Thing you haven't mentioned is that with no oversight, no transparency no counter, no clear your name, the tyranny which wants to ruin your life doesn't need to build a CSAM scanner to do it. A tip-off to the police, a falsified claim from an "eye witness", an "accident" putting your name on the wrong report to get the machinery rolling and it will, as you say, roll by itself. See what actually did happen to Sir Cliff Richard[1] where "a complaint to the police" got his house raided and his name dragged through the media and despite not being arrested, not being charged, case being dropped, him suing the media and winning, suing the police and winning and the media apologising, he says his reputation will never be completely cleared - and it probably never will be, and it didn't require any specific tech.

"The System" didn't need to wait patiently for a big tech company to build a complicated system with dastardly moustache-twirling weaknesses before it could affect Sir Cliff, anymore than Big Brother in 1984 needed to wait for Winston to be seen taking action on the telescreen in his house before the system crushed him. If "The System" wanted to accuse you, it could accuse your car of having been seen on a nearby road at the time, your likeness being seen on CCTV, and if you get rid of licence plate recognition scanners and CCTV then it would be "an anonymous witness" seeing you in the area at the time or "overhearing you discussing" something.

> "Most people don't understand how life destroying a false accusation is"

Citation needed? Because we were forced to read 1984 and To Kill a Mockingbird in school and I'm pretty sure a lot of other people were as well; we've seen cult TV series like The Prisoner and The Fugitive focusing on the lives of the trapped trying to escape "the system". Blockbuster films have been made about the power of "The State" chasing people such as Enemy of the State with Will Smith. Films in the pattern "wrongly accused must fight to clear his name" and "stalwart good guy fights the system gone bad" are practically genres on their own - The Fugitive as a film with Harrison Ford, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Shawshank Redemption, and specifically about someone falseley accused by a child, The Hunt with Mads Mikkelsen which is in the IMDB Top 250 films.

Are you also, for example, complaining about the system where doctors and social workers are mandatory reporters if they have any evidence or suspicion of children being abused? That's a "their word against yours" system which pervades the nation, has no oversight, has no objective criteria, no explanaiton of the workings of the brain behind it, relies on humans when we know for certain that there are doctors who make mistakes and errors of judgement and at least some who would look the other way for money.

At least with the tech company CSAM scanners we can potentially have a society wide discussion about how they work in detail, whether that's reasonable, who could and should oversee them and how, what kinds of data cloud companies are obliged to know about their customers and what is reasonable for them to not know, etc. But even in tech circles we can't actually have those discussions, most of the attempts to discuss the details of how it works are drowned out by people who haven't a clue what Apple announced, misunderstand massive parts of it, conflate two or three different systems, don't seem to understand that other tech companies already do this with much less careful design, and cry tyranny and blame China.

Hypothetically, iMessage or any chat system could be built end to end encrypted, any cloud file sync or file storage could be. One end of the spectrum is that they should be. If that's your position then "the system" will probably work around you, that's the "opt out of modern life" position of the "return to the woods" lifestyle. You can't unmake billions of cheap ubiquitous cameras, you can't unopen Pandora's box, and you probably can't stop people emotionally reacting strongly to topics of child protection. If your reaction to that is "not listening, no no no" then it doesn't seem likely to sway "the system" very much at all.

> "CSAM is a dastardly and effective way to establish a totalitarian rule by fear of life in jail, nothing more.

America has effectively incarcerated a lot of people into for-profit prisons without needing this. China has effectively added a lot of population control by rule of fear without needing this. You don't need a high-tech murder-detector to make people fear being thrown in jail for murder.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_Richard#Property_search,...