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Should Edward Snowden Trust Apple To Do the Right Thing?
Nicola Hahn writes: As American lawmakers run a victory lap after passing the USA Freedom Act of 2015, Edward Snowden has published an op-ed piece which congratulates Washington on its "historic" reform. He also identifies Apple Inc. as a champion of user privacy. Snowden states: "Basic technical safeguards such as encryption — once considered esoteric and unnecessary — are now enabled by default in the products of pioneering companies like Apple, ensuring that even if your phone is stolen, your private life remains private."
This sort of talking point encourages the perception that Apple has sided with users in the battle against mass surveillance. But there are those who question Snowden's public endorsement of high-tech monoliths. Given their behavior in the past is it wise to assume that corporate interests have turned over a new leaf and won't secretly collaborate with government spies?
He was aware of abuses. Brought them to light. What are his actual security credentials?
Is that you don't trust nobody.
I can't imagine actually 'trusting' Apple or any other corporation or government. Give them a pat on the back for making security easier - sure. Trusting them, not so much.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
None of the tech companies have been shown to be co-operating voluntarily with government spies. Telecoms have but not Google / Apple / Microsoft.
said Betteridge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The only real change as a result of this law is that the telecoms have to pay to collect & store the information that the Feds used to do themselves.
So now they'll have to get their secret court to rubberstamp a warrant for them instead of just emailing a request downstairs when they want some information on someone. Big whoop!
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Anyone characterizing that single line as an endorsement is just clickbaiting. It is absolutely appropriate to give apple praise for improving their baseline. Just because you recognize the improvements they've made doesn't mean you've left them off the hook for continuing on that path.
The article's author seems to be taking the tact that nothing short of perfection is worthy of praise. That's a recipe for maintaining the status quo.
It was one sentence out of an entire essay. I think Ed's point is to praise a direction the country seems to be taking, not single out Apple or even more ridiculously companies in general to just "do the right thing". The piece is about how the world has changed in the past 2 years, not about how we've arrived and a privacy shangri-la where corporations all do everything the way we'd all prefer.
It's still an open question how much we should trust companies like Google and Apple... with regards to their internal motivation and plans. However (anecdotally, at least) it seems pretty obvious these companies learned from Snowden's leaked documents just how much the government was screwing them, and they've seen how it's hit their bottom line - any trust that might've previously existed is gone.
Remember the (anecdotal) reaction of the Google engineers when they heard how the NSA was tapping their unencrypted intra-datacenter communications?
#DeleteChrome
The only way to win is not to play as a prisoner - so trust is not possible if you put two people in two separate rooms - or even less than that, one person in a room, with the threat of losing rights to property, freedoms... the "other guy" always looses. It's never like tv.
Snowden didn't really say that. I trust the New York Times to accurately report Snowden testimony in untranslated and undoctored form as much as I trust the Sunday Times to do the same. Tell a thousand truths to sell one lie is a common tactic of government regimes nowadays.
Lesson: Now we REALLY know we can't trust Apple. IT'S A TRAP!
Maybe because the only "evidence" of Apple involvement is a claim by government officials, which is self-serving to those officials only.
... and the check the links supposedly showing Apple is involved with spying on customers, you find the author is an empty wind bag trying to make a name for himself and failing miserably at it. Don't just take my word for it; go read the articles he links from his post. Absolutely none of those articles implicates Apple outside of accusations by the NSA; no documents, no dates/times/minutes of meetings, nothing verifiable, nothing believable.
Given their behavior in the past is it wise to assume that corporate interests have turned over a new leaf and won't secretly collaborate with government spies?
As long as there are secret government orders that companies are forced to comply with, you can never trust them.
The poster's interpretation seems completely off-base to me; not only is Snowden not encouraging us to blindly trust Apple et al with our privacy, he explicitly warns of the very danger the OP brings up.
As an iOS developer, my perception is certainly not that Apple is trying to grab our data instead of the government - in recent years, they have started a major cultural shift toward real protections of user data - simply not collecting it, encrypting it in transit, etc., etc., even if it's a burden on third-party developers to make the transition. This is a Good Thing, full stop. Props to Apple (as well as Google, who is also making its own efforts).
I like the title 'Freedom Act'...you can't make this shit up. I see you don't get many creative types in the propaganda department.
One nation...of lemmings.
Why do you assume that Snowden is not an NSA operative? An active one. He took a story which was in the public eye (the SLC building is huge so everyone knew about it) and turned it into a story about him for at least half of the population. He could have stayed anonymous. Instead he made the story that would have galvanized 80% of the population against NSA into a story that galvanized 30% of the population against him, 40% against the NSA and 30% not care at all. He couldn't do NSA a bigger favor if he tried.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I trust corporations to do the "right thing" inasmuch as PR dictates there is a public perception that this is important.
But I do not trust corporations to ever do the "right thing" out of a corporate sense of morality.
I expect corporations to act like vicious sociopaths trying not to be noticed and miming "the right thing" without actually giving a damn.
Trusting the moral compass of a corporation is a pathetic joke and a lie.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
"evidence" of Apple involvement
Evidence of their involvement in what? I didn't RTFA. I simply don't trust them on principle.
