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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."
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.
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.
Since when does metadata equal them giving up access to the device? Metadata is things like what IP it last checked an iTunes account with or how many IOS devices you have. Yes, you ARE an idiot.
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
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.
AC US Constitutional protections are not a series of blocked tubes to work around to spy on people.
Color of law does not get around the US Constitution.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Because Apple announced this last year. This is only news to the people that don't pay attention in the first place.
"any of a number of other very useful categories of data"
Phone number ?
Customer who bought the phone , their name, and address ?
Credit card used to buy the phone ?
Balance on their iTunes account ?
Last time it was accessed ?
There is a heap of data Apple has which does NOT include any data that is on the phone, and when given a valid warrant, Apple and every other company in the world will comply and hand over that data.
This is entirely consistent with Apples stance on protecting user privacy, by encrypting the end users data with keys they do not have they can not hand anything over, likewise with end to end encryption, Apple is not privy to any chat data and can therefore not hand anything over.
So, you have any PROOF to say otherwise, please give it, paranoid delusion is not proof.
No. Two-faced liars spewing a totally different hue of vomit in public than the shit they spray with Hillary in private.
All evil motherfuckers. All criminals. All corrupt.
Your desires of what should and shouldn't be done don't affect what is done.
Learn to love Alaska
Constitution restriction doesn't apply here as actions are done under authorized warrant for law enforcement. That is explicitly allowed.
*Individual*, very specific, and narrow warrants yes, but not general warrants, they are expressly forbidden.
However, our current crop of politicians, bureaucrats, federal judges, and TLAs seem to be of the opinion that they can violate the US Constitution with impunity by waving a 'national security' flag around. Sorry, but national security, illegal drug traffickers, child porn, copyright infringement, etc etc...none of these trump the Constitution and civil rights.
Government no longer honors the limitations to its' power and scope set out in its' founding document which are the only things which give it legitimacy.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
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
It's not with disclosure by warrant, it's disclosure by " other forms of legal process". I don't know of any other form of legal process that permits release or use of any user data without the user's express permission (including "metadata").
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
...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.
Metadata doesn't exist, all data is data.
The government doesn't really care if you just asked for direction, if you are in contact with someone they don't like you are a criminal.
They even kill people just based on "meta"-data.
Ex-CIA director – We kill people based on metadata
And here is a YouTube clip if you think that veteranstoday just made it up.
Former NSA boss: "We kill people based on metadata"
Since when does metadata equal them giving up access to the device? Metadata is things like what IP it last checked an iTunes account with or how many IOS devices you have. Yes, you ARE an idiot.
You know what else is metadata?
The key that data has been encrypted with.
That is right, it's just data about the data, not the actual data itself.
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.
Yeah, how dare they comply with legal court orders rather than risk contempt fines and sanctions!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
The US government doesn't give American corporations the choice of saying no. This is why American Corp = Untrustworthy.
Metadata is more useful.
Contents of email, chats, voicemail, etc., are less important than who you talked to, when, and where. The number of times you communicate with someone says how important they are. It tells people who your friends really are, in spite of what you /say/ about your friends. If $JOE_FBI asks you about $RANDOMPERSON and you say "I don't know $RANDOMPERSON" and the metadata says you talked to $RANDOMPERSON 8 times last week, that's significant. Metadata is also more searchable and compact.
Metadata tells you who is an active member of an organization, to be rounded up and imprisoned later - one that $JOE_FBI might be assigned to or simply has a grudge against.
Saying "it's not equal to them giving up access to the device" is minimizing the importance of metadata.
--
BMO
LOL try harder to hear what you want to hear.
"a number of other very useful categories of data" != "everything".
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
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.
but not general warrants, they are expressly forbidden.
You may think so. And it may have been the writers' intent. But the decision about what The Constitution means is relegated to (usually) 9 individuals (currently 8). I am going to go ahead and assume (despite the thin veil of anonymity) that you are not one of those individuals. And until their majority states otherwise in a court case, the choice to use such warrants remains available to the executive.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
The provide data when warrants are issued. They don't get a choice in the matter. Every other company does the same thing.
Are agnostics skeptical of unicorns too?
Yes, it means everything.
What I like to call "Bartcop's razor" went something like this
Any 'mistake' that adds to the wealth, power or prestige of any corporation
WILL be repeated unless there is a strong disincentive (like prison) to stop it
So yes, "a number of" means EVERYTHING!
Oh, I'm aware that the federal government is using general warrants in complete violation of the US Constitution while trying to avoid any cases making it to a SCOTUS ruling, at least until they have the court comfortably packed with friendly justices.
That is the danger of allowing 9 politically-appointed, unelected individuals to be the ultimate power to "interpret" the Constitution, as what the definition and scope of "interpretation" is and encompasses always broadens and becomes increasingly politically and ideologically biased.
People are increasingly losing faith and respect for the legal system and the government as a whole as the weight of political corruption and cronyism, which scales proportionately with the power, size, & scope of government, becomes increasingly worse. History shows that when that faith and respect drops below a certain point among enough people, really, really bad things happen. In other countries it has often led to violent revolts and revolutions. No nation whose people do not as a whole generally believe in its' leaders and government can remain standing.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
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.