5 ms·

New group attacking iPhone encryption backed by US political dark-money network

182 points by mikece 3y ago

specialist 3y ago
I wish these loons would redirect their focus away from SIGINT back to HUMINT. Panopticon doesn't keep society safer. Old timey investigations do.
Hizonner 3y ago
I would like to caution against trying to oversimplify your model of activists and their organizations. They're not entirely unified, they have complicated motivations, and they work together in complicated ways. Sure, there's dark money. All of politics is full of dark money. I'm not even sure that means anybody's evil. If you're a billionaire and you're trying to move political opinion, you know that you being the public face will interfere with that. You may also have limited time. So you fund others and stay in the background. Sure, the "Heat Initiative" thing benefits from the dark money. But it's not so much about some slush fund spinning up an organization. Registering a domain is cheap. What makes this kind of thing effective is multiple slush funds, not always on the same page, having worked for a long time to build a community and a methodolody. Part of the methodology is to have lots of "grassroots organizations". Every two-bit activist in the space seems to run a "group", and be on at least the "advisory board" of a couple of others. There are also some larger groups, more what you'd think of as "real" organizations, that can help coordinate. It's second nature to all of them-- part of the methodology-- to create a new "initiative" and make it a vaguely independent entity. One reason for doing that is that it's easier to get supporters to buy in on single issues. For instance, NCOSE announced that it was part of the "Heat Initiative". NCOSE probably would not agree with a lot of other things that Hopewell does. This fairly tightly targeted effort, with its own name, lets them work together on an issue they do share, and do it without seeming to agree on everything. In fact, to the degree that both their names do come up, they can use their other disagreements to make it look like a universal issue. Look, everybody agrees, even these people who cant agree on this other thing! Anybody who disagrees with both must be really extreme! Wrong, of course, but sometimes effective. Everybody involved has a very large rolodex. When you set up the "Heat Initiative", you call every potential fellow traveler you can think of, and see if they want to help out. They can help by visibly "joining", or they can help by doing things like making phone calls to politicians and journalists to hype the thing, or getting you an appointment with the right person at Apple. That sort of networking lets you get a lot done without having to make the "initiative" into a large or long-term organization in its own right. When they're working together on this, it's as parts of a sort of "anti-porn complex". For the most part, that complex really does oppose all porn, not just child porn. Most of the really vocal anti-child-porn people-- the types who make it their life's work-- are obsessed enough to be blind to even glaring flaws in what they're asking for. They're often fanatical to the point of being unable to see that anything tagged as "anti-child-porn" might ever be a bad idea, even if it obviously won't do any good and obviously will do harm. For whatever reason, the vast majority also seem hostile to all porn, to prostitution, and often to a bunch of other stuff around sex. At most, they may be grudgingly, theoretically willing to permit porn in general if it meets a bunch of purity tests that can never be completely met, and produces absolutely no ill effects. All negatives count, but no positives can ever be acknowledged. What they most seem to have in common is that they're all uncomfortable if everything related to sex isn't kept in some kind of well-contained, ritualized box: a box that makes it somehow "pure". They may want different boxes, but everybody has some box. The religious wing wants to see all sex be in marriage (and usually heterosexual, generally in the missionary position, and often only for purposes of procreation). The "soccer mom" wing wants to see at least monogamy, with a bunch of social baggage attached. Both seem to be opposed to anybody under about 25 even knowing that sex exists. There's also a more lefty wing that comes out of a certain subset of feminism. They tend to endlessly measure their own and everybody else's every sexual thought and action in terms of various arcane social theories-- which they work constantly to elaborate and "improve", almost always by making them stricter-- and to believe that anything that doesn't come out 100.00000 percent pure should be suppressed. All of them are prepared to use governmental authority to enforce their bounds. ... and, to be fair, they are all also opposed to real coercion and real exploitation that really do happen. Even if some of them do also accept some other kinds of coercion and exploitation. Anyway, they may be at one another's throats about other issues, even on some sex-related issues, and even on some details about porn... but they can usually at least work together on anything related to porn, and especially child porn. And of course they'll take money for that cause, from billionaires or anybody else. There are profiteers involved in all of this, but it's important to remember that most of the people involved, including the billionaires, are true believers. If you assume that they're all just out to make a buck, without truly believing in their cause, you won't be able to predict them accurately. Thorn may be run by bogus profiteers. But actually I suspect Thorn is more like true believers trying to make their social engineering project self-sustaining. And of course even an individual who's totally committed ideologically, and really wants to work full-time on the issue, has to eat. The age verification companies, who are working with the same players on closely related issues, do seem to be largely real profiteers.
- fortran77 3y ago
  > What makes this kind of thing effective is multiple slush funds, not always on the same page, having worked for a long time to build a community and a methodolody. Part of the methodology is to have lots of "grassroots organizations". Every two-bit activist in the space seems to run a "group", and be on at least the "advisory board" of a couple of others. There are also some larger groups, more what you'd think of as "real" organizations, that can help coordinate. Wealthy people also like forming organizations that can employ a few dozen people on their boards with $250K salaries and expense accounts to be able to provide jobs for their kids for several generations hence. So they pick a cause, any cause, and start an organization. Ones who don't actually have to feed the hungry, but just provide "awareness" are the most lucrative because they can funnel all the tax-free money to friends and family "consultants"
