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Ha! If you think that apple does not work with governments all around the world and that you can take their word at face value you're going to have a bad time.

by x86x87 4y ago

jrockway 4y ago
I'm sure Apple will give me up to China in a heartbeat, but I actually don't think they'll give me up to the US. It's all about incentives; China can say "sorry, you can't buy our cheap cheap capacitors anymore" and they go out of business. The US can write them a strongly-worded letter about how they don't love freedom, and it's their constitutional right to throw that letter directly into the trash while donating to the campaign of whoever is running against the letter-writer. Pesky constitution!! I always worry about how many FBI / NSA employees work at Apple/Google/etc. though. If you're doing a lot of illegal stuff, I'd avoid uploading the evidence to the Internet. Even someone with the best intentions writes software with bugs or hires compromised employees.
- gabbaghoulie 4y ago
  The entire organization that investigates leaks and supply chain tampering at one of those is formers and retirees of U.S. and allied intelligence and law enforcement communities. It is a large organization. It is itself a very small part of the organization containing it. This is not uncommon, of course. Cops work at Kohl’s and shadow the Zuckerbergs and bounce at clubs and set security policy at multinationals. I don’t get why this is weird unless you’re implying that working in LE or intelligence automatically makes someone untrustworthy. Which is odd, since half of the peace officer or clearance processes are establishing trust and creating an enormous hill to climb to successfully violate it. The threat model is obvious, and it only takes a moment of thought to realize that “ex-CIA person” you’re looking at with a cocked eyebrow was deemed by said organizations to be trustworthy enough to represent the interests of the United States or wherever they come from. Do they get it wrong? Sure. Is it as often as you think? No. You don’t hear the successes and the ratio is way lower than you think it is. There are hundreds of thousands of people who would disagree with your premise. Many of them have a quiet, nonzero involvement in ensuring you can safely share that opinion and eat, a majority are former military and had direct involvement in the same, and at the end of that they’d like to put the gun away and provide for their family. Why is that automatically suspect? It’s not like they’re walking out of government with an armful of implants. Put it this way: would you rather someone that the government spent millions of dollars training in, say, cybersecurity and active threat assessment end their career by buying and operating a movie theater or by making sure the Internet and power grid keep working? I’m about as liberal as it gets and even I can get there while acknowledging that occasionally those powers are used for malevolence. I’d counter that Sand Hill is just as capable of capitalizing that malevolence as Fort Meade and arguably more successful on some axes (no pesky laws). And sure, leak investigation is a bit stupid and mildly malevolent, but supply chain isn’t, and it’s also their prerogative to run their house as they wish. We’d all benefit from debating the policy instead of the person a bit more, I think.
  - jrockway 4y ago
    Oh, I'm not making a value judgement. I think that these government agencies should absolutely try to get people into Apple adding secret undetectable backdoors that help them catch criminals. I also think Apple is completely within their rights to make them work for it. Basically, I totally agree with pretty much everyone that people who abuse children and upload pictures of it to iCloud should burn in hell. But I don't think that Apple should be compelled to add hell to iOS 17 if that makes any sense. If the NSA wants to hire double agents that pass the Apple interview process and add sneaky undetectable code that reports those people to them, I think that's great. I think I just like the chaos of it all. That's why nobody votes for me when I run for Congress or whatever.
    - gabbaghoulie 4y ago
      You are making a value judgment, though, even in your followup. You’ve implied that employment of one of those people is prima facie surreptitious, despite a carefully-drawn picture of how nearly all of the cases you’re gesturing toward are benign and not worth your ongoing concern. Foreign governments doing exactly what you’re alleging, on the other hand… To be honest, that opinion makes you unelectable because you’ve alienated a huge group of people (way, way bigger than you think, and across the political spectrum), partially by imagining the beltway and back rooms of FAANGs as a le Carré novel. Reality is boring. Do horror shows happen? Duh. But take PRISM, for example. PRISM is an efficient, automated legal warrant process to streamline subpoena and provenance of user data for national security purposes, nothing more, but everybody screamed oh my holy hell! because the Snowden slides didn’t contextualize that and could be taken to imply something far worse. It’s toil reduction. Ask anybody in compliance at major companies. Subpoenas are a huge bitch at scale and nearly all major companies have a PRISM equivalent facing the other direction precisely for the reason PRISM exists. It’s not cigar smoke and port mirroring but for some people that’s more fun to imagine, I guess. Seriously, reality in all of it is far less interesting than you think, and that’s one example of many. And often the fetishization of the secrecy and imaginative scenarios takes away from the real issue, which is market forces incentivizing the erosion of privacy and civil liberties. So ironically, by worrying you’re weakening the worry. I know this because I do.
