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Apple Shared User Data With Governments, Says WikiLeaks Email (dailydot.com)
"Please know that Apple will continue its work with law enforcement," reads an email from Apple's vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives, who reports directly to CEO Tim Cook, according to new documents this week on WikiLeaks. An anonymous reader writes:
In the email the Apple executive writes "we work closely with authorities to comply with legal requests for data that have helped solve complex crimes. Thousands of times every month, we give governments information about Apple customers and devices, in response to warrants and other forms of legal process. We have a team that responds to those requests 24 hours a day." The email was addressed to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.
But the context is missing, and could show a larger attempt to soften Hillary Clinton's position on encryption. While Jackson writes that at Apple, "We share law enforcement's concerns about the threat to citizens," she later writes "Strong encryption does not eliminate Apple's ability to give law enforcement meta-data or any of a number of other very useful categories of data."
The email also compliments Clinton for her "principled and nuanced stance" on encryption in a December debate against Bernie Sanders. Clinton had said "maybe the backdoor is the wrong door, and I understand what Apple and others are saying about that. But I also understand, when a law enforcement official charged with the responsibility of preventing attack...well, if we can't know what someone is planning, we are going to have to rely on the neighbor... I just think there's got to be a way, and I would hope that our tech companies would work with government to figure that out."
But the context is missing, and could show a larger attempt to soften Hillary Clinton's position on encryption. While Jackson writes that at Apple, "We share law enforcement's concerns about the threat to citizens," she later writes "Strong encryption does not eliminate Apple's ability to give law enforcement meta-data or any of a number of other very useful categories of data."
The email also compliments Clinton for her "principled and nuanced stance" on encryption in a December debate against Bernie Sanders. Clinton had said "maybe the backdoor is the wrong door, and I understand what Apple and others are saying about that. But I also understand, when a law enforcement official charged with the responsibility of preventing attack...well, if we can't know what someone is planning, we are going to have to rely on the neighbor... I just think there's got to be a way, and I would hope that our tech companies would work with government to figure that out."
fucking backstabbers
Closed source encryption = faith-based security.
Total surprise! It's why they've made sure they can't get through their own crypto...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
But the context is missing
That's the whole problem with all of these WikiLeaks emails. We see people shooting messages back and forth but we have no idea what conversations may have led up to, or occurred as a result of, each email. A lot of them are snippets of news articles and other research, looking for opinions and bouncing ideas around. We don't know what decisions were or weren't made based on most of this stuff because we're only seeing a small window into a much larger operation.
"If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged."
If you give ANY large corporation data about yourself, they can and will disclose that data to the feds, and a lot of the time to advertisers too.
The only way past all this is to take matters into your own hands. End to end encryption, so no one in the middle CAN disclose the contents. Do not use services that depend on centralized servers. Run your own servers if you have to for your friends and family to use for IM/vidchat/etc.
Stop centralizing the internet, and this will be less of a problem. We're here because everyone is so keen on discarding the original internet architecture and putting all our eggs in a tiny number of massive baskets, and then giving away the key.
If it was any more obvious, the jike would be lost.
Well, this one is for all you Apple fans who jumped up and down and breathlessly supported Apple over the Santa Barbara phone case.
The company you cherished and supported and defended and swore could do no wrong.... was stabbing you in the back and selling you down the river the whole time.
Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha
The truth is, big companies like Apple don't get to become big companies like Apple unless they sell out LONG before they get that big. They've ALL sold out. They ALL happily hand over your data all the time. You have NO privacy. NOBODY will protect you. And if you ever really believed otherwise, you were a fool.
Sig for hire.
I'm confused, isn't wikileaks pro-sharing? Isn't that all they do?
Firstly it's not selling it, Apple are responding to warrants as they're legally required to do. But notice the date? This was around the time the FBI was demanding back doors in phones. They're clearly lobbying to head off that. San Bernadino case being earlier that month.
*However*, the golden rule of security is you protect your own stuff. Because if there's an easy backdoor, the FBI will take it. Regardless of jurisdiction, your right to challenge the warrant etc. they will always take the easiest path, and if slapping a warrant on Apple is the easiest route that minimizes your chance to challenge their warrant, then they will do that.
Yeah, this isn't news. Anyone who followed the San Bernardino case knows the sticking point with Apple wasn't handing over user data to the FBI - they already handed over the guy's iCloud backups, after all - it was being required to write new code.
Essentially once it became clear that they weren't going to be able to get into the device without having to - gasp - do some software development, they balked. But up until that point, they were happily helping the FBI try and access that iPhone.
Apple never has and never will be "on their customer's side." They're more than willing to sell you out to the government at a moment's notice.
What did you think they did?
They make changes to make it impossible to turn over your data. But that will never be the case for some kinds of data, like when you last accessed your account, etc.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Garbage news? They were issued legal warrants on an individual case by case basis and responded to those warrants. Yes there were a ton of warrants but as long as they are input and responded to individually there is nothing nefarious happening unless I'm missing something. This is not news, this is how the government is supposed to work.
...but the headline is a bit clickbait-y.
How about you let us make our own judgements?
In this case, the facts seem to be that Apple follows the law, and that it's reluctant to enable a back door.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
In other news, water is wet, the pope is catholic, and bears shit in the woods.
If Apple can't help but making up bullshit language like this, by using the phrase "complex crimes", imo they can't be trusted.
I can ofc guess at what "complex crimes" might mean, but this is no way an objective way of describing things, this phrase is much too vague.
I don't know why the parent is moderated troll. If you want to be secure that is the correct assumption to make: be it true or false. The only safe machines are the one that you control - physically; nothing in the cloud can be 100% trusted.
