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Comment by parliament32 | Hacker News Reader

>Tim Cook is not properly informed - which is very unlikely at this point

Humor me, why is this unlikely? Why is it not possible that (whatever three letter agency) grabbed a few engineers, told them to do X without talking to anyone else, at the risk of them and their families getting disappeared to a black site?

Besides, in security controlled jobs it's perfectly normal to not be allowed to disclose what you're working on even to your direct superior. This idea that Tim Cook / Apple PR must know everything that's going on at Apple is kinda ridiculous.

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Well, who scrubbed the emails? Who scrubbed the data center record? And the financial records and shipping records? Who hid the motherboards?

It’s going to take more than a couple engineers to cover this up completely.

Also, if the consequence for talking about this is being disappeared, why weren’t the Bloomberg reporters disappeared some time during the year they were working on the story?

And why exactly would a three letter agency do this to protect Apple?

It just doesn’t make any sense.

They're not doing it to protect Apple, they're doing it to protect their sources and methods within Apple. Tim Cook isn't a huge friend of the FBI (http://time.com/4262480/tim-cook-apple-fbi-2/) so if the FBI has a counterintelligence op embedded within Apple, they're going to want to hide it from Cook.

I think the idea that he has to know everything going on ahead of time or when it happens is certainly infeasible.

But while I'm not promoting some kind of executive supremacy, I don't feel it's a big stretch that the CEO can get properly informed of specific goings on of the company if the issue really lands on her or his plate. Even if there's some hole, having zero evidence that something weird may have happened on several thousand servers seems odder than anything.

That they must know everything is ridiculous, that they must be able to find out anything less so.

If the CEO can't find out (almost -thinking medical stuff) anything by asking then that company has a problem as do it's shareholders.

> Why is it not possible that (whatever three letter agency) grabbed a few engineers, told them to do X without talking to anyone else...

Even if that were possible it wouldn't account for all the discrepancies here. Bloomberg claimed that Apple worked with the FBI on an investigation and returned thousands of servers. Apple has strongly denied that which casts doubt on the rest of it as well.

> This idea that Tim Cook / Apple PR must know everything that's going on at Apple is kinda ridiculous.

He doesn't have to know everything, but he sure as hell would know "a foreign government is implanting spy chips into the hardware that is being sold to us".

A foreign spy agency isn't going to walk around with a sign saying, hey we planted this. The spy's sole purpose is to make sure Tim doesn't know about it.

So this spy doesn’t want Tim to know about it, but does want Bloomberg to know about it?

Because Cook would have known about the results of the security audits that were performed.

Accounting has audits too and there is still accounting fraud, mis-statements, theft.

We're commenting on Hacker News and we're believing that Tim is all knowing because of a security audit... against some malicious actor with the resources of a foreign state??

The flaw in your logic doesn't lie in your assertion, but the opposite:

If it's indeed possible for some powerful forces to coerce some engineers into accomplishing certain goals, how possible is it for the same said forces to coerce some other people into accomplishing some other goals?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation

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