- kelnos 4y ago
  To be fair, I recall seeing an article here a few days ago stating that Apple was moving a significant chunk of their manufacturing out of China. I don't think Apple is that dependent on China. I'm sure Apple has lines they will not cross. Maybe giving you up to China isn't one of them, but I'm sure they have them.
  - DSingularity 4y ago
    Absent significant changes in world order no major company will ever be successful in severing relations with China. No nation today is positioned to be able to both bring up the manufacturing AND compel their people to work. Without the two no nation can match Chinas production and thus produce the alternative “cheap capacitors”.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  Apple is a key member of PRISM [1] and got on board just about the time their phone business started to skyrocket. Just because the media stopped talking about PRISM doesn't mean it went away. If anything I'd expect it's only grown more emboldened given the relatively tepid public response to it. I'd argue this is likely the real reason that Huawei was banned. The US 3-letter agencies agencies had the choice of bringing a Chinese company into the surveillance state web, having a phone on the market they have no control over, or simply banning those phones. As for incentive, big tech regularly flaunts nearly every single behavior that all of our anti-competitive clauses were meant to prohibit. 'Back in the day' Microsoft was targeted, and lost, an anticompete lawsuit for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. Now a days bundling everything in your own packages, locking down other companies into a an unescapable market where you impose a 30% tribute, buying out competitors to prevent competition, and more - that's all perfectly cool, somehow. If Apple, Microsoft, Google, et al stopped playing ball - they'd be out of the game before nightfall. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
- throwaway5959 4y ago
  Where do you think Apple is headquartered? There’s a lot the US government can do to make them heel.
rockinghigh 4y ago
Apple publishes the volume of government information requests across the world: https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/choose-country-region.html https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/choose-country-regi... They try to reduce their exposure to these government information requests; by keeping personal data on the devices and storing anonymized records on their servers when possible.
- firsttimebigboy 4y ago
  I remember hearing about these types of requests that also have a gag order placed on them so companies can't explicitly inform the public about them. I haven't heard much about that sort of thing lately though. Either very good or very bad.
  - jrockway 4y ago
    Keep in mind that warrants and gag orders are very much behind the state of the art. Apple might receive a request for all the information they have on you, and are absolutely compelled by law to give that to them. But unfortunately, the information is all encrypted with a key that only you know. So the government has no choice but to come to your house and hit you with a rubber hose until you tell them the key, but bad news! it turns out it's illegal to do that. They can't hit you with a rubber hose until a pesky jury has heard the evidence against you and returned a guilty verdict, which if they had, they wouldn't be probing your iCloud account. What is more of a grey area is whether or not a court can compel Apple to hit you with some malware. The government can ask "give jrockway a special firmware so that whenever he tries to shitpost on HN, the browser locks up until he types his iCloud encryption key into nsa.gov". What's not clear is whether or not Apple has to obey that request. It seems pretty likely that the government doesn't have that power, so Apple can tell them to go away. But who knows, it's perfectly possible to pass a constitutional amendment that literally says "Apple, Inc. has to dedicate 100% of their resources to spying on readers of the dark website Hacker News", and it's all moot. I've seen Congress (or rather, the states in this case) trying to agree on less controversial things before, though, and I'm not too worried about anything changing. (What's the opposite of pro? Con. What's the opposite of progress? Congress.) Encryption is literal kryptonite for democratic governments. Apple is putting themselves at the forefront of the debate. It will be interesting to watch!

