> Apple hashes all of your photos offline [...]

No, only the ones designated for upload to iCloud.

> [...] it’s about governments forcing Apple to do things with this new weapon

Governments can already force Apple to do any kind of scanning, "weapon" being built already or not.

> > Apple hashes all of your photos offline [...]

> No, only the ones designated for upload to iCloud.

How do you verify that?

If you turn off iCloud, the hash list will never get downloaded on your phone. No scanning will take place in that case.

How do you verify that? :) You're just quoting what apple says. Which may be all they're allowed to say due to the national security letter thing.

I'm trusting in the hacker community with this.

If Apple really is trying to sneak in a CSAM database on your phone with iCloud disabled, someone WILL catch it and raise so much hell we'll all hear it.

iOS is open source now?

Network sniffers are.

Says who? Apple? How much is that worth?

If Apple were going to lie about this process, they didn't need to announce it and go into so much detail at all. They could have just kept it quiet the way the current server side CSAM scanning is done by others already. The legal and market impacts of Apple lying would be severe.

Every other cloud storage provider has implemented scanning since 2011-2013.

I haven't seen a single person concerned about Apple scanning photos in iCloud. The problem is entirely that the scan is happening on your personal phone with apparently some janky implementation that in one week has already shown to have serious flaws.