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Comment by Alien1Being | Hacker News Reader

Apple :

"In 2012, Apple joined the PRISM data collection program run by the National Security Agency (NSA)."

"The firm added that between 1 December 2012 and 31 May 2013 it received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from US law enforcement for customer data, involving between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices. It did not say with how many it had complied."

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just as a point of comparison, google had 25,879 requests involving 42,500 accounts in approximately the same time period (january 1 through june 2013)

google complied with ~65% of the requests

("fun" tidbit: the number for the last half year are 304,915 requests for 748,478 accounts, and google complied with.... 98%!)

The question is, how much data NSA accesses in a single request. The official rules have changed but the "two hop" rule permits the agency to recover metadata from about 25,000 phones with a single request, according to 2016 Stanford study.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/nsa-can-legally-access-metadata-of...

In addidition to the official request NSA infiltrated links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-in...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6641378

You think they don't put in requests for optical taps anymore?

Google's privacy ain't main/one of main selling point since we all know how things work in ad business.

If apple was principally against sharing those things they wouldnt be joining the very organization made for that.

Plus any public statement from anybody, unless forced by court, shouldnt be taken as facts. We have no way of knowing if it was 25k cases or 25 million cases, and they have no reason to tell such non-public truth if its harmful to them.

my comment is primarily to give a sense of scale.

you don't know whether "4,000 to 5,000 requests" is a lot or a little if you have no point of comparison.

i am not commenting on the conclusions, everyone should have the opportunity to draw those themselves.

> google had ... requests

Official requests.

>Official requests.

obviously.

i dont have access to the number of gag-order requests, and if i did, i wouldnt be posting them on hn

I didn’t find this in the article where did this come from? I remember when Apple suddenly shutdown the developer network to deal with a security breach in 2013.

https://giga.law/daily-news/2013/07/22/apples-developer-site...

Credit to Steve Job's, he wasn't too interested in joining PRISM. Reasoning was never given but I would suspect it was part his anti-establishment bent, part trying to not damage the brand if it came out.

It was only once he passed than Apple went all in on it.

One could even say it was very convenient for them that he passed.

Definitely, he may have been the architect of digital jails but he did seem to care about his prisoners. Tim Cook is just a free for all but with some nice marketing.

Whatever number they give publicly on how many US law enforcement requests they received you can be sure that number won't include anything they turned over the NSA which is probably everything in their cloud all of the time. We know they backdoored the devices (https://www.cultofmac.com/news/nsa-spyware-allegedly-gives-b...)

from NIST [0] to AT&T [1], the NSA has always had a backdoor into huge swathes of data created or transmitted through whatever means along with having Congress laws passed to retroactively make all of this collection legal [2]

it really makes you wish that the lesson the Ruby Ridge far-right took away was simple anti-authoritarianism and not the antisocial tendencies of racial separatism and a Judeo-Christian theocracy

[0] https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs181/projects/ethic... [1] https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-whistleblower-who-unc... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(...

I will argue that Judeo-Christian theocracy tempered even more egregious "rule by might and violence" that has always been a real factor

I think the exploits of the Inquisitors across the millenia especially post-Cathars when torture and mass slaughter were recommended tools for religious indoctrination might be a bit a counter-factual to this (but religious history is not my most strongly studied area)

> you can be sure that number won't include anything they turned over the NSA

Once the requests number in the tens or hundreds of thousands, including NSA requests isn’t going to result in ‘Ha, gotcha!’

Are any of the requests identifiable?

You understand that there is difference between US law enforcement and the intelligence community? And that all service providers are required, by law in almost ALL countries, to respond to legal requests from their governments? What you are citing is not any serious evidence of some shadowy conspiracy between apple and the "government".. Not that I believe Apple's bullshit about protecting users privacy, but you're grasping at straws there.

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