monero-xmr 3y ago
I’m a “follow the money” guy and the only thing I can think is that back dooring encryption helps the largest tech companies, because only they will be able to do it “safely”. In a world where all online vendors back door their encryption, you want the largest companies to do it “right”. Obviously this is very dumb and shouldn’t happen. But I simply can’t understand pure motivations for dumping millions into weakening encryption. There must be some financial incentive for someone.
- Hizonner 3y ago
  > But I simply can’t understand pure motivations for dumping millions into weakening encryption. It will generate a few reports to law enforcement, when a very few very stupid or careless criminals mess up. And it will keep a few copies of certain images from getting forwarded. That's it. That's your pure motivation. These are true fanatics. The fact that law enforcement already has more reports than it can handle doesn't matter. There's always a chance that one of them could be actionable. The fact that the same images are still going to circulate through other channels, and that most people who want them will still find them, doesn't matter. There's always a chance that one person won't get a copy. The fact that the responses will often be ineffective doesn't matter. At least somebody will get a chance to try. The fact that the system can be repurposed to create a police state doesn't matter, because one incident of CSA outweighs anything else that could happen. If it saves just one child, nothing else matters. Oh, and by the way, sexual abuse is the worst thing that could possibly happen to any child, including murder. The fact that the data will be abused for CSA does not compute. Of course all the people working against this scourge will be pure of heart. And of course a giant database can be made perfectly secure if you just nerd harder. The fact that police states are dangerous places for children also does not compute. Because that would mean that there was nothing to do about the most important problem that could ever exist. And that can't be, because we live in a just world.
  - fortran77 3y ago
    Every decade seems to have a new mass hysteria over child abuse. Remember the "McMartins" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial And then there were all those useless "Megans Law" lists. Now it's CSAM and encryption, and nobody wants to stick their neck out on this, lest he be branded "Pro Child Porn"
daft_pink 3y ago
Is it not transparent to everyone yet that these people demanding that technology change because of child sexual abuse have or are being boosted by someone with a totally different agenda? Some government agency wants your data and they are cloaking themselves in this noble cause to get it.
- lamontcg 3y ago
  > Some government agency wants your data and they are cloaking themselves in this noble cause to get it. Some groups probably want the ability to take down politicians by hacking their phones and getting them thrown in jail for CSAM.
- ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
  The way this works is deep state wants to control the population. First they ask nicely. Apple tried but went back because their user base saw through it. Then deep state funds "attacks" and then poor Apple will have no option but to give in. This has been happening since post WW2.
  - downWidOutaFite 3y ago
    That's not how it works
  - phero_cnstrcts 3y ago
    Problem - reaction - solution. But lately it’s been boiled down to: problem - solution. They don’t even care about the people s manufactured outrage anymore.
  - delfinom 3y ago
    "The deep state"? There is no deep state, just the wealthy elite controlling everything through legalized bribery and scams.
    - jquery 3y ago
      To the extent there is a deep state, it exists as the laws (and the civil servants charged with upholding those laws) that were passed under previous administrations and act as a check on the current one.
erostrate 3y ago
You don't even need to go very deep to find financial interests at stake: Thorn sells a "comprehensive solution for platforms to identify, remove and report child sexual abuse material." [1] So the CEO of this Heat Initiative is pressuring Apple to implement the kind of solution her previous company is selling. But yes, Eric Schmidt famously said he thinks that there is no right to privacy. Although he did try to get a journalist fired for what he considered an infringement on his privacy, so I imagine this only applies to us peasants. But billionaire philanthropy is definitely a wonderful thing, let's keep telling ourselves how great it is that Schmidt, Gates and co are willing to do so much disinterested work to help the world. [1] https://www.thorn.org/our-work-to-stop-child-sexual-exploitation/ https://www.thorn.org/our-work-to-stop-child-sexual-exploita...
- husadanytinabou 3y ago
  Helping the world? They just want those pictures. They and their friends are in too many of them.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
concinds 3y ago
Called it. A group no one had ever heard of before, suddenly gets widespread media coverage just a week after their website is created. There are way too many groups trying to manipulate democracy through bad-faith marketing campaigns, using the media to spread their talking points and feed an illusion of popularity for unpopular decisions. It's not billionaires trying to manipulate public opinion and media, it's an NGO, a grassroots initiative, the people's voice! Deep, vigorous involvement of civil society (billionaire-funded NGOs) is essential to any free country! What a fucking scam.
- HHC-Hunter 3y ago
  It's really depressing how openly easy the NGO's are to spot.
- nebula8804 3y ago
  I just googled Heat initiative and while all results are within 1-4 weeks of the WHOIS registration date of the website(8-16-23), the sources ive seen are the NYTimes, Forbes, PRNewsWire, Wired, AppleInsider and 9to5Mac. I tried searching for things like fox news, MSNBC, CNN, even OAN but not much came up. Maybe those Democratic donors have connections to those specific publications? Also, I don't know if this could be considered "widespread media coverage" since it is limited to print and only one side of the aisle (or my google searches couldn't pick up the others) but I totally get your point. It seems like there might be an opportunity to "reverse engineer" which groups/people tend to trigger which media orgs to publish something.
- amadeuspagel 3y ago
  Yes, the first amendment also applies to billionaires and corporations, and if that weren't the case encryption would likely already be dead, since big tech companies wouldn't be allowed to lobby for it.
closetnerd 3y ago
Ah good reminder why I'm paying for the intercept.
navigate8310 3y ago
I'm quite sure that the executives at Heat Initiative are using an iPhone to safeguard their privacy and uphold their secrecy.