Snowden's comment has to be seen in the context of the recent comments by the director of the FBI demanding that companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft NOT provide default encryption to their customers. guardian.com/us-news/2014/oct/16/fbi-director-attacks-tech-companies-encryption
or not. Apple isn't going to care what this one person thinks and Snowden only cares how newsworthy people think he is.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Apple technically has end-to-end encryption, but the problem is the key exchange. Apple retains the keys for all of your devices, which is how one iMessage can be sent to multiple devices. The way it works is that the sender communicates with Apple's servers to obtain a list of public keys for devices registered to the recipient. The sender then encrypts the message once per key, and sends the encrypted messages to Apple, who then distributes them to each device. In theory, and likely in practice, Apple cannot see the contents of the messages transiting its servers, since it doesn't have the private keys.
But, as the custodian, Apple could add keys to this list at any time, including their own, or one at the behest of a TLA. This may or may not happen, so it's really a question of what risk you're willing to take. Their current method, if implemented properly, would prevent your plaintext messages from being swept up in mass collection, but without knowing the encryption method and the security details surrounding the keystore, you could still be targeted. Add to that that iMessage silently falls back to SMS, so if someone had the ability to block your tcp/ip traffic, the iDevice would transmit in the clear. It's an improvement over pure plaintext, but it's still fraught with risk and insecurities that will likely be exploited at some point, if the past experience is any indication.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Given their behavior in the past is it wise to assume that corporate interests have turned over a new leaf and won't secretly collaborate with government spies?
No, but it is wise to use free market forces to force corporate interests to offer encryption, to be seen as encryption friendly, and eventually to even be friendly to end-to-end user-controlled encryption.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Apple certainly makes sure that your private life remains private and don't collaborate with government spies...
Both have proven themselves untrustworthy in my view.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Why would you even ask that question?
They will do what's best for them, not "the right thing". That what Steve Jobs did.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
A little PR statement showing he can play ball and voila! I am interested to see what he brings with him, but that will be classified for a very long time...
And no, don't trust Apple. That would be absurd. All this stuff is for pacification.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
No, I don't trust Apple. Never have, never will. Closed source, closed minds.
By this, you mean, in the context of all the fan-boy phones the mindless hordes of tech blog lemmings forced on us AFTER BlackBerry, which, almost since inception, has been encrypted by default. Seriously, you have yourselves to blame for this.
To quote the Gipper. I am inclined to feel that Tim Cook understands the need for privacy and security, as a gay man. It would be nice to be able to take him at his word because he is sincere, but we cannot.
Without independent 3rd-party verification there can be no trust. Sorry Apple, I prefer to let the Chinese and Russians handle my data. They are equally scummy and bent on ruining the internet as the NSA, but at least they are not likely to rendition, dronestrike or merely civil forfeiture me.
This also applies to Google, Amazon, eBay, Verizon, Motorola, Intel, Cisco, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft, any US ISP, etc., etc. and especially AT&T.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
For apple maybe. Will they do the right thing for you? I highly doubt it. And if Mr. Snowden thinks they will, I would advise him to brush up on his history of that company.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
His statement reads like an Apple marketing "press release."
Or, maybe he's dead, and his identity assumed by a State Actor.
I see no reason to trust Apple or any similar companies whatsoever. They have betrayed consumers' trust in the past, have cooperated with illegal surveillance programs, etc. If a given company has cleaned up its act, great, but independent verification, open standards, etc. are the only way to gain assurance. Trust is irrelevant.
Regardless of how bad a corporation or government agency has been in the past, there's nothing wrong with lauding them whenever they take a step in the right direction. It might not get them all the way to the place you want them to already be, but they're all going to move in the direction of encouragement and what gets them better results. And the faster they get the positive or negative feedback, the more effective it will be. Continuously lambasting Apple today for something that Jobs did in the past will only make them not care about your opinion even more, since we're all pretty sure they're not going to be able to convince Jobs to change his view and publicly apologize at this point. The company will follow what gets them good PR and more money - so we've got to give them a visible path to what they want, that just happens to be sitting on top of what we want. Negative reinforcement is much better at convincing people to not get caught more than it does to just not do it.
"let's not, and say we did." Do you really think the U.S. and its tech giants would deconstruct the spying machinery, with all the investments made into it? The U.S. has decided it will spy and attack all other countries in the world, for its own benefit, and it will never go back on that policy.
Is "The Right Thing" treason? Because otherwise, how the fuck would Snowden know?
If you watch any of his speaking engagements in their entirety, he is always careful to state that, while things like this are better than what we had before the disclosures, it's more a case of things becoming "less horrible", not "everything's great now, move along". He always says we must keep pushing for more and more security, more and more ability to 'trust but VERIFY', more and more transparency.
See this as more like a parent praising a spoiled kid, who after acting badly for a long time, finally says "please" when asking for dessert, -- the kid's still a spoiled brat, but at least he's making a show of trying to be more polite and this slight improvement should be encouraged, in the hopes it will elicit more good behaviour.
