Reply to post: Re: The end of Apple

Re: The end of Apple

@Marketing Hack

Excellent debating points :-)

1) It's always going to be difficult for Apple to argue that it's an unreasonable burden. The modifications being asked for are comparatively simple, a few lines of code only, even if they target it at only this one specific phone. And any half decent programmer worth their salt could find the right module and make those changes whether or not they've worked on iOS development before. Even if Apple lost all their development staff, there would always be devs that could be hired in.

2) I'm not so sure about that. A few months ago some senior FBI bigwig gave a public statement along the lines of them giving up trying to prevent atrocities, presumably because now it's too hard to get any useful tip-offs from Internet services.

You can kinda see their point of view. There's 300 million Americans, I suspect they receive very little in the way of useful tip-offs from the public and they can't possibly snoop the old fashioned way to a sufficient extent way without America becoming a police state or the FBI falling foul of accusations of racial profiling, etc.

Basically he was saying that as things stand right now the FBI is effectively there simply to pick up the pieces afterwards. Now Apple are, for better or worse, making even that hard.

I see the FBI's decision to have this raised in a public court hearing as highly indicative of an organisation that's practically given up and is only too happy to pass the buck. The relationship between the FBI and Apple management had clearly broken down to the extent that the FBI decided to completely wrong-foot Apple, who I'm convinced never imagined that this request would ever become public knowledge.

However, I don't think that the FBI has done themselves, the US public, or anyone else any favours leading up to this. Their case against Microsoft, trying to force a warrant for access to an MS data centre in Ireland bypassing the mutual assistance treaties that exist between the USA and Ireland, is a complete and utter joke. MS have every right to be pissed off with it because it places them in an impossible legal Catch 22 situation, and Ireland is pissed off because their sovereignty is being threatened. We all believe in the rule of law, but stretching it to that extent discredits the law. It is hugely unnecessary and it's not surprising that companies like Apple are not exactly well disposed to comply.

The tech companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google, MS, and Apple do need to take care. If they make too much of a point of not letting the Feds into their systems, they take on the implied responsibility for policing their own systems. But they don't do it very well.

For example, Facebook recently got caught allegedly acting as a conduit for child pornography in a journalistic investigation by the BBC here in the UK. Facebook, an organisation run by a man whose wife has just had their first child, apparently does not effectively police the material it hosts to identify those who would harm people like his child. I hope MZ has paid attention to that point.

If they truly succeed in locking out law enforcement then nasty people will realise that they don't need to go to all that bother with Tor anymore, they can just use Facebook or Twitter or iCloud or whatever. The policing job could then become a huge burden on the companies, and they'd be getting the blame every time they foul up.

I said 'implied responsibility'. It's not written down anywhere, but it could be in some future news headline. All it would take is some hideous act that truly revolts the US (or any other) population to be somehow associated with use of their services and their reputations would be seriously harmed. "We don't let the Feds in" might be great advertising, but it's no good if everyone is saying "Ok, but you do let paedophiles in...".

In short, locking out the Feds means they run a risk of losing their business to a nasty headline in the morning newspapers.

3) If the FBI do win in court on this matter then any dev tempted to play silly buggers would be well advised to think carefully about their future. If the order is deemed to be a valid court order, impeding it or sabotaging it would risk the wrath of the court as well as the FBI. It'd pretty much be a straight-to-jail job.

4) A lot of us non-Americans do find the deep seated distrust of the federal government, well, odd. There's no equivalent feeling in, for, example, the UK, certainly not to the same extent. I've had bizarre conversations with people who work for the federal government, yet hate it vehemently (and not just in a my-job-is-crap way). That's difficult to understand. It suggests that there's something wrong with the way America is run, yet most people I've spoken to firmly believe in the correctness of the Constitution and the way power is divided between executive, legislative and judicial branches even though it results in the existence of the Federal Government.

The way I see it is that the governmental system makes it extremely difficult for anyone to get decisions made and laws passed on difficult and nasty topics (e.g. just how much snooping powers should there be). Yet in the fast moving dynamic world, decisions and laws have been urgently required. So it's been fudged. Repeatedly. Over many decades. Throw in the heavy duty lobbying that goes on and it's kinda inevitable that the System doesn't work well.

Anyway, if Apple do lose the case and cannot persuade any of their American staff to work on it, they may have to depend on foreign employees to do the actual work.