182 points by mikece 3y ago

I wish these loons would redirect their focus away from SIGINT back to HUMINT. Panopticon doesn't keep society safer. Old timey investigations do.

Hizonner 3y ago

I would like to caution against trying to oversimplify your model of activists and their organizations. They're not entirely unified, they have complicated motivations, and they work together in complicated ways. Sure, there's dark money. All of politics is full of dark money. I'm not even sure that means anybody's evil. If you're a billionaire and you're trying to move political opinion, you know that you being the public face will interfere with that. You may also have limited time. So you fund others and stay in the background. Sure, the "Heat Initiative" thing benefits from the dark money. But it's not so much about some slush fund spinning up an organization. Registering a domain is cheap. What makes this kind of thing effective is multiple slush funds, not always on the same page, having worked for a long time to build a community and a methodolody. Part of the methodology is to have lots of "grassroots organizations". Every two-bit activist in the space seems to run a "group", and be on at least the "advisory board" of a couple of others. There are also some larger groups, more what you'd think of as "real" organizations, that can help coordinate. It's second nature to all of them-- part of the methodology-- to create a new "initiative" and make it a vaguely independent entity. One reason for doing that is that it's easier to get supporters to buy in on single issues. For instance, NCOSE announced that it was part of the "Heat Initiative". NCOSE probably would not agree with a lot of other things that Hopewell does. This fairly tightly targeted effort, with its own name, lets them work together on an issue they do share, and do it without seeming to agree on everything. In fact, to the degree that both their names do come up, they can use their other disagreements to make it look like a universal issue. Look, everybody agrees, even these people who cant agree on this other thing! Anybody who disagrees with both must be really extreme! Wrong, of course, but sometimes effective. Everybody involved has a very large rolodex. When you set up the "Heat Initiative", you call every potential fellow traveler you can think of, and see if they want to help out. They can help by visibly "joining", or they can help by doing things like making phone calls to politicians and journalists to hype the thing, or getting you an appointment with the right person at Apple. That sort of networking lets you get a lot done without having to make the "initiative" into a large or long-term organization in its own right. When they're working together on this, it's as parts of a sort of "anti-porn complex". For the most part, that complex really does oppose all porn, not just child porn. Most of the really vocal anti-child-porn people-- the types who make it their life's work-- are obsessed enough to be blind to even glaring flaws in what they're asking for. They're often fanatical to the point of being unable to see that anything tagged as "anti-child-porn" might ever be a bad idea, even if it obviously won't do any good and obviously will do harm. For whatever reason, the vast majority also seem hostile to all porn, to prostitution, and often to a bunch of other stuff around sex. At most, they may be grudgingly, theoretically willing to permit porn in general if it meets a bunch of purity tests that can never be completely met, and produces absolutely no ill effects. All negatives count, but no positives can ever be acknowledged. What they most seem to have in common is that they're all uncomfortable if everything related to sex isn't kept in some kind of well-contained, ritualized box: a box that makes it somehow "pure". They may want different boxes, but everybody has some box. The religious wing wants to see all sex be in marriage (and usually heterosexual, generally in the missionary position, and often only for purposes of procreation). The "soccer mom" wing wants to see at least monogamy, with a bunch of social baggage attached. Both seem to be opposed to anybody under about 25 even knowing that sex exists. There's also a more lefty wing that comes out of a certain subset of feminism. They tend to endlessly measure their own and everybody else's every sexual thought and action in terms of various arcane social theories-- which they work constantly to elaborate and "improve", almost always by making them stricter-- and to believe that anything that doesn't come out 100.00000 percent pure should be suppressed. All of them are prepared to use governmental