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Apple Details US Requests For Customer Data
An anonymous reader writes "Not to be left out Apple has released details about government requests for customer data. The company said it received between 4,000-5,000 government requests, affecting as many as 10,000 accounts or devices. From the article: 'The iPad maker said that it received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement agencies for customer data from December 1, 2012 to May 31, 2013, and that 9,000 to 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in the requests. Apple did not state how many of the requests were from the National Security Agency or how many affected accounts or devices may have been tied to any NSA requests.' Facebook and Microsoft released their numbers this weekend."
Just keep shopping America, pay no attention to the camera over your shoulder. I mean if you don't have anything to hide, you have nothing to fear.
I got here through a series of tubes
It's easy to criticize the status quo. It's harder to work on a long-term solution. But the fact is, we won't be able to control the rise in totalitarianism in government if we continue to cede our control of the government itself.
The Government is doing what we said they could (and in some cases insisted) do. Not sure why everyone is acting so shocked.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
The problem is not technical at all, we have secret courts that account to no one, and have no public records - these are referred to as FISA courts but they could also be called Kangaroo Courts.
The second issue is the national security letters that companies like Apple, MS, Google and Yahoo receive - they cant even acknowledge that they got the damn letter! how re they then supposed to be upfront with their customers about what they hand over?
The problem is really that the judicial and legislative branches have given the executive too much power, and this isn't a Red vs Blue thing, Bush was bad, Obama is bad, and whoever is next will be as bad or worse unless we fundamentally change things bacl to the way they were structured under the Constitution/.
11 people were killed by toddlers accidentally firing guns in 2013 and 4 by terrorists on US soil.
Another fun fact, terrorists don't tend to post giant posts on public areas like Facebook, Twitter, or Verizon text message with giant keywords like "nuclear bomb" and "terrorist attack" nor do they do it on the internet or a blog.
"The most common requests came from police investigating crimes or searching for people". Searching for people would mean that each request would affect one account. 4,000-5,000 requests affecting 10,000 accounts implies that each request touched on average two accounts (a caller and a recipient?). In addition, it doesn't say how much data was slurped out of each request either - is it a particular imessage or a whole dump of all imessage records, or is it tapping all imessages to come?
That can't be right. The NSA said there were fewer than 300 requests total, and they would never lie to us.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Microsoft gave a bit of detail about how this is done:
"We are permitted to publish data on national security orders received (including, if any, FISA Orders and FISA Directives), but only if aggregated with law enforcement requests from all other U.S. local, state and federal law enforcement agencies; only for the six-month period of July 1, 2012 thru December 31, 2012; only if the totals are presented in bands of 1,000; and all Microsoft consumer services had to be reported together."
That way nobody can really tell what these numbers mean...
This was the discussion on Slashdot: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/04/07/2029233/is-the-dea-lying-about-imessage-security Here was Schneier's piece, noting concerns: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/04/apples_imessage.html I couldn't find the white paper you refer to on Apple's site, though there are references to it elsewhere. This article (with a dead link to the white paper) makes no mention of iMessage, though it does refer to other aspects of iOS security: http://securitywatch.pcmag.com/none/298642-nothing-new-in-apple-s-ios-security-guide
At first glance, 5,000 or whatever "government requests" doesn't seem that bad out of millions of accounts. But that number doesn't account for data that the NSA has access to from eavesdropping / backdoors, bulk data dumps, and data acquired via 3rd parties.
I am a Libertarian, so guess where I stand on the whole NSA thing. And to go further, they put Boston and surrounds under martial law, for one guy, who was caught by a guy violating martial law and noticed something out of sorts in his backyard. Most of the military police were not even looking in the right place. If he hadn't been shot, they would likely never caught him.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
An updated link to the whitepaper: https://www.apple.com/ipad/business/docs/iOS_Security_Oct12.pdf
It contains the sentence "iMessage and FaceTime provide client-to-client encryption as well."