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?
