I think Apple was doing the exact opposite. They wanted to do the __least possible thing__ in order to stave away the far worse outcome of intelligence departments using the
"it's for our children" excuse to pressure elected representatives to vote for back doors on consumer encryption.
The ridiculous thing is that Apple's proposal was functionally identical to what other platform vendors (e.g. Google, Microsoft) were already doing. In all cases — including Apple's proposed system — only photos uploaded to cloud storage would be scanned to see if it matched CSAM already known to the government. The only difference with Apple's proposal was initial "fuzzy hash" calculation would be performed on-device prior to upload, instead of on-cloud after upload.
The reason for doing it differently was because it meant (in theory) satisfying both masters — implementing real end-to-end encryption, while not being seen as a CSAM scanning laggard compared to Google, Microsoft, etc.
Other vendors just scan all your shit and nobody cares.