authority to enforce their bounds. ... and, to be fair, they are all also opposed to real coercion and real exploitation that really do happen. Even if some of them do also accept some other kinds of coercion and exploitation. Anyway, they may be at one another's throats about other issues, even on some sex-related issues, and even on some details about porn... but they can usually at least work together on anything related to porn, and especially child porn. And of course they'll take money for that cause, from billionaires or anybody else. There are profiteers involved in all of this, but it's important to remember that most of the people involved, including the billionaires, are true believers. If you assume that they're all just out to make a buck, without truly believing in their cause, you won't be able to predict them accurately. Thorn may be run by bogus profiteers. But actually I suspect Thorn is more like true believers trying to make their social engineering project self-sustaining. And of course even an individual who's totally committed ideologically, and really wants to work full-time on the issue, has to eat. The age verification companies, who are working with the same players on closely related issues, do seem to be largely real profiteers.

fortran77 3y ago
> What makes this kind of thing effective is multiple slush funds, not always on the same page, having worked for a long time to build a community and a methodolody. Part of the methodology is to have lots of "grassroots organizations". Every two-bit activist in the space seems to run a "group", and be on at least the "advisory board" of a couple of others. There are also some larger groups, more what you'd think of as "real" organizations, that can help coordinate. Wealthy people also like forming organizations that can employ a few dozen people on their boards with $250K salaries and expense accounts to be able to provide jobs for their kids for several generations hence. So they pick a cause, any cause, and start an organization. Ones who don't actually have to feed the hungry, but just provide "awareness" are the most lucrative because they can funnel all the tax-free money to friends and family "consultants"

monero-xmr 3y ago

I’m a “follow the money” guy and the only thing I can think is that back dooring encryption helps the largest tech companies, because only they will be able to do it “safely”. In a world where all online vendors back door their encryption, you want the largest companies to do it “right”. Obviously this is very dumb and shouldn’t happen. But I simply can’t understand pure motivations for dumping millions into weakening encryption. There must be some financial incentive for someone.

Hizonner 3y ago
> But I simply can’t understand pure motivations for dumping millions into weakening encryption. It will generate a few reports to law enforcement, when a very few very stupid or careless criminals mess up. And it will keep a few copies of certain images from getting forwarded. That's it. That's your pure motivation. These are true fanatics. The fact that law enforcement already has more reports than it can handle doesn't matter. There's always a chance that one of them could be actionable. The fact that the same images are still going to circulate through other channels, and that most people who want them will still find them, doesn't matter. There's always a chance that one person won't get a copy. The fact that the responses will often be ineffective doesn't matter. At least somebody will get a chance to try. The fact that the system can be repurposed to create a police state doesn't matter, because one incident of CSA outweighs anything else that could happen. If it saves just one child, nothing else matters. Oh, and by the way, sexual abuse is the worst thing that could possibly happen to any child, including murder. The fact that the data will be abused for CSA does not compute. Of course all the people working against this scourge will be pure of heart. And of course a giant database can be made perfectly secure if you just nerd harder. The fact that police states are dangerous places for children also does not compute. Because that would mean that there was nothing to do about the most important problem that could ever exist. And that can't be, because we live in a just world.
- fortran77 3y ago
  Every decade seems to have a new mass hysteria over child abuse. Remember the "McMartins" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McMartin_preschool_trial And then there were all those useless "Megans Law" lists. Now it's CSAM and encryption, and nobody wants to stick their neck out on this, lest he be branded "Pro Child Porn"