CAPTCHA: liberty :p
If we really "trusted nobody", then nobody would ever build another electronic device. Heck, we'd have to pretty much destroy all of them we've got in use already.
(Say we're simply talking about a "security appliance" for your network like a box that handles junk mail filtering, or even a firewall. If you don't place any trust in the idea that the components making up the units aren't back-doored at the factory, secretly allowing leaks of the data that passes through them? Then why buy and implement them at all? Same goes for the firmware or software running them.)
I don't think the original poster was suggesting any company get a "free pass" .... Rather, it's an ongoing process where a company establishes trust over time by putting out products that get widely used and tested, and appear to be working as advertised. When it's discovered they didn't do so, then that trust level evaporates quickly and people look at other options.
So right now, yes, I have a fair amount of trust in Apple to protect my privacy. I don't "trust them absolutely" by ANY means. But the nature of the marketplace indicates to me that Apple has some strong motivations right now to make it a priority. (EG. They're competing with cloud services, head to head, with Google at the present time -- so they need to be able to show their products are advantageous over Google's because your data is safer from misuse or resale with them.)
We can only judge them on what we know they have done and are doing, not on what they MIGHT do in the future or don't know they are doing.
Apple is a profiteering corporation; not a human being. As such, it has only one purpose - the bottom line (profit$). Take as much as you can, and give back as little as possible.
Trust Apple? Sure, trust them to do what they will to increase profits. Trust them to make moral decisions? Nope. Not unless it prevents cuts to their bottom line.
"Trusting" a corporation is about as foolish as believing that a corporation "cares" about you. Corporations do not care because they cannot care. They are a legal fiction, not human beings.
It's all about the money. Always will be.
Political correctness is really just herd psychology pushed by insecure people who desperately seek social conformity.
When you have secret laws which say "give us this or else", WTF difference does 'voluntary' matter?
Lawyers.
If it is involuntary, the company pays intelligent lawyers to use the law to (1) hold the government to the law, even if secret and even if it's less protective than it should be. This in turn (2) makes the government less likely to make absurd requests and (3) costs the government resources, which provides at least some limitation on what they do.
It's not enough, of course--we really need more robust protections on the secret side by cleared personnel with automatic publication a decade or two down the line as a good first step--but it's a lot better than nothing.
If I were Snowden,I would just shut up and live a nice life in Russia. Find some nice girl(s), and don't give a shit..
If 'Right Thing' means lining the pockets of upper management, then yes he can.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
No.
Snowden shouldn't trust any one, he is what we call a vulnerable population... susceptible to any number calibers of bullet used by the US military and intelligence organizations.
Who do you trust?
"Bullshit" that is. Why should I "implicitly" trust hardware as praxis stated? You seem to be happy defending him, so explain that position. I assume risk using Software, but with hardware it's only full and unqualified trust or nothing? How on Earth do you come to that conclusion? Do you know what you are defending?
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
There is no continent called America. North, yes. South, yes. Central even, yes.
~The grand unifying truth is that the State's power to change us now exceeds our power to change the State.
What you have to understand in all this is motivation.
Google has ALWAYS has a significant monetary motivation to collect and analyze as much data as possible about you.
Apple has NEVER had that motivation. They just have never had a need to collect information about you because it doesn't do them any good, therefore collecting it is only an added expense with no return.
Now it turns out that no only does Apple not gain by collecting user data, in fact they have figured out how to PROFIT from not collecting user data - witness the current marketing push that makes the argument you should buy Apple gear because Apple values your privacy. That is a very clear, and very powerful message.
I don't think people here (or really anywhere) understand just what it means to the world that Apple is firing up its ginormous marketing engine to make privacy desirable...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Nobody should ever trust any corporation to "do the right thing". It's a well established fact that profits are first and foremost in consideration. Currently putting up a privacy friendly front may be deemed more profitable but in the long run that will flip flop multiple times until it no longer affects their bottom line.
Snowden should know that better than anybody.
Encryption should only be between sender and recipient, ever. The fact that a 3rd party is involved is ridiculous. Apple, Microsoft or any cloud service that has encryption is a joke. Choose to encrypt your own data with the encryption tool of your choice BEFORE it goes to the third party.
... feed the tuna mayo.
Why the hell don't we all just give it up and sign off on FOIA to each other?
I mean, all the people on the planet.
I'll know your shit; mine; theirs and everybody can have mine and stuff.
--
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one
~ John Lennon
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Especially as a publicly held company, apple could change management literally tomorrow.
The new management could monetize user data instantly.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Edward Snowden is a trader and I abhor the methods he used to collect the data that the Chinese and Russians now hold. Hr has weakened this country and deserves the highest order of punishment.
Snowden is a spy and traitor. He has done irreparable harm to intelligence agencies and has put people at risk. Several months ago he made the comment that this wasnt about him. My advice - STFU and go away
5 Core members: Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Yahoo
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Sadly, a Libertarian cannot force his views on another, and freedom cannot spread as does the cancer known as religion.
"That isn't true, nor was my statement an ad hominem"
Yes it was. Moron.