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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 enfor

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.
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    > PRISM is an efficient, automated legal warrant process to streamline subpoena and provenance of user data for national security purposes Dropping the euphemisms, it's a for cops to do their job easier. That's cool when they're doing it transparently, with sufficient oversight and protections against abuse, and with a high success rate. The extent to which any of those three is true is pretty dubious. Even if you truly do believe in this, which I totally understand–I have plenty of friends who work in this area, they are really behind the whole "we protect America" thing and I'm guessing you're probably in a similar camp–the issue is even more fundamental: it's one of attitude. Just because you're doing something good doesn't mean you have the right to have your job made easier. That's just not how it works. You don't get to take nuclear secrets and work on them from your personal laptop on the beach, no matter how pure your intentions are. When you work on things that are "dangerous" you don't get to just do whatever you want. The PRISM leaks were a scandal because they made the American people feel like the government was not accountable to them, and that is the price you have to pay to do anything in this country. End of story.

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.
- saagarjha 4y ago
  > PRISM is an efficient, automated legal warrant process to streamline subpoena and provenance of user data for national security purposes Dropping the euphemisms, it's a for cops to do their job easier. That's cool when they're doing it transparently, with sufficient oversight and protections against abuse, and with a high success rate. The extent to which any of those three is true is pretty dubious. Even if you truly do believe in this, which I totally understand–I have plenty of friends who work in this area, they are really behind the whole "we protect America" thing and I'm guessing you're probably in a similar camp–the issue is even more fundamental: it's one of attitude. Just because you're doing something good doesn't mean you have the right to have your job made easier. That's just not how it works. You don't get to take nuclear secrets and work on them from your personal laptop on the beach, no matter how pure your intentions are. When you work on things that are "dangerous" you don't get to just do whatever you want. The PRISM leaks were a scandal because they made the American people feel like the government was not accountable to them, and that is the price you have to pay to do anything in this country. End of story.