Three years ago, Edward Snowden made defying government mass surveillance a cause celebre. Ever since, tech companies have been in the vanguard of those championing this cause.
From day one, however, I’ve been decrying their hypocrisy and the ignorance of their