The way this was worded is so plain and to the point, it's refreshing. I sincerely hope it's true! Great job on Apple and Tim Cook for laying it all out there.
Is the NSA lying in its internal slides to itself?
Is Tim Cook lying in his statement to the external world?
Is Tim Cook splitting hairs in some fashion? For instance, is he defining "backdoor" to mean "illegal backdoor", which therefore excludes everything done with the FBI/NSA under a veneer of legality?
We know they have active programs looking for holes in open source code and fuzzing commercial services looking for vulnerabilities. How is that so hard to believe?
Do you have links that show this is true?
https://www.apple.com/privacy/government-information-request...
I read these statements just a Mr. Cook laid them out.
If your comment was true, you would also assume data handed directly to authorities in criminal cases where subpoena's are issued would also be ruled out, but we know that information is handed out to authorities as required by law under subpoena.
So long as a company can be compelled to do this in secrecy, their assurances about "no backdoor", "no direct access", "we process every request ourselves" are basically meaningless, since not even they have control over their customers' privacy (if they comply with law.)
Same thing with allowing access to their servers. They may provide access to some other part of their infrastructure. The government agency may provide their own servers that are a mirror of Apple's in a way that does not require direct access to Apple's servers. And so on...
Tim Cook should have said something like "We do not provide bulk data to any third party."
In a strict sense that's probably not true, they may have to provide some form of bulk data to outside parties for accounting purpose for example. Trying to craft a statement to include those exceptions would just invite more hyper-parsing of the language.
Goddamn I hate the tinfoil-hat nonsense that happens here...