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Comment by molecule | Hacker News Reader

It seems peculiar that Apple is a signatory:

> Sincerely,

> AOL, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo

and their logo appears in the listing @ the end of the page, but their logo isn't in the beginning of the page, and they don't provide a quote from their CEO nor legal counsel, per the other signing companies.

Last-minute change of heart, lukewarm support...?

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I wondered about that as well. Last-minute inclusion seems most likely explanation, but very odd.

If you have ever worked on something like this, you will know that merely getting these companies to agree to have their logos on the same page is a feat. They are listed in alphabetical order, and I imagine there was MUCH discussion about their relative sizes. But it can't be that Apple is disputing their logo size, since it's included at the bottom.

They can't be that particular, they're even using the old Twitter logo at the top.

I was hoping to see Amazon.com signed on to this as well, given their substantial position in cloud computing, and their likely future influence being even greater.

The fact that the CIA is one of their largest AWS customer might be playing a role. http://www.forbes.com/sites/benkepes/2013/10/29/ibm-capitula...

Yeah that's a suspicion on my part as well. Same reason we'll never see Oracle on a list like this. In the recent interview with Charlie Rose, Ellison wouldn't even remotely come close to challenging what the NSA was doing (he also pulled a cheap dodge by saying the great thing about living in a democracy is the people can do something about it if they want to).

If you saw Palantir on the list, things would be pretty amazing :)

How can we check that the letter and the page were actually signed by these companies? What if it's all fake?

Update:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/press/2013/dec13/12-08co...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/09/technology/tech-giants-iss...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/09/nsa-surveillanc...

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