It may have been a mistake for Apple as a company to make this decision, but I think we can understand why the individuals within Apple might choose to let decisions like this play out and fail in public, even if they know it is going to fail.
Well Craig Federighi seems to be happy with it. Their software engineers leads of the features seems to be happy with it. i.e I dont believe there were significant objection to the feature within Apple. At least not those in power. And that is why they went with it. The objection obviously came later after it was reviewed to the public.
There is a big difference between happy with it and not unhappy enough to quit publicly when part of your job is to spread koolaid and look happy.
If i were against something like this, but not powerful enough to squash it (especially if a gov had a hand in getting it pushed through), then i'd make sure to do a press tour and get it in every newspaper for all the wrong reasons, while making an all/nothing stance to torpedo the project.
I can think of no other reason beyond utter incompetence why they'd announce it how they did. Apple is known for being secretive, but why did they do a press interview and say "sure other 3-letter gov agencies may need to add to the illegal photos database in the future" unless you wanted to really make sure the project would fail? Why else announce it in the same press release as scanning messages for similar content? It seems like the rollout was designed to be as suspicious as possible tbh.
Never assume 4D chess when simple incompetence can do the job, because 4D chess is rare, and tends to fail when it confronts the unexpected. If you were trying to sink the project this way, how would it work out if some other, unrelated scandal had popped up and distracted the general public?
> If [i were not influencial enough to sink it internally, so i] were trying to sink the project [through bad publicity]
Therefore, the answer to your question is "darn, it didn't work. that sucks but at least i tried".
Also...
> Never assume 4D chess when simple incompetence can do the job
In this context, its very likely that a government is somewhat behind it. We know the FBI and apple didn't get along. We know apple has been doing things quid-pro-quo for china to stay on their good side. So it seems like we're already sitting at a 4d chess board, but no one is sure who's playing.
If a government says you have to do X on the DL, and you don't want to because its bad, then a logical solution is to get general population + news media to say "X is bad! We really hope X doesn't happen." Because then its easy to show the government why you can't do X.
> The objection obviously came later after it was reviewed to the public.
Why is this obvious? Normally, when you have an objection to a company policy, you voice those objections in private to people within the company. This seems "obvious" to me, but to explain--(1) it's against company policy and often considered a fireable offense, (2) employees have an interest in presenting a united front, (3) those who want the project to fail publicly want it to happen without interference from inside the company.
