This is a financial disaster waiting to happen. Microsoft is oblivious if it is not doing something to divorce itself from the NSA.
Apple, on the other hand, could have come out smelling like a rose, but following the death of Steve Jobs, who apparently refused to play ball with the NSA, it stupidly jumped on board to join the PRISM club.
According to the Prism slides, it really looks so:
"Dates when Prism collection began for each provider
Microsoft 9/11/07
Yahoo 3/12/08
Google 1/14/09
Facebook 6/3/09
PalTalk 12/07/09
YouTube 9/24/10
Skype 2/6/11
AOL 3/31/11
Apple (added Oct 2012)"
Steve Jobs: February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011.
If it's true, it's one reason more to deeply admire him.
And can you just imagine how much more sales Apple would get now for not being on that list?
That reminds me of Putin a little bit. Even if you think some leader is an asshole, sometimes you need an asshole to stand up to an even bigger bully. I just imagine someone like former president Medvedev (and with no Putin in sight) would've offered Snowden to US government on a silver platter, just like France, Spain, Portugal and Italy tried to do (fortunately unsuccessfully). I remember I was very much against Putin when he fought the US' anti-rocket shield, but over the past few years I've started to understand why he would do that. No country should own the whole world.
I don't think mtgox was implying principle, just a willingness to resist, even for the wrong reasons. ("You can't imprison dissidents. That's my job.")
You might find some of what you're looking for on the wikipedia page I linked to. But courts are only very rarely the place where accusations against heads of states are examined, especially when it comes to superpowers.
Anyone who serves in a role as top leader of a country or large corporation is an asshole -- it's a job requirement.
What you're seeing in Putin is the ability to be independent. He gets to enjoy watching the Americans squirm at low cost. What's the US going to do to Russia? Our diplomats will be rude to each other, maybe we won't attend the Russian summer ball and snub the Russian ambassador, each country will declare some spies persona non grata.
At the end of the day, the areas in which the Russians and Americans cooperate are areas that they have a mutual interest to do so.
Others, like the Germans or Spain are different. They piss off the US, we cut off the faucet of intelligence, money, privileges, etc.
For those who know Formula 1, I think Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley are the sort of examples that might work. Of course, some would say they are and were the bullies that needed standing up to. Heh, I suppose that gets us to the terrorist / freedom fighter type debate!!!
What amazes me is that among those corporations with revenues in the tens of billions of dollars, not one of them challenged the constitutionality of the decision in court. Not one, not once.
Not that it would be necessary in an obvious case like this, but each one of Microsoft/Skype, Google/Youtube, Apple and Facebook could easily have hired the nation's best and brightest one thousand lawyers at $1,000 an hour, full time for 10 years to defend privacy. It would have been well within their means. Yet, each of them chose to back down. Each of them chose to fail their users' trust.
I don't think its due to cowardice. If these organisations cared the slightest bit they would have acted to protect their users. Not in the wildest scenario would the US government have jailed the leaders of Apple, Google or Microsoft. My best guess is they got something in return.
It's possible that there's as-yet undisclosed legal action with some of the others; the secrecy around just about any proceeding in the FISC makes it very hard to tell.
> The judicial Power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.
Congress certainly does have the 'say so' -- at least with 'inferior Courts'. That still leaves the Supreme Court though as final arbiter.
I'd like to agree with you. I believe there is a category of societal actions that constitutes a court of justice within the framework of a civil society; secrecy doesn't fall into that category.
Not in the wildest scenario would the US government have jailed the leaders of Apple, Google or Microsoft.
That may be naive. Most people have skeletons in their closets. The government would use these to pressure those leaders to acquiesce. I suspect the most dangerous skeletons are ones which seem harmless to you, but cast in the proper light they can be used as a justification for punishment. E.g. Something which seems harmless now can retroactively be used to claim you were doing insider trading. Few people would step up to defend you, even if the charges are baseless, because recently it's been fashionable to hate capitalists, and trading stocks is the epitome of capitalism. So it'd be very much "obey us or we will litigate you into bending your knee anyway."
Jobs was immune because he was the CEO equivalent of a rockstar. To try to pull baseless charges against him would outrage the public. Yet I'd imagine the public would get grim satisfaction out of seeing Ballmer punished, even if the charges were baseless, because most people don't like him. It's shallow, but it seems true.
On one hand, the CEO of Qwest was convicted of insider trading, and he claims it was retaliation by the NSA because Qwest would not participate in warrantless wiretapping.
On the other hand, the federal government had a perfect excuse to prosecute Steve Jobs in 2006 with the options backdating scandal, but chose not to. Those would not have been baseless charges--Apple really did backdate those options. The government just concluded that Jobs was not personally culpable.
Well, PRISM seems to have been created in '07. Plus Apple didn't matter very much in '06 -- not in the same way Google mattered. Apple didn't have much user data for the government to be interested in, because iPhone didn't launch till June '07.
That's actually a perfect example of leverage that the government would have used against a technology company to pressure them into doing the government's bidding.
I remain astonished that Martha Stewart was targeted, convicted, and jailed. I don't care either way if she did some thing wrong. I care about the unequal application of justice.
In contrast, I can't imagine anyone targeting Oprah. She'd destroy (PR-wise) anyone challenging her. Recall that beef lobby's attacks.
I agree - it's what I mean when I say that I think they got something in return for not fighting the FISA requests. Could be antitrust cases that were dropped, tax hikes that were cancelled or more personal matters.
It's been my observation that revenue in the tens of billions of dollars doesn't enable a company to make bold, risky moves -- it hinders it. People become very risk-averse when there's a lot to lose. Many of these well established, high revenue companies can't even take the risks that are necessary to continue having revenue in the tens of billions of dollars, much less stand up to nation-states.
