How do you know it was Steve Jobs that prevented Apple from joining earlier? Perhaps Apple just wasn't a priority for the NSA until 2012.
That's incitement enough to try to get them on board.
Why go after the myriad of handset manufacturers when you could just get the network providers on board?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobileMe
.Mac: July 17, 2002 – July 9, 2008
MobileMe: July 9, 2008 – June 30, 2012
iCloud was launched on October 12, 2011, one year before Apple entering Prism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
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.
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.
http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/10/27/mystery-solved-why-st...
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.
It is really simple.
Simply drawing attention to the fact that his attempt at anonymity acts a key personal identifier in this instance.
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.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/06/steve-jobs-security...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA
http://www.cracked.com/blog/five-fun-facts-about-the-cia-and...
1. Whether you're likely to voluntarily leak any secure information.
2. Whether someone who dug up some dirt on you could blackmail you into leaking secure information.
Or as the saying goes, it's fine to have a mistress, but having a mistress that your wife doesn't know about is a problem...
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.
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.
Apple not being a priority for NSA until Oct 2012? Pfft.