g. autocomplete can reveal otherwise private information, so "most of the time"
  - dylan604 5y ago
    Client side scanning of inappropriate pictures is of content you'd ordinarily be sending them as anyways as well. The proposal was only to do this if cloud services were/are enabled.
    - haswell 5y ago
      A significant number of concerns aren't about the feature as proposed by Apple, but the slippery slope it creates.
      - fsflover 5y ago
        More about this slippery slope: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28309202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28309202.
      - GekkePrutser 5y ago
        True but slippery slopes are simply a thing. Like the Overton window. Every move takes a step further and moves something else from ridiculous into feasible. And personally, I know this won't affect me. I don't own such content. I don't use the cloud without encryption first (thanks Cryptomator). However I just hate the feeling of my own phone constantly looking over my shoulder on someone else's behalf. Is that so weird?
        haswell 5y ago
        I think we're saying the same thing. 100% agree here. I think (hope) the vast majority of folks wouldn't be affected by the proposal. But the backlash against it has been justified for exactly the reasons you outline.
    - inetknght 5y ago
      > Client side scanning of inappropriate pictures is of content you'd ordinarily be sending them as anyways as well. The proposal was only to do this if cloud services were/are enabled. I have an iPhone. The Photos app keeps telling me that it's unable to upload things to iCloud because my account is full. I never turned it on. I never intended to upload any photos to the cloud. I haven't signed into my iCloud account for years because I don't use it. Nonetheless, iCloud has a magical way of uploading things to something that I've literally never used. Next you'll be arguing that people using Windows should have simply turned off online logins if they didn't want their Windows computer to phone home. Bullshit, Microsoft shoves that shit down people's throats. So your statement of "you'd ordinarily be sending them as anyways as well" is ludicrous. That's deliberately burying your head into he sand against the fact that big business sets defaults to settings that users often have no idea were set or are buried behind huge warnings against turning them off.
      - dylan604 5y ago
        I've had an iDevice since 2007. I've never signed up for the paid iCloud. I get the standard 5GB plan that all Apple accounts receive. I have never accidentally uploaded a photo to it. I have never enabled it. I don't understand how your situation happens as it has never happened to me. It makes no sense other than someone (maybe you forgot, a significant other, a kid) played around with some settings? There's no other explanation that makes sense to me.
        inetknght 5y ago
        There's nothing better than knowing everything and never having to play around with settings to discover what they do, never forgetting what you've set your settings to, and not having children, family members, or friends do the same. There's no way any reasonable person could ever have their uploads accidentally turned on without their full knowledge and consent so that definitely invalidates any reason to argue against the idea that client-side scanning is unreasonable because it only happens to things that you wanted to upload anyway. There's definitely no way a new version could patch your system and turn something on without your knowledge. No, there's absolutely never been a situation where some new setting has shown up and you didn't know what it does or inspected what it was set to by default. And there's absolutely no way you could have restored a backup and not had all of your settings transfer over correctly. No, there's no way you'll ever turn the setting on and forget that it's on when you plug your device into some network. And you know you will never be the victim of any malicious activity that could screw you over in some way. You've never had some app automatically connect to something that you didn't know it could even connect to. You'll never have someone else pick up your phone and take random pictures or recordings that you don't know about because those would never get automatically uploaded because, of course, you didn't turn on that setting for yourself. You'll never have to worry about your battery going low because you turned on automatic uploads and not only did your upload happen but your device also scanned your uploads too. You never use your phone for work because your work definitely pays for a new device for you to use for work. Gosh it sure is weird hat so many people don't want client-side scanning. Scanning your device before uploading anything is just a very reasonable thing to do. /s
  - a1369209993 5y ago
    > If they wish to enforce rules over what is stored on their server The whole point of end-to-end encryption is that what is stored on their server is statistically uniform binary white noise. If they wish to enforce that, there are a plethora of server-side tools (like the Diehard test suite) with which to do so.
    - Shish2k 5y ago
      You are completely correct from a computer science perspective - unfortunately, this is not a computer science discussion. As far as the FBI are concerned, “storing encrypted child porn on behalf of people with the keys to decrypt it” still counts as “storing child porn”. You can disagree with that (and there are many good reasons to do so) - but “it’s encrypted so it’s fine” isn’t going to convince anybody who matters.
      - mulmen 5y ago
        This is the part where we need laws to protect privacy. This is arguably an overreach by the FBI in the first place and if it is legal it shouldn’t be.
        lazide 5y ago
        Since Congress folks seem happy to threaten Apple too with changing the law to do what the FBI wants, I wouldn’t assume it would go the way you are thinking it will.
      - aidenn0 5y ago
        It's not even the just FBI; if the majority of your competitors claim to prevent child-porn from being stored on their servers and you don't, the reputational damage is real. Apple doesn't want to be the "Child Porn friendly cloud service."
        AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        You're the customer of a cloud service. Do you want the one that does or does not scan your own files so that a false positive could cause you to be arrested, incur thousands of dollars in legal fees and suffer severe and permanent reputational damage yourself?
  - perihelions 5y ago
    But none of these conundrums could exist if Apple had no access to the user's device, nor control over the software running on it. "Who owns your computer" is still the central question; we're just Sapir-Whorfing ourselves around it within the implicit language of walled gardens. "Apple owns your computer" is the unspoken premise, and it's not axiomatic. Stallman was very, very right.
    - aidenn0 5y ago
      There's a huge tangle of things with "Apple owns your computer" but I don't think most of it applies to the icloud question. If you wanted to store photos in icloud on a Windows machine, you'd be using the Apple icloud client. Apple has at least some control over what software they write and ship does[1]. They can break 3rd party clients almost at will, so if they choose to be hostile to 3rd party clients that control is fairly strong. Arguing over what amount of control Apple should exercise over what software runs on a device purchased by a consumer is mostly orthogonal to arguing over what amount of control Apple should exercise over what software can connect to their servers. 1: On a general purpose machine, debuggers and emulators can influence what software does, obviously, so the control isn't absolute.