Ha! If you think that apple does not work with governments all around the world and that you can take their word at face value you're going to have a bad time.

by x86x87 4y ago

Ha! If you think that apple does not work with governments all around the world and that you can take their word at face value you're going to have a bad time.

jrockway 4y ago

I'm sure Apple will give me up to China in a heartbeat, but I actually don't think they'll give me up to the US. It's all about incentives; China can say "sorry, you can't buy our cheap cheap capacitors anymore" and they go out of business. The US can write them a strongly-worded letter about how they don't love freedom, and it's their constitutional right to throw that letter directly into the trash while donating to the campaign of whoever is running against the letter-writer. Pesky constitution!! I always worry about how many FBI / NSA employees work at Apple/Google/etc. though. If you're doing a lot of illegal stuff, I'd avoid uploading the evidence to the Internet. Even someone with the best intentions writes software with bugs or hires compromised employees.

gabbaghoulie 4y ago
The entire organization that investigates leaks and supply chain tampering at one of those is formers and retirees of U.S. and allied intelligence and law enforcement communities. It is a large organization. It is itself a very small part of the organization containing it. This is not uncommon, of course. Cops work at Kohl’s and shadow the Zuckerbergs and bounce at clubs and set security policy at multinationals. I don’t get why this is weird unless you’re implying that working in LE or intelligence automatically makes someone untrustworthy. Which is odd, since half of the peace officer or clearance processes are establishing trust and creating an enormous hill to climb to successfully violate it. The threat model is obvious, and it only takes a moment of thought to realize that “ex-CIA person” you’re looking at with a cocked eyebrow was deemed by said organizations to be trustworthy enough to represent the interests of the United States or wherever they come from. Do they get it wrong? Sure. Is it as often as you think? No. You don’t hear the successes and the ratio is way lower than you think it is. There are hundreds of thousands of people who would disagree with your premise. Many of them have a quiet, nonzero involvement in ensuring you can safely share that opinion and eat, a majority are former military and had direct involvement in the same, and at the end of that they’d like to put the gun away and provide for their family. Why is that automatically suspect? It’s not like they’re walking out of government with an armful of implants. Put it this way: would you rather someone that the government spent millions of dollars training in, say, cybersecurity and active threat assessment end their career by buying and operating a movie theater or by making sure the Internet and power grid keep working? I’m about as liberal as it gets and even I can get there while acknowledging that occasionally those powers are used for malevolence. I’d counter that Sand Hill is just as capable of capitalizing that malevolence as Fort Meade and arguably more successful on some axes (no pesky laws). And sure, leak investigation is a bit stupid and mildly malevolent, but supply chain isn’t, and it’s also their prerogative to run their house as they wish. We’d all benefit from debating the policy instead of the person a bit more, I think.
- jrockway 4y ago
  Oh, I'm not making a value judgement. I think that these government agencies should absolutely try to get people into Apple adding secret undetectable backdoors that help them catch criminals. I also think Apple is completely within their rights to make them work for it. Basically, I totally agree with pretty much everyone that people who abuse children and upload pictures of it to iCloud should burn in hell. But I don't think that Apple should be compelled to add hell to iOS 17 if that makes any sense. If the NSA wants to hire double agents that pass the Apple interview process and add sneaky undetectable code that reports those people to them, I think that's great. I think I just like the chaos of it all. That's why nobody votes for me when I run for Congress or whatever.
  - gabbaghoulie 4y ago
    You are making a value judgment, though, even in your followup. You’ve implied that employment of one of those people is prima facie surreptitious, despite a carefully-drawn picture of how nearly all of the cases you’re gesturing toward are benign and not worth your ongoing concern. Foreign governments doing exactly what you’re alleging, on the other hand… To be honest, that opinion makes you unelectable because you’ve alienated a huge group of people (way, way bigger than you think, and across the political spectrum), partially by imagining the beltway and back rooms of FAANGs as a le Carré novel. Reality is boring. Do horror shows happen? Duh. But take PRISM, for example. PRISM is an efficient, automated legal warrant process to streamline subpoena and provenance of user data for national security purposes, nothing more, but everybody screamed oh my holy hell! because the Snowden slides didn’t contextualize that and could be taken to imply something far worse. It’s toil reduction. Ask anybody in compliance at major companies. Subpoenas are a huge bitch at scale and nearly all major companies have a PRISM equivalent facing the other direction precisely for the reason PRISM exists. It’s not cigar smoke and port mirroring but for some people that’s more fun to imagine, I guess. Seriously, reality in all of it is far less interesting than you think, and that’s one example of many. And often the fetishization of the secrecy and imaginative scenarios takes away from the real issue, which is market forces incentivizing the erosion of privacy and civil liberties. So ironically, by worrying you’re weakening the worry. I know this because I do.
kelnos 4y ago
To be fair, I recall seeing an article here a few days ago stating that Apple was moving a significant chunk of their manufacturing out of China. I don't think Apple is that dependent on China. I'm sure Apple has lines they will not cross. Maybe giving you up to China isn't one of them, but I'm sure they have them.
- DSingularity 4y ago
  Absent significant changes in world order no major company will ever be successful in severing relations with China. No nation today is positioned to be able to both bring up the manufacturing AND compel their people to work. Without the two no nation can match Chinas production and thus produce the alternative “cheap capacitors”.
somenameforme 4y ago
Apple is a key member of PRISM [1] and got on board just about the time their phone business started to skyrocket. Just because the media stopped talking about PRISM doesn't mean it went away. If anything I'd expect it's only grown more emboldened given the relatively tepid public response to it. I'd argue this is likely the real reason that Huawei was banned. The US 3-letter agencies agencies had the choice of bringing a Chinese company into the surveillance state web, having a phone on the market they have no control over, or simply banning those phones. As for incentive, big tech regularly flaunts nearly every single behavior that all of our anti-competitive clauses were meant to prohibit. 'Back in the day' Microsoft was targeted, and lost, an anticompete lawsuit for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. Now a days bundling everything in your own packages, locking down other companies into a an unescapable market where you impose a 30% tribute, buying out competitors to prevent competition, and more - that's all perfectly cool, somehow. If Apple, Microsoft, Google, et al stopped playing ball - they'd be out of the game before nightfall. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
throwaway5959 4y ago
Where do you think Apple is headquartered? There’s a lot the US government can do to make them heel.