However: there are levels of trust; how much of a target are you, how dangerous/important are your secrets ? For most of us most vendor/... security is sufficient since we are unlikely to be of interest to government spooks. But: get active politically, or in a trade union, ... and you become a target.
I am not talking of stupid companies like TalkTalk and Ashley Madison who just don't have a real clue about security or simply can't be bothered.
Of course any company will provide data to law enforcement upon presentation with legal orders to do so. Otherwise the company and persons involved with withholding the data could be held in contempt and may be an accessory if there was a crime involved. The idea that a company can simply choose which laws and lawful orders it will obey is some fragment of rebellion left in the minds of its leadership from the days when they were teenagers and in rebellion against their parents. Not obeying the law is a much more serious action and has potentially serious consequences. This is as it should be. Otherwise, Russia and Putin await these a-holes.
Translation: Please provide 'Blackberry' level of "concerns about the threat to citizens". She's not opposing corporate policies but is using weasel words to claim that "a law enforcement official charged with the responsibility of preventing attack" will be given some mechanism to defeat privacy and encryption.
Bring on the East German style of national security.
I mean, I really want a convincing answer that does not apply equally well to all the shit the security agencies of the "free countries" are pulling these days.
Have they uncovered anything embarrassing about Russia? Of course not.
Why are we so fooled by its propaganda?
The iPhone has been very successful in China. You can bet your last dollar that Apple has caved to the Chinese government.
In what must be the biggest surprise story of the week, Apple, a big corporation, acts like a big corporation. Jokes aside, the government is *Apple's* government, not yours. Like it's Exxon's or Monsanto's, or Koch whatever. It's called capitalism, a lot of you say you like it, so don't get all outraged when capital rules. And you don't.
Remember when the Clinton campaign actively conspired to defraud voters and steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders by rigging and corrupting the voting process? Good times. If you are or were a Bernie Sanders supporter, don't forget that YOU GOT FUCKED.
Also, Apple "complying with legal requests for data that help solve complex crimes" is not earth shattering news. Every fucking body does this. I'm an Apple hater from way back, and I'd love to see them crash and burn up like a Note 7, but come on, this isn't even newsworthy.
The question we should all be asking is "Why aren't Bill and Hillary both rotting in prison for their crimes?"
Slow news day, huh? This amounts to "Apple responds to specific court orders with specific information, as required by law." The headline makes this sound like they're secretly decrypting private data and sending everything to the government. Which they aren't. Not much to see here.
To all the Apple fanbois:
You're the pot calling the kettle black! You jumped all over Blackberry when they worked with governments.
Looks good on ya!
"Every security scheme that is based on secrets eventually fails." - Steve Jobs
The subtle difference between sharing data and writing a non-existent program to access data inside a device when no such program currently exists remains the key. Of course, Apple shares data which they have and can provide when they get subpoenas. They probably do it even without subpoenas under the assumption that the government is a good-faith actor. But such assumption was not enough (as far as we know) to force Apple to write a program which would have made hacking into their own devices possible. So this story DOES NOT contradict the claim that Apple did not help the government break into secure storage on iPhones. I am not saying that Apple didn't do it. But I am pointing out that there is difference between what this email says Apple did and what the government asked them to do in the instance which became famous earlier this year.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Any business that receives a legal document in the mail claiming to be from a LEA or government bureaucracy should verify the authenticity of it through at least two different, and separate, channels.
How many times of outing Timmy Cook will it take to get him and his succulent subordinates out of Apple Inc.?
We are waiting.
Ha ha
They fought and lost on exactly that turnover of data years ago when M$, ATT etc were already giving that information over with or without a warrant.
Yahoo! Lost and ended up spending millions in penalties before aquiescing.
Lots of things to hate on Yahoo! for, but that isn't one of them.
I was going to say it isn't really news- but it sort of is. The new part is that Apple is using their stance as a defense in emails to powerful people. The old part is that (a) Apple has metadata that is available to them and (b) Apple shares everything that they can with any government that asks. Apple will deliver, when given a lawful order, metadata, anything that isn't encrypted, and anything that they can decrypt. This includes everything in icloud.
This should, frankly, not be a surprise, but if you just glanced at the stories from last year, you'd be forgiven for thinking that. If you instead looked at the documents that Apple provides for law enforcement ( https://www.apple.com/legal/pr... ), or law enforcements own documents (which I can't easily google at the moment, but they are out there), you'll see that Apple basically hands over every single thing, every single time. For the older phones that weren't encrypted with a user key, they would unlock the entire phone. Every thing that they are technically capable of unlocking, they do. Since forever!
I also doubt they are in any way unique in this. It *is* the law, after all. It's also probably a big part of why Apple has added more and more user-only accessible parts to their phone, such as encrypting it in such a way that they can't read it (the phone itself, iMessage). Meanwhile, every piece of metadata is duly handed over, as they have access to that.
Basically, this is only a surprise if you didn't ever bother to look into it much, which, I mean, not everyone would. The new part is the email where they defend themselves to the Clinton campaign.
Citizen 4 had already shown in a leaked document (a PowerPoint of all things) that Apple, Facebook, Micro$oft, Google amongst others were already on the alphabet mafia payroll.
I will try to sum this up after reading several comments here: Apple is obligated to respond to warrants for handing over data they possess. This does not include any data encrypted on end-user devices, because Apple does not have the key, and Apple cannot defeat their crypto mechanisms to decipher the data without this key. Moreover, since there are no sweeping warrants allowed (for indiscriminately forking over the available data on every Apple customer), this is actually a non-story.