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        Well services generally shouldn't be controlling what software can connect either! The argument over whose computer it is applies pretty similarly. My computer is not part of their infrastructure, and they should only be controlling the software on their infrastructure.
      - deleted 5y ago
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      - deleted 5y ago
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      - someguydave 5y ago
        It seems to me that Apple does their best to ensure you end up using icloud against your will through a a series of very confusing opt-out prompts and defaults. Maybe it would be nice to have a tool that would allow you to see exactly what data the client side scanner is “allowed” to “see”?
  - noduerme 5y ago
    Just as an aside, I think form validity checks that phone home to a server prior to submission are very questionable, and recording keystroke data from those is absolutely unethical under all circumstances (even if it's only to improve an autocomplete algorithm). Really, any out-of-band transmission from a web form to some other app / database is a potential security threat. The same is true with any kind of client-side scanning, which is part of the point: Although these files may only be scanned because they will be transmitted and stored in the cloud, the whole stack doing secondary scans is out-of-band and by definition insecure, i.e., it is designed to ultimately make human review possible. Who can access that side stream of data and when is intentionally left opaque in these types of proposals, and amounts to "trust us" hocus pocus which is usually a sure sign that proper security measures will not be taken.
  - _jal 5y ago
    > The Javascript that checks validity of forms before you submit them is a form of client-side scanning It is hardly difficult to draw a distinction between ensuring a field looks like an expected datatype and ML analysis guessing at photo content. In fact, trying to construct an argument conflating the two pretty much immediately runs in to the fact that one is adversarial, so it only works if you studiously ignore intent.
    - dane-pgp 5y ago
      When you say "one is adversarial", I assume you mean that someone trying to upload illegal files will try to prevent the system from detecting that their files are illegal, while someone filling in a form isn't trying to sneak invalid data past the client-side validator (assuming all hackers know that the system is correctly implemented, i.e. the server performs its own validation). The other distinction is, if a client-side form validator detects a problem with the input, it tells the user so they can fix it, whereas if Apple's system detects a problem with your input, it potentially tells the police without giving you a chance to delete the maliciously-generated false positive files you've unwittingly received.
      - _jal 5y ago
        Yeah, 'adversarial' isn't exactly the right word; I'm not sure what is. What I mean is that client side form validation is typically part of a cooperative process - I want to buy something at your store, you want to sell it to me, and smart client side validation can make that faster/easier if I typo something it can catch. It is (or at least should be) mostly aimed at helping the user; your parsing for security is (should be), as you note, on the server. Scanning photos for [CSAM, thoughtcrime memes, poor taste, whatever] doesn't make the user's life easier, is not something anyone asked to be subjected to, and potentially can lead to a very negative outcome for them. That's the distinction I was getting at, and yes, your second point is directly relevant there.
  - newsch 5y ago
    Just to be clear, is apple's icloud photo storage E2EE? From what I've been able to find it isn't, but I couldn't find anything official one way or the other from apple directly.
    - mdekkers 5y ago
      No, Apple’s iCloud storage isn’t E2EE. In fact a lot/most of their encryption appears sketchy, as they hold keys.
  - mdekkers 5y ago
    > While I don't like client-side scanning, that's overly reductive. No it isn’t. It’s my device. I get to decide what runs on it.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      And you decide to install the update. If iOS 15 is the only option, such as on the 13, you knowingly decided to purchase a device with this sort of scanning happening. Once more, you also decided to sign in to iCloud and enable storing photos in iCloud Photos, thus enabling the bit that controls whether or not photos are scanned.
  - ls15 5y ago
    > "Client side scanning" (both in general, and in the recent Apple kerfuffle) is talking about a network client, that will be talking to servers that are owned by "them." If they wish to enforce rules over what is stored on their server then to enforce that right, the only two choices are to disallow E2EE or to perform client-side scanning. So the core of the problem is that they want to enforce rules over what is stored on their servers, even in E2EE form. They could just allow regular E2EE, where they ignore the content that they don't know and push back against politicians who think they are entitled to all data. They chose to push back against user's privacy instead. What if I have a file on my phone that is already encrypted before I upload it to icloud and it gets encrypted a second time? Apple would have no knowledge about its content. Would they have to scan all my other devices too?
- 2stop 5y ago
  Sure, but it's their software that you are 'licensed' to use under their conditions. So sure, the silicon is yours, but the bits on it are merely licensed for use by you. Not saying I agree with this status quo. But it's not ambiguous.
- new_realist 5y ago
  It’s their cloud service. If you want to upload to iCloud, you must agree to use their client, and their client implements CSS. If you don’t want to use their client, don’t use their service.
  - secondaryacct 5y ago
    ofc, but I think we re talking of client side scanning as per the title
    - new_realist 5y ago
      Their iCloud photo upload client is what does the scanning, at the time you upload to their service. It just so happens that their client is bundled with the phone. I think the root of angst here is that nobody trusts that the client isn’t running even when you don’t choose to upload your photos to their cloud service.
amatecha 5y ago
Completely agree with the final sentences in their conclusion/recommendations: "In a world where our personal information lies in bits carried on powerful communication and storage devices in our pockets, both technology and laws must be designed to protect our privacy and security, not intrude upon it. Robust protection requires technology and law to complement each other. Client-side scanning would gravely undermine this, making us all less safe and less secure."
- Fnoord 5y ago
  Does this count for something like AV, too? I grew up in a world where AV and anti malware only worked offline / client-side. What about spam filters and AV on mail servers? I often hear a commercial for Crowdstrike on Darknet Diaries podcast, which apparently is some kind of combination of a SIEM and ML (though that might be marketing). Would that be the panacea according to this paper? Or is this specific about a client-server model where the server hosts the data? Because the solution to that is rather simple 1) FOSS client 2) public-key cryptography where the private key does not enter the server. Sure, a cloud might make that illegal, but that's why the cloud is just someone else's server. Use your own instead.