rockinghigh 4y ago

Apple publishes the volume of government information requests across the world: https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/choose-country-region.html https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/choose-country-regi... They try to reduce their exposure to these government information requests; by keeping personal data on the devices and storing anonymized records on their servers when possible.

firsttimebigboy 4y ago
I remember hearing about these types of requests that also have a gag order placed on them so companies can't explicitly inform the public about them. I haven't heard much about that sort of thing lately though. Either very good or very bad.
- jrockway 4y ago
  Keep in mind that warrants and gag orders are very much behind the state of the art. Apple might receive a request for all the information they have on you, and are absolutely compelled by law to give that to them. But unfortunately, the information is all encrypted with a key that only you know. So the government has no choice but to come to your house and hit you with a rubber hose until you tell them the key, but bad news! it turns out it's illegal to do that. They can't hit you with a rubber hose until a pesky jury has heard the evidence against you and returned a guilty verdict, which if they had, they wouldn't be probing your iCloud account. What is more of a grey area is whether or not a court can compel Apple to hit you with some malware. The government can ask "give jrockway a special firmware so that whenever he tries to shitpost on HN, the browser locks up until he types his iCloud encryption key into nsa.gov". What's not clear is whether or not Apple has to obey that request. It seems pretty likely that the government doesn't have that power, so Apple can tell them to go away. But who knows, it's perfectly possible to pass a constitutional amendment that literally says "Apple, Inc. has to dedicate 100% of their resources to spying on readers of the dark website Hacker News", and it's all moot. I've seen Congress (or rather, the states in this case) trying to agree on less controversial things before, though, and I'm not too worried about anything changing. (What's the opposite of pro? Con. What's the opposite of progress? Congress.) Encryption is literal kryptonite for democratic governments. Apple is putting themselves at the forefront of the debate. It will be interesting to watch!