God I hate this. rollingstone.com/culture/cultur…
Although Facebook is the primary target of this pressure campaign, it’s hard not to notice how closely Apple’s client-side scanning announcement fits with the UK government’s desires. 
Don’t listen to anyone who tells you “they’ll never give in to government pressure” when it’s obvious they already are.
The serious purpose of this campaign (which started in 2019 by the way) is to make it difficult to deploy new encrypted services. The UK doesn’t actually care if people figure out how to solve end-to-end encrypted scanning.
I think some people think they’re going to be clever by deploying client-side scanning, thus giving the UK “what it’s asking for.” In the short term this might work — only because the UK gov would be happy to let competitors throw Facebook under the bus. But not the long term.
The main law enforcement ask (and the UK is just the part of the global law enforcement community with the most invasive laws) is retrospective access to data. They also want these real-time scanning systems, but they’re terrified encryption means losing data access.
If somehow it looked like we were headed to a world with end-to-end encryption and client-side CSAM scanning, law enforcement wouldn’t be mollified. They’d just change their strategy.
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