snvzz 5y ago
Quite the roster of names behind the article.
- znyboy 5y ago
  The first name that stood out to me was Ron Rivest, of RSA, MD5, and public-key cryptography fame.
  - null0pointer 5y ago
    Also Whitfield Diffie, of Diffie-Hellman fame.
    - donw 5y ago
      His partner went on to make some pretty good mayonnaise, too!
      - mdp2021 5y ago
        Martin Edward Hellman, electrical engineer, was born in 1945. Richard Hellman started selling jars in 1912. No remote relation apparent. (Specifying just in case of doubt, especially for those unfamiliar with the brand.)
  - jodrellblank 5y ago
    You skipped over Whitfield Diffie to find someone of public-key cryptography fame, lol. You might like his work too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitfield_Diffie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitfield_Diffie Hal Abelson, first name there, is from the computer science classic SICP book/MIT lecture series - https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/ https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussm...
    - shbooms 5y ago
      > You skipped over Whitfield Diffie don't forget Steven M. Bellovin who's on that list and who was one of the inventors of the first Encrypted Key Exchange, a precursor to the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange.
otoh 5y ago
On the other hand, CSS might -- eventually, anyway -- offer the best compromise for facilitating reliable, responsible lawful access to mass consumer information technology. Develop CSS in a manner that minimizes the noted risks. Such mechanisms are a fundamental compromise, philosophically. I am skeptical that those on opposing ends of the privacy debate will find sufficient common ground to achieve responsible implementations. Deeper concerns regarding the misprioritization of security in consumer infotech design prevent meaningful basis to realize a suitable compromise for CSS tech, anyway.
- akersten 5y ago
  > Develop CSS No, do not. There is no reasonable privacy preserving manner in which you can do so. Spyware is fundamentally incompatible with privacy. I don't care how many god damn whitepapers they write about their novel perceptual hash cohort-based homomorphic 0-trust TPM scanner. It's still a rat.
  - 2stop 5y ago
    What about in the Apple case where: - The alternative is hold the keys to your photo library and scan the entire thing (like google photos) vs - Don't hold the keys but do CSS, that then on a positive provides partial keys to partial data. That feels like a better trade off. But I can see that it could be the slippery slope towards broader CSS...
  - jdlshore 5y ago
    As another poster said, it's not a choice of whether or not your content is scanned; it's a choice of where. If you upload pictures to the cloud—which is the only scenario in which Apple's scanning was stated to happen¹—then it's a choice between scanning on your device, which allows for the possibility of E2E encryption, or definitely no encryption and scanning on the server. At present, Apple doesn't scan photos on the server, but all their competitors do, and I don't doubt for a second that they will eventually start scanning photos as well. The choice is not if, but how, and their client-side solution seems to me to be much more privacy-preserving than server-side scanning. ¹If you don't believe them, that's fine, but given that they have root control over the software running on your phone, your only choice is to either believe them or don't use their phones. Same goes for all other phones.
new_realist 5y ago
“It’s not perfect yet, so let’s not do it” is not much of an argument, especially from cryptography wonks with no experience in public policy or law enforcement.
- zdw 5y ago
  Schneier at least has substantial experience and analysis on public policy - his "Beyond Fear" book published over a decade ago is one example.
new_realist 5y ago
Eventually we’ll see cryptographic attestation of open source binaries on our phones. Until then, all popular phones will run closed source software, and it will be necessary to trust the vendor. Even then, the vendor may also be the chip maker. Apple would do well to look at sourcing an independent chip vendor for their on-device enclaves. That would give them a trust advantage over Android phones.
- fastball 5y ago
  > Eventually This is far from a given.
- mulmen 5y ago
  http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thom... I don't believe this is a technology problem. This is a legislative problem. We (well, some of us) have the Bill of Rights and the justice system for a reason. We need to codify who owns our data (we do) and what third parties can do with it (nothing unless we say they can, individually). LEO can't do a damn thing unless they have probable cause. This dragnet BS needs to stop. We are absolutely empowered to change the rules to suit us.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > Apple would do well to look at sourcing an independent chip vendor for their on-device enclaves. That would give them a trust advantage over Android phones. They are designing all of the critical chips (SoC and crypto/enclave) themselves already, TSMC only manufactures them - and if there is one company capable to verify that the chips that TSMC produce actually match the designs, it's Apple.
- tremon 5y ago
  What makes you think cryptographic attestation will favor open source binaries? Don't you think it's much more likely that cryptographic attestation will tilt the field even more in favor closed-source binaries, given who hold the keys to everyone's kingdom?
konfin 5y ago
Given how the average person and even the majority of people on tech have been acting the last 6 years I'm at the point where I don't care. I can protect myself, everyone else is their own responsibility. The more we remove privacy by tech the less we lose it by law which I now think is the much worse outcome.
- kf6nux 5y ago
  > The more we remove privacy by tech the less we lose it by law On its face, that seems like a false dichotomy. Can you expand? Generally, I see the erosion of our right against unreasonable search and seizure to be something that hurts everyone (regardless of an individual's ability to make fewer searchable spaces).
  - konfin 5y ago
    If 99.8% of people can have all their information sized by law enforcement then law enforcement won't see the point of a costly political battle to overturn the 4th amendment. Much like advertising those of us tech savvy enough to install add blockers are subsidized by those who don't.
    - robbedpeter 5y ago