daft_pink 3y ago

Is it not transparent to everyone yet that these people demanding that technology change because of child sexual abuse have or are being boosted by someone with a totally different agenda? Some government agency wants your data and they are cloaking themselves in this noble cause to get it.

lamontcg 3y ago
> Some government agency wants your data and they are cloaking themselves in this noble cause to get it. Some groups probably want the ability to take down politicians by hacking their phones and getting them thrown in jail for CSAM.
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
The way this works is deep state wants to control the population. First they ask nicely. Apple tried but went back because their user base saw through it. Then deep state funds "attacks" and then poor Apple will have no option but to give in. This has been happening since post WW2.
- downWidOutaFite 3y ago
  That's not how it works
- phero_cnstrcts 3y ago
  Problem - reaction - solution. But lately it’s been boiled down to: problem - solution. They don’t even care about the people s manufactured outrage anymore.
- delfinom 3y ago
  "The deep state"? There is no deep state, just the wealthy elite controlling everything through legalized bribery and scams.
  - jquery 3y ago
    To the extent there is a deep state, it exists as the laws (and the civil servants charged with upholding those laws) that were passed under previous administrations and act as a check on the current one.

erostrate 3y ago

You don't even need to go very deep to find financial interests at stake: Thorn sells a "comprehensive solution for platforms to identify, remove and report child sexual abuse material." [1] So the CEO of this Heat Initiative is pressuring Apple to implement the kind of solution her previous company is selling. But yes, Eric Schmidt famously said he thinks that there is no right to privacy. Although he did try to get a journalist fired for what he considered an infringement on his privacy, so I imagine this only applies to us peasants. But billionaire philanthropy is definitely a wonderful thing, let's keep telling ourselves how great it is that Schmidt, Gates and co are willing to do so much disinterested work to help the world. [1] https://www.thorn.org/our-work-to-stop-child-sexual-exploitation/ https://www.thorn.org/our-work-to-stop-child-sexual-exploita...

husadanytinabou 3y ago
Helping the world? They just want those pictures. They and their friends are in too many of them.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

concinds 3y ago

Called it. A group no one had ever heard of before, suddenly gets widespread media coverage just a week after their website is created. There are way too many groups trying to manipulate democracy through bad-faith marketing campaigns, using the media to spread their talking points and feed an illusion of popularity for unpopular decisions. It's not billionaires trying to manipulate public opinion and media, it's an NGO, a grassroots initiative, the people's voice! Deep, vigorous involvement of civil society (billionaire-funded NGOs) is essential to any free country! What a fucking scam.

HHC-Hunter 3y ago
It's really depressing how openly easy the NGO's are to spot.
nebula8804 3y ago
I just googled Heat initiative and while all results are within 1-4 weeks of the WHOIS registration date of the website(8-16-23), the sources ive seen are the NYTimes, Forbes, PRNewsWire, Wired, AppleInsider and 9to5Mac. I tried searching for things like fox news, MSNBC, CNN, even OAN but not much came up. Maybe those Democratic donors have connections to those specific publications? Also, I don't know if this could be considered "widespread media coverage" since it is limited to print and only one side of the aisle (or my google searches couldn't pick up the others) but I totally get your point. It seems like there might be an opportunity to "reverse engineer" which groups/people tend to trigger which media orgs to publish something.
amadeuspagel 3y ago
Yes, the first amendment also applies to billionaires and corporations, and if that weren't the case encryption would likely already be dead, since big tech companies wouldn't be allowed to lobby for it.

closetnerd 3y ago

Ah good reminder why I'm paying for the intercept.

navigate8310 3y ago

I'm quite sure that the executives at Heat Initiative are using an iPhone to safeguard their privacy and uphold their secrecy.