For all we know, some of them may have challenged it but they cannot make those details public because they're not even allowed to admit the NSA requested such information to begin with.
I wonder what would a Tim Cook-made iMessage look like from a security standpoint (probably a lot more like Skype/Hangouts than how it works right now).
* Apple distributes the encryption keys
* Multiple keys can be associated with an account (iPhone, Mac – and the NSA?)
* Apple can retain metadata
* Apple doesn't use certificate pinning
My understanding is that this isn't that bad. If you use iCloud, then the NSA can read your old messages. If you don't sync your iMessages with iCloud, under the assumption that not every iMessage gets encrypted to an NSA key in addition to the recipient's keys, your messages are safe until the NSA/other law enforcement explicitly targets you, and even then, they can only read new messages and not previous ones.
"And can you just imagine how much more sales Apple would get now for not being on that list?"
Barely any change at all, I'd bet. And not worth the legal hassle they could have been up against if it came to a knock-down, drag-out battle with the US Government over <spins the dial>.
I can imagine that U.S. companies wouldn't do anything, but European companies would be much more motivated for transition. As we speak, the top managers in Europe do try to find an alternative and everybody likes the easy way out. At the moment, baring some other potential compromising evidence, Apple would be such a way was it not on the Prism slide. Transitioning to big the powerful non-compromised Apple would be probably valued as less pain than transitioning to your in-company-made Linux distribution.
Seems like "Think Different" was more real than "Don't be Evil". Even with all the Apple's closed ecosystem.
This reminds everyone to look at different angles when we criticize people/companies and understand that, even now, an individual makes a lot of difference.
It's conjecture, but it's likely. Apple as a company has put a high value on user privacy, which was heavily influenced by Steve. He was also known for maintaining a high degree of personal privacy for such a public figure (for instance, refusing to put plates on his car).
This reminds me of a friend of mine who proxies all his web traffic through something which strips user agents and referrers. It's very easy for me to tell when he visits my website, because the logs show "-" for each of these fields.
>This reminds me of a friend of mine who proxies all his web traffic through something which strips user agents and referrers. It's very easy for me to tell when he visits my website, because the logs show "-" for each of these fields.
I wonder if the best strategy, then, is to figure out a very common user agent string and use that. The EFF's Panopticlick might be a good start: https://panopticlick.eff.org.
That's really interesting. It sounds like an easy way to get targeted by the people who do want to track you, though. Still -- do you have any idea what he uses for that?
Apple is a company producing consumer devices, while the others are companies offering Internet services, which is what PRISM targets. Apple has only recently had some success in the Internet services space with iCloud.
The main difference before iCloud was that you had to pay for it. I can however remember that I've had free .me account before iCloud, so even .me must have had enough users.
Well, in the NSA's eyes, that main difference is important. Free (and highly pushed by the very popular iPhone and iPad) meant people actually starting using iCloud. The cost-benefit analysis shifted tremendously from .mac/MobileMe.
It is fun to think of Steve Jobs as the lone person saying "fuck you" to the NSA. But it isn't realistic. It isn't like the other companies are run by meek people who love bending over to authorities.
I can remember that I've had a free .me account before iCloud, so I believe even .me must have had enough users: it was freely available to every iDevice user. There were millions of them fast.
How does that follow? It is not just about the cost, but the amount of utility for the NSA. There are plenty of free services that are not on the PRISM list and I am sure even Apple employees would freely admit their pre-iCloud user numbers were disappointing. They would not have bothered to rebrand the service in the first place if they had a significant userbase.
Looking at the PRISM company list, we are talking data service companies with users in the tens of millions (minus the oddball Paltalk). Apple just wasn't in that group until recently.
I find it hard to believe that the NSA didn't see one of the most valuable and popular companies in the world as a priority until 2012. I bet they were salivating as soon as the first iPhone launched.
I don't think that would effect his chances. All of our latest presidents have admitted or have been proven to do illegal drugs of some sort. Not to mention that the U.S. government has done some crazy things with drugs, especially LSD.
Having gone thru the sec clearance thing in the 90s, the third thing is if you have financial issues (like an expensive addiction with much income) and some foreign intelligence service can "help". So they're pretty interested in finances. Which wouldn't have been a problem for Jobs...
A friend in college wanted to be an FBI agent, so I got to hear alot about this.
I believed they polygraphed you about drug use, and I recall that they had a threshold number of "experimental" sessions with marijuana that were ok, as long as you disclosed them during the background check and polygraph.
I remember an Australian talking about the various levels of clearance - confidential, secret negative (anything stand out in your history), secret positive (in-depth active examination of your history). He said that the process wasn't about finding dirt on you, it was about finding out if you had any dirt that could be leveraged against you. For example, if you were gay and being outed would be a problem, then that's leverage. If you didn't care and were clearly open about it, that's not leverage.
That harmonizes with my experience. I was interviewing for a "top secret" job with the US and spent some time studying the system and looking over the appeals rulings of the clearance process.
Generally, the key things were, "are you a crook? are you liable to be bribed/coerced?".
E.g. one chap was a transvestite, but the appeals court ruled that since his wife and minister knew, it wasn't something that could be leveraged against him.
Possible but unlikely. Steve Jobs was very influencial within Apple. Jobs' opinion was almost certainly a strong factor. Apple had been a leading and popular mobile phone manufacturer for many years before 2012, why wouldn't the NSA be interested in them?
Apple, on the other hand, could have come out smelling like a rose, but following the death of Steve Jobs, who apparently refused to play ball with the NSA, it stupidly jumped on board to join the PRISM club.
According to the Prism slides, it really looks so:
Steve Jobs: February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011.If it's true, it's one reason more to deeply admire him.
And can you just imagine how much more sales Apple would get now for not being on that list?