      "We didn't violate your privacy because we bought the information from a private company that violated your privacy. But it's ok, because you clicked a button, or signed a EULA." That's the legal justification behind law enforcement fusion centers gathering, deanonymizing, and sharing data harvested by adtech firms, device manufacturers, and service providers. It's a gotcha with the same intellectual weight as "I know you are but what am I?" We need legislation with consequences lethal to companiesthat violate privacy. Something like this - Every individual variable that a company wants to obtain from a person should be consensual with no option to select all, and the data and permission should be ephemeral. At any time a person should be able to inspect, delete, or allow continued possession of private data. They should be able to allow or deny sale or transfer of the data, and any recipient of the data must confirm permissions before taking receipt. Any algorithm or software or human analysis of data must be public and transparent. A record of any decision or business logic involving private data must be kept, and that record becomes private data, subject to the same constraints. Stealing someone's identity should have a mandatory minimum of 2 years of community service, and total loss of opt in privileges for 5 years. No free web services or social media if you fuck around with someone else's privacy. Violations result in fines, paid to the victim and more community service. A business caught abusing private data is subjected to a fine of 5% of company net worth per day. Half of the fine goes to the regulatory bureau, half to the victims. Law enforcement must obtain warrants specific to known individuals - no geofencing or search term fishing expeditions. Digital data is subject to the same 4th amendment protections as physical papers and property. Leaks would mean the end of an organization. If a company can't protect private data, then it can't participate in collecting it. I'm sure there are flaws, but the gist of this seems a good starting outline. Anything less won't solve the problems and there should still be a mechanism for consensual participation in data markets. This would nuke credit bureaus, rein in isps and big tech abuses.
EastOfTruth 5y ago
I just disabled Google Play Services on my Android phone to increase privacy... then I started to get spammed with about 10 notifications every 10 seconds (not a joke) to tell me that those 10 apps would not work properly without Google Play Services enabled even if they did work properly... Google and/or LG allowed me to disable 7 of these apps, but the others could not be uninstalled or disabled using the GUI... I had to use ADB to remove them. One of those apps, believe it or not was the LG phone clock and another was the calculator. After I removed all apps that were complaining about missing Google Play Services and installed alternatives for the ones that I needed like the calculator, everything was working fine. (thanks to f-droid for helping me find viable alternatives)
- mdp2021 5y ago
  Which Android version? Some of us have no Google Play Services and no relevant notifications on older devices.
  - EastOfTruth 5y ago
    Android 10 on an LG device
    - mdp2021 5y ago
      Well, time to really ditch newer Android for either older versions or customizations, or open alternatives.
      - EastOfTruth 5y ago
        I might go with a Pixel and LineageOS... I just hate to have to buy a new phone to be able to install it.
- krageon 5y ago
  Don't disable google play services, run something like microg (easiest way to do so is probably https://lineage.microg.org/ https://lineage.microg.org/ ). Apps are written to expect you to be spied upon and in order for them to not push you to "fix" that, you must lie to them. Moving entirely to f-droid is not an option for most people, as they use their phones to communicate and doing so involves a certain amount of dirtying yourself.
lunatuna 5y ago
I'm in the libertarian lion's den . . . and I only read the abstract. What I see from a historical standpoint, pre-cloud, mobile phone/computer, personal encryption etc is that anything stored be it something on paper, something in your house, safety deposit box, whatever was available to law enforcement with controls via the courts or other mechanism. It was available when there was a legal matter. Is there disagreement that legal matters should allow for full disclosure whether criminal or civil? Is the problem that law enforcement and other state institutions through legislative channels and courts getting just too much access without legal justification? Notional idea: could you have a key vault? Only with court order the keys are released and your devices get opened up? Even if not implementable would that work for most people? I do get the government mass surveillance aspect and think that needs way more scrutiny and people should be vicious in their defense of themselves and society. But it also smells like we lost that battle as private companies are doing pretty well at surveilling individuals and communities.
- amarshall 5y ago
  I would say your historical reference is flawed. One could just as well have written an encrypted text on a sheet of paper that would be non-trivial to decrypt (e.g. Z-340). The difference, I think, is that it used to be far more effort to create the encrypted text than it is today.
- mcoliver 5y ago
  The difference is that our computing devices have become an extension of our very being. Our thoughts, actions, and interactions are recorded at a granular level never before possible in history, we often don't know what is actually being recorded, and that data can be stored cheaply, transfered instantly, replicated, and searched for mere pennies. To expand on your comment, I can go in my file cabinet and flip through papers I have chosen to keep with data that I chose to write down, and then drop it in the trash can. It's physical and tangible and it doesn't have a record of who I called, where I went for breakfast, or what I ordered. Our founding fathers were very clear on their intent with regards to how they viewed governments imposing on the private lives of citizens.
- michaelmrose 5y ago
mro_name 5y ago
IMO that boils down to "who owns what you use". And "there is no free lunch". Applies both to services and devices.
- mulmen 5y ago
  I paid Apple for my iPhone and for storage. I see no reason they should go out of their way to spy on me.
  - connordoner 5y ago
    While the indiscriminate collection of data is another issue entirely, I struggle to see that I — or, indeed, most of us — are important enough to be focused on in particular, out of the many billions who’s data is inevitably collected by various three-letter agencies.
    - krageon 5y ago
      > important enough Ah, so because you are not inconvenienced right now it's not an issue. That's not a good way to approach a systemic injustice, except if you look at other people's suffering and can still sleep fine.
    - mulmen 5y ago
      The problem with this line of thinking is that it presupposes the surveillance is justified. It isn't. The practical objection is that you have no recourse if you are focused on. So it's a numbers game. One that we shouldn't be playing. You say most of us. How many innocent lives are you willing to destroy in the quest to vanquish an imaginary foe?
      - connordoner 5y ago
        I hear you, loud and clear. I don’t know where the balance lies, truth be told, because I can see both sides to the argument.
beebeepka 5y ago
Wait till they start putting noses on those things. In fact, I am surprised no one has done it. It will be super convenient... for the people collecting said data
dsign 5y ago
Can we coin the word spy-tech and go on with our day? I read a post here about when radioactive toys were popular, back in the early 1900s. Radioactivity fell so much out of grace, that these days we prefer to die of global warming than to use nuclear power. In a similar vein, a world where most people go back to pen and paper and watching public TV on bootlegged devices so that they can (try to) escape continuous surveillance by electronic devices is conceivable. Give it enough time and grisly precedents, and companies like Apple and Samsung will only be able to sell new devices to corporate customers.
DeathArrow 5y ago
I believe law enforcement and spying agencies might be falsely complaining about cryptography. Doing this will make targets rely more on cryptography instead of also using alternative security measures. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG
martincmartin 5y ago
I wonder if the title refers to the song "Drugs in my pocket" by The Monks, 1979. This song was actually only popular in a few cities in the world, I think Toronto was a big one. I wonder if the author grew up there...

