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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?
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!
He's been a security focused sysadmin for years. Look him up on Wikipedia
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"
Quite honestly, does it matter if this is voluntary?
When you have secret laws which say "give us this or else", WTF difference does 'voluntary' matter?
Even the transparency reports say "we can't actually tell you what we did because we're under a gag order".
Unless the government no longer has secret laws, or tech companies stand up to them and implement tech which doesn't have built in security bypass ... voluntary don't mean a damned thing.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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 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).
You seem to be upset that Snowden leaked information containing the horrible acts of our Government and it's military, yet you're not upset that the government and it's military were doing these horrible things. I think your priorities are askew.
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.
There is no proof that he handed secrets to the Russians or Chinese. The whole article on that was made up by its authors.
BTW: People criticising the USA normally criticise the politics and actions of the USA. To call them America-haters is totally wrong. In two ways. First, there is a lot more America then only the USA. Use google maps if you do not believe me. Second, its the actions abroad that cause you low reputation. And three, your tourists often help to foster such reputation. Even though the last thing is hardly something that can be changed. We all have parts of our population which go on vacation and ruin our reputation. Ask the Germans and the British or even better ask the Italian and Spanish on the reputation of Germans and the British.
Apple certainly makes sure that your private life remains private and don't collaborate with government spies...
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
Well, one way could be put responsibility in hands of users or within product itself.
So even if some one comes up with "give us this or else", companies can just say go take it from device its yours. We dont have information you request but we can point you to person whom we sold the device.
This can make difference between companies that voluntarily cooperate and put backdoors and those that just choose to push this responsibility to end users and their devices.
Kidnapping, torture and war... for starters.. The spying? Eh...
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
Why is it that when the government does something that he doesn't like, it's "big government run amok" but when it's something that I don't like, I'm "an America hater"?
What would the Founding Fathers, which most conservatives uphold to be the absolute pinnacle of what our government should strive to be, say about the NSA's data collection on it's own citizens? I personally think they made it perfectly clear in the 4th Amendment, but that's just me.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
A source "with detailed knowledge on the matter" told Reuters that hiring screeners for Booz Allen had found some details of Snowden's education that "did not check out precisely," but decided to hire him anyway
Resume falsified, yup sounds like a typical "expert" to me.
You have bought into the administration smear campaign and government propaganda. Booz Allen isn't necessarily lying, here, but this statement, along with the ridiculously picayune reasons for rejecting candidates based on some detail not being perfect, it's likely something as innocuous as listing the wrong day of the month for a graduation, or misspelling of an instructor's name.
You might educate yourself by checking out the form Snowden was required to complete. I challenge anyone to be able to fill it out completely and include nothing that does not "check out precisely".
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
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.)
You're a troll or a moron. Look at this interview with Tom Harper, the author of that hit piece: http://edition.cnn.com/videos/...
All he says, repeatedly (besides "ummm"), is that he has no idea if the facts are true and he just wrote what people in the government told him to write. He's a stenographer, not a reporter.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Apple retains the keys for all of your devices, which is how one iMessage can be sent to multiple devices.
Do you actually know this, or is this your guess? Because my understanding is that iMessage encryption was designed explicitly to avoid having Apple hold the kind of private keys that can decrypt the message. I thought there was some scheme where each device got its own decryption key, and that those keys never left the device.
Add to that that iMessage silently falls back to SMS,
Well, not entirely "silently". Messages sent via SMS turn green, so you know whether they were sent via iMessage. You don't necessarily know ahead of time whether, when you hit "Send", your message will be sent via SMS or iMessage, but I believe that can also be turned off on the device itself, so that it won't fall back to SMS.
One thing I tell everybody who fills out the SF86 is, KEEP A COPY OF YOUR SF86. You'll probably fill it out more than once in your career. Starting from scratch is a gigantic pain and errors creep in if you have to look up older stuff from primary sources.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
How many countries on the American continents have "America" as part of their name, other than the USofA aka America? Do you really want the phrase "United States of America haters" to become a thing?
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.