204 points by azalemeth 5y ago

flerchin 5y ago

It's not their device to scan.

jt_thurs_82 5y ago
According to the TOS and their enforced end to end control of binaries and user actions, it is. Oops.
aidenn0 5y ago
While I don't like client-side scanning, that's overly reductive. "Client side scanning" (both in general, and in the recent Apple kerfuffle) is talking about a network client, that will be talking to servers that are owned by "them." If they wish to enforce rules over what is stored on their server then to enforce that right, the only two choices are to disallow E2EE or to perform client-side scanning. Really client-side scanning is only up for debate when E2EE is used. The Javascript that checks validity of forms before you submit them is a form of client-side scanning, but most of the time[1] nobody cares because it's data that you intend to send to the server anyways. 1: Inadvertent pastes into fields that phone-home for e.g. autocomplete can reveal otherwise private information, so "most of the time"
- dylan604 5y ago
  Client side scanning of inappropriate pictures is of content you'd ordinarily be sending them as anyways as well. The proposal was only to do this if cloud services were/are enabled.
  - haswell 5y ago
    A significant number of concerns aren't about the feature as proposed by Apple, but the slippery slope it creates.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      More about this slippery slope: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28309202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28309202.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      True but slippery slopes are simply a thing. Like the Overton window. Every move takes a step further and moves something else from ridiculous into feasible. And personally, I know this won't affect me. I don't own such content. I don't use the cloud without encryption first (thanks Cryptomator). However I just hate the feeling of my own phone constantly looking over my shoulder on someone else's behalf. Is that so weird?
      - haswell 5y ago
        I think we're saying the same thing. 100% agree here. I think (hope) the vast majority of folks wouldn't be affected by the proposal. But the backlash against it has been justified for exactly the reasons you outline.
  - inetknght 5y ago
    > Client side scanning of inappropriate pictures is of content you'd ordinarily be sending them as anyways as well. The proposal was only to do this if cloud services were/are enabled. I have an iPhone. The Photos app keeps telling me that it's unable to upload things to iCloud because my account is full. I never turned it on. I never intended to upload any photos to the cloud. I haven't signed into my iCloud account for years because I don't use it. Nonetheless, iCloud has a magical way of uploading things to something that I've literally never used. Next you'll be arguing that people using Windows should have simply turned off online logins if they didn't want their Windows computer to phone home. Bullshit, Microsoft shoves that shit down people's throats. So your statement of "you'd ordinarily be sending them as anyways as well" is ludicrous. That's deliberately burying your head into he sand against the fact that big business sets defaults to settings that users often have no idea were set or are buried behind huge warnings against turning them off.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      I've had an iDevice since 2007. I've never signed up for the paid iCloud. I get the standard 5GB plan that all Apple accounts receive. I have never accidentally uploaded a photo to it. I have never enabled it. I don't understand how your situation happens as it has never happened to me. It makes no sense other than someone (maybe you forgot, a significant other, a kid) played around with some settings? There's no other explanation that makes sense to me.
      - inetknght 5y ago
        There's nothing better than knowing everything and never having to play around with settings to discover what they do, never forgetting what you've set your settings to, and not having children, family members, or friends do the same. There's no way any reasonable person could ever have their uploads accidentally turned on without their full knowledge and consent so that definitely invalidates any reason to argue against the idea that client-side scanning is unreasonable because it only happens to things that you wanted to upload anyway. There's definitely no way a new version could patch your system and turn something on without your knowledge. No, there's absolutely never been a situation where some new setting has shown up and you didn't know what it does or inspected what it was set to by default. And there's absolutely no way you could have restored a backup and not had all of your settings transfer over correctly. No, there's no way you'll ever turn the setting on and forget that it's on when you plug your device into some network. And you know you will never be the victim of any malicious activity that could screw you over in some way. You've never had some app automatically connect to something that you didn't know it could even connect to. You'll never have someone else pick up your phone and take random pictures or recordings that you don't know about because those would never get automatically uploaded because, of course, you didn't turn on that setting for yourself. You'll never have to worry about your battery going low because you turned on automatic uploads and not only did your upload happen but your device also scanned your uploads too. You never use your phone for work because your work definitely pays for a new device for you to use for work. Gosh it sure is weird hat so many people don't want client-side scanning. Scanning your device before uploading anything is just a very reasonable thing to do. /s
- a1369209993 5y ago
  > If they wish to enforce rules over what is stored on their server The whole point of end-to-end encryption is that what is stored on their server is statistically uniform binary white noise. If they wish to enforce that, there are a plethora of server-side tools (like the Diehard test suite) with which to do so.
  - Shish2k 5y ago
    You are completely correct from a computer science perspective - unfortunately, this is not a computer science discussion. As far as the FBI are concerned, “storing encrypted child porn on behalf of people with the keys to decrypt it” still counts as “storing child porn”. You can disagree with that (and there are many good reasons to do so) - but “it’s encrypted so it’s fine” isn’t going to convince anybody who matters.
    - mulmen 5y ago
      This is the part where we need laws to protect privacy. This is arguably an overreach by the FBI in the first place and if it is legal it shouldn’t be.
      - lazide 5y ago
        Since Congress folks seem happy to threaten Apple too with changing the law to do what the FBI wants, I wouldn’t assume it would go the way you are thinking it will.
    - aidenn0 5y ago
      It's not even the just FBI; if the majority of your competitors claim to prevent child-porn from being stored on their servers and you don't, the reputational damage is real. Apple doesn't want to be the "Child Porn friendly cloud service."
      - AnthonyMouse 5y ago
        You're the customer of a cloud service. Do you want the one that does or does not scan your own files so that a false positive could cause you to be arrested, incur thousands of dollars in legal fees and suffer severe and permanent reputational damage yourself?
- perihelions 5y ago
  But none of these conundrums could exist if Apple had no access to the user's device, nor control over the software running on it. "Who owns your computer" is still the central question; we're just Sapir-Whorfing ourselves around it within the implicit language of walled gardens. "Apple owns your computer" is the unspoken premise, and it's not axiomatic. Stallman was very, very right.
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    There's a huge tangle of things with "Apple owns your computer" but I don't think most of it applies to the icloud question. If you wanted to store photos in icloud on a Windows machine, you'd be using the Apple icloud client. Apple has at least some control over what software they write and ship does[1]. They can break 3rd party clients almost at will, so if they choose to be hostile to 3rd party clients that control is fairly strong. Arguing over what amount of control Apple should exercise over what software runs on a device purchased by a consumer is mostly orthogonal to arguing over what amount of control Apple should exercise over what software can connect to their servers. 1: On a general purpose machine, debuggers and emulators can influence what software does, obviously, so the control isn't absolute.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      Well services generally shouldn't be controlling what software can connect either! The argument over whose computer it is applies pretty similarly. My computer is not part of their infrastructure, and they should only be controlling the software on their infrastructure.
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    - someguydave 5y ago
      It seems to me that Apple does their best to ensure you end up using icloud against your will through a a series of very confusing opt-out prompts and defaults. Maybe it would be nice to have a tool that would allow you to see exactly what data the client side scanner is “allowed” to “see”?
- noduerme 5y ago
  Just as an aside, I think form validity checks that phone home to a server prior to submission are very questionable, and recording keystroke data from those is absolutely unethical under all circumstances (even if it's only to improve an autocomplete algorithm). Really, any out-of-band transmission from a web form to some other app / database is a potential security threat. The same is true with any kind of client-side scanning, which is part of the point: Although these files may only be scanned because they will be transmitted and stored in the cloud, the whole stack doing secondary scans is out-of-band and by definition insecure, i.e., it is designed to ultimately make human review possible. Who can access that side stream of data and when is intentionally left opaque in these types of proposals, and amounts to "trust us" hocus pocus which is usually a sure sign that proper security measures will not be taken.
- _jal 5y ago
  > The Javascript that checks validity of forms before you submit them is a form of client-side scanning It is hardly difficult to draw a distinction between ensuring a field looks like an expected datatype and ML analysis guessing at photo content. In fact, trying to construct an argument conflating the two pretty much immediately runs in to the fact that one is adversarial, so it only works if you studiously ignore intent.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    When you say "one is adversarial", I assume you mean that someone trying to upload illegal files will try to prevent the system from detecting that their files are illegal, while someone filling in a form isn't trying to sneak invalid data past the client-side validator (assuming all hackers know that the system is correctly implemented, i.e. the server performs its own validation). The other distinction is, if a client-side form validator detects a problem with the input, it tells the user so they can fix it, whereas if Apple's system detects a problem with your input, it potentially tells the police without giving you a chance to delete the maliciously-generated false positive files you've unwittingly received.
    - _jal 5y ago
      Yeah, 'adversarial' isn't exactly the right word; I'm not sure what is. What I mean is that client side form validation is typically part of a cooperative process - I want to buy something at your store, you want to sell it to me, and smart client side validation can make that faster/easier if I typo something it can catch. It is (or at least should be) mostly aimed at helping the user; your parsing for security is (should be), as you note, on the server. Scanning photos for [CSAM, thoughtcrime memes, poor taste, whatever] doesn't make the user's life easier, is not something anyone asked to be subjected to, and potentially can lead to a very negative outcome for them. That's the distinction I was getting at, and yes, your second point is directly relevant there.
- newsch 5y ago
  Just to be clear, is apple's icloud photo storage E2EE? From what I've been able to find it isn't, but I couldn't find anything official one way or the other from apple directly.
  - mdekkers 5y ago
    No, Apple’s iCloud storage isn’t E2EE. In fact a lot/most of their encryption appears sketchy, as they hold keys.
- mdekkers 5y ago
  > While I don't like client-side scanning, that's overly reductive. No it isn’t. It’s my device. I get to decide what runs on it.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    And you decide to install the update. If iOS 15 is the only option, such as on the 13, you knowingly decided to purchase a device with this sort of scanning happening. Once more, you also decided to sign in to iCloud and enable storing photos in iCloud Photos, thus enabling the bit that controls whether or not photos are scanned.
- ls15 5y ago
  > "Client side scanning" (both in general, and in the recent Apple kerfuffle) is talking about a network client, that will be talking to servers that are owned by "them." If they wish to enforce rules over what is stored on their server then to enforce that right, the only two choices are to disallow E2EE or to perform client-side scanning. So the core of the problem is that they want to enforce rules over what is stored on their servers, even in E2EE form. They could just allow regular E2EE, where they ignore the content that they don't know and push back against politicians who think they are entitled to all data. They chose to push back against user's privacy instead. What if I have a file on my phone that is already encrypted before I upload it to icloud and it gets encrypted a second time? Apple would have no knowledge about its content. Would they have to scan all my other devices too?
2stop 5y ago
Sure, but it's their software that you are 'licensed' to use under their conditions. So sure, the silicon is yours, but the bits on it are merely licensed for use by you. Not saying I agree with this status quo. But it's not ambiguous.
new_realist 5y ago
It’s their cloud service. If you want to upload to iCloud, you must agree to use their client, and their client implements CSS. If you don’t want to use their client, don’t use their service.
- secondaryacct 5y ago
  ofc, but I think we re talking of client side scanning as per the title
  - new_realist 5y ago
    Their iCloud photo upload client is what does the scanning, at the time you upload to their service. It just so happens that their client is bundled with the phone. I think the root of angst here is that nobody trusts that the client isn’t running even when you don’t choose to upload your photos to their cloud service.

amatecha 5y ago

Completely agree with the final sentences in their conclusion/recommendations: "In a world where our personal information lies in bits carried on powerful communication and storage devices in our pockets, both technology and laws must be designed to protect our privacy and security, not intrude upon it. Robust protection requires technology and law to complement each other. Client-side scanning would gravely undermine this, making us all less safe and less secure."

Fnoord 5y ago
Does this count for something like AV, too? I grew up in a world where AV and anti malware only worked offline / client-side. What about spam filters and AV on mail servers? I often hear a commercial for Crowdstrike on Darknet Diaries podcast, which apparently is some kind of combination of a SIEM and ML (though that might be marketing). Would that be the panacea according to this paper? Or is this specific about a client-server model where the server hosts the data? Because the solution to that is rather simple 1) FOSS client 2) public-key cryptography where the private key does not enter the server. Sure, a cloud might make that illegal, but that's why the cloud is just someone else's server. Use your own instead.

snvzz 5y ago

Quite the roster of names behind the article.

znyboy 5y ago
The first name that stood out to me was Ron Rivest, of RSA, MD5, and public-key cryptography fame.
- null0pointer 5y ago
  Also Whitfield Diffie, of Diffie-Hellman fame.
  - donw 5y ago
    His partner went on to make some pretty good mayonnaise, too!
    - mdp2021 5y ago
      Martin Edward Hellman, electrical engineer, was born in 1945. Richard Hellman started selling jars in 1912. No remote relation apparent. (Specifying just in case of doubt, especially for those unfamiliar with the brand.)
- jodrellblank 5y ago
  You skipped over Whitfield Diffie to find someone of public-key cryptography fame, lol. You might like his work too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitfield_Diffie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitfield_Diffie Hal Abelson, first name there, is from the computer science classic SICP book/MIT lecture series - https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/ https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.001/abelson-sussm...
  - shbooms 5y ago
    > You skipped over Whitfield Diffie don't forget Steven M. Bellovin who's on that list and who was one of the inventors of the first Encrypted Key Exchange, a precursor to the Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange.

otoh 5y ago

On the other hand, CSS might -- eventually, anyway -- offer the best compromise for facilitating reliable, responsible lawful access to mass consumer information technology. Develop CSS in a manner that minimizes the noted risks. Such mechanisms are a fundamental compromise, philosophically. I am skeptical that those on opposing ends of the privacy debate will find sufficient common ground to achieve responsible implementations. Deeper concerns regarding the misprioritization of security in consumer infotech design prevent meaningful basis to realize a suitable compromise for CSS tech, anyway.

akersten 5y ago
> Develop CSS No, do not. There is no reasonable privacy preserving manner in which you can do so. Spyware is fundamentally incompatible with privacy. I don't care how many god damn whitepapers they write about their novel perceptual hash cohort-based homomorphic 0-trust TPM scanner. It's still a rat.
- 2stop 5y ago
  What about in the Apple case where: - The alternative is hold the keys to your photo library and scan the entire thing (like google photos) vs - Don't hold the keys but do CSS, that then on a positive provides partial keys to partial data. That feels like a better trade off. But I can see that it could be the slippery slope towards broader CSS...
- jdlshore 5y ago
  As another poster said, it's not a choice of whether or not your content is scanned; it's a choice of where. If you upload pictures to the cloud—which is the only scenario in which Apple's scanning was stated to happen¹—then it's a choice between scanning on your device, which allows for the possibility of E2E encryption, or definitely no encryption and scanning on the server. At present, Apple doesn't scan photos on the server, but all their competitors do, and I don't doubt for a second that they will eventually start scanning photos as well. The choice is not if, but how, and their client-side solution seems to me to be much more privacy-preserving than server-side scanning. ¹If you don't believe them, that's fine, but given that they have root control over the software running on your phone, your only choice is to either believe them or don't use their phones. Same goes for all other phones.

new_realist 5y ago

“It’s not perfect yet, so let’s not do it” is not much of an argument, especially from cryptography wonks with no experience in public policy or law enforcement.

zdw 5y ago
Schneier at least has substantial experience and analysis on public policy - his "Beyond Fear" book published over a decade ago is one example.

new_realist 5y ago

Eventually we’ll see cryptographic attestation of open source binaries on our phones. Until then, all popular phones will run closed source software, and it will be necessary to trust the vendor. Even then, the vendor may also be the chip maker. Apple would do well to look at sourcing an independent chip vendor for their on-device enclaves. That would give them a trust advantage over Android phones.

fastball 5y ago
> Eventually This is far from a given.
mulmen 5y ago
http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf http://users.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thom... I don't believe this is a technology problem. This is a legislative problem. We (well, some of us) have the Bill of Rights and the justice system for a reason. We need to codify who owns our data (we do) and what third parties can do with it (nothing unless we say they can, individually). LEO can't do a damn thing unless they have probable cause. This dragnet BS needs to stop. We are absolutely empowered to change the rules to suit us.
mschuster91 5y ago
> Apple would do well to look at sourcing an independent chip vendor for their on-device enclaves. That would give them a trust advantage over Android phones. They are designing all of the critical chips (SoC and crypto/enclave) themselves already, TSMC only manufactures them - and if there is one company capable to verify that the chips that TSMC produce actually match the designs, it's Apple.
tremon 5y ago
What makes you think cryptographic attestation will favor open source binaries? Don't you think it's much more likely that cryptographic attestation will tilt the field even more in favor closed-source binaries, given who hold the keys to everyone's kingdom?

konfin 5y ago

Given how the average person and even the majority of people on tech have been acting the last 6 years I'm at the point where I don't care. I can protect myself, everyone else is their own responsibility. The more we remove privacy by tech the less we lose it by law which I now think is the much worse outcome.

kf6nux 5y ago
> The more we remove privacy by tech the less we lose it by law On its face, that seems like a false dichotomy. Can you expand? Generally, I see the erosion of our right against unreasonable search and seizure to be something that hurts everyone (regardless of an individual's ability to make fewer searchable spaces).
- konfin 5y ago
  If 99.8% of people can have all their information sized by law enforcement then law enforcement won't see the point of a costly political battle to overturn the 4th amendment. Much like advertising those of us tech savvy enough to install add blockers are subsidized by those who don't.
  - robbedpeter 5y ago
    "We didn't violate your privacy because we bought the information from a private company that violated your privacy. But it's ok, because you clicked a button, or signed a EULA." That's the legal justification behind law enforcement fusion centers gathering, deanonymizing, and sharing data harvested by adtech firms, device manufacturers, and service providers. It's a gotcha with the same intellectual weight as "I know you are but what am I?" We need legislation with consequences lethal to companiesthat violate privacy. Something like this - Every individual variable that a company wants to obtain from a person should be consensual with no option to select all, and the data and permission should be ephemeral. At any time a person should be able to inspect, delete, or allow continued possession of private data. They should be able to allow or deny sale or transfer of the data, and any recipient of the data must confirm permissions before taking receipt. Any algorithm or software or human analysis of data must be public and transparent. A record of any decision or business logic involving private data must be kept, and that record becomes private data, subject to the same constraints. Stealing someone's identity should have a mandatory minimum of 2 years of community service, and total loss of opt in privileges for 5 years. No free web services or social media if you fuck around with someone else's privacy. Violations result in fines, paid to the victim and more community service. A business caught abusing private data is subjected to a fine of 5% of company net worth per day. Half of the fine goes to the regulatory bureau, half to the victims. Law enforcement must obtain warrants specific to known individuals - no geofencing or search term fishing expeditions. Digital data is subject to the same 4th amendment protections as physical papers and property. Leaks would mean the end of an organization. If a company can't protect private data, then it can't participate in collecting it. I'm sure there are flaws, but the gist of this seems a good starting outline. Anything less won't solve the problems and there should still be a mechanism for consensual participation in data markets. This would nuke credit bureaus, rein in isps and big tech abuses.

EastOfTruth 5y ago

I just disabled Google Play Services on my Android phone to increase privacy... then I started to get spammed with about 10 notifications every 10 seconds (not a joke) to tell me that those 10 apps would not work properly without Google Play Services enabled even if they did work properly... Google and/or LG allowed me to disable 7 of these apps, but the others could not be uninstalled or disabled using the GUI... I had to use ADB to remove them. One of those apps, believe it or not was the LG phone clock and another was the calculator. After I removed all apps that were complaining about missing Google Play Services and installed alternatives for the ones that I needed like the calculator, everything was working fine. (thanks to f-droid for helping me find viable alternatives)

mdp2021 5y ago
Which Android version? Some of us have no Google Play Services and no relevant notifications on older devices.
- EastOfTruth 5y ago
  Android 10 on an LG device
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    Well, time to really ditch newer Android for either older versions or customizations, or open alternatives.
    - EastOfTruth 5y ago
      I might go with a Pixel and LineageOS... I just hate to have to buy a new phone to be able to install it.
krageon 5y ago
Don't disable google play services, run something like microg (easiest way to do so is probably https://lineage.microg.org/ https://lineage.microg.org/ ). Apps are written to expect you to be spied upon and in order for them to not push you to "fix" that, you must lie to them. Moving entirely to f-droid is not an option for most people, as they use their phones to communicate and doing so involves a certain amount of dirtying yourself.

lunatuna 5y ago

I'm in the libertarian lion's den . . . and I only read the abstract. What I see from a historical standpoint, pre-cloud, mobile phone/computer, personal encryption etc is that anything stored be it something on paper, something in your house, safety deposit box, whatever was available to law enforcement with controls via the courts or other mechanism. It was available when there was a legal matter. Is there disagreement that legal matters should allow for full disclosure whether criminal or civil? Is the problem that law enforcement and other state institutions through legislative channels and courts getting just too much access without legal justification? Notional idea: could you have a key vault? Only with court order the keys are released and your devices get opened up? Even if not implementable would that work for most people? I do get the government mass surveillance aspect and think that needs way more scrutiny and people should be vicious in their defense of themselves and society. But it also smells like we lost that battle as private companies are doing pretty well at surveilling individuals and communities.

amarshall 5y ago
I would say your historical reference is flawed. One could just as well have written an encrypted text on a sheet of paper that would be non-trivial to decrypt (e.g. Z-340). The difference, I think, is that it used to be far more effort to create the encrypted text than it is today.
mcoliver 5y ago
The difference is that our computing devices have become an extension of our very being. Our thoughts, actions, and interactions are recorded at a granular level never before possible in history, we often don't know what is actually being recorded, and that data can be stored cheaply, transfered instantly, replicated, and searched for mere pennies. To expand on your comment, I can go in my file cabinet and flip through papers I have chosen to keep with data that I chose to write down, and then drop it in the trash can. It's physical and tangible and it doesn't have a record of who I called, where I went for breakfast, or what I ordered. Our founding fathers were very clear on their intent with regards to how they viewed governments imposing on the private lives of citizens.
michaelmrose 5y ago

mro_name 5y ago

IMO that boils down to "who owns what you use". And "there is no free lunch". Applies both to services and devices.

mulmen 5y ago
I paid Apple for my iPhone and for storage. I see no reason they should go out of their way to spy on me.
- connordoner 5y ago
  While the indiscriminate collection of data is another issue entirely, I struggle to see that I — or, indeed, most of us — are important enough to be focused on in particular, out of the many billions who’s data is inevitably collected by various three-letter agencies.
  - krageon 5y ago
    > important enough Ah, so because you are not inconvenienced right now it's not an issue. That's not a good way to approach a systemic injustice, except if you look at other people's suffering and can still sleep fine.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    The problem with this line of thinking is that it presupposes the surveillance is justified. It isn't. The practical objection is that you have no recourse if you are focused on. So it's a numbers game. One that we shouldn't be playing. You say most of us. How many innocent lives are you willing to destroy in the quest to vanquish an imaginary foe?
    - connordoner 5y ago
      I hear you, loud and clear. I don’t know where the balance lies, truth be told, because I can see both sides to the argument.

beebeepka 5y ago

Wait till they start putting noses on those things. In fact, I am surprised no one has done it. It will be super convenient... for the people collecting said data

dsign 5y ago

Can we coin the word spy-tech and go on with our day? I read a post here about when radioactive toys were popular, back in the early 1900s. Radioactivity fell so much out of grace, that these days we prefer to die of global warming than to use nuclear power. In a similar vein, a world where most people go back to pen and paper and watching public TV on bootlegged devices so that they can (try to) escape continuous surveillance by electronic devices is conceivable. Give it enough time and grisly precedents, and companies like Apple and Samsung will only be able to sell new devices to corporate customers.

DeathArrow 5y ago

I believe law enforcement and spying agencies might be falsely complaining about cryptography. Doing this will make targets rely more on cryptography instead of also using alternative security measures. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG

martincmartin 5y ago

I wonder if the title refers to the song "Drugs in my pocket" by The Monks, 1979. This song was actually only popular in a few cities in the world, I think Toronto was a big one. I wonder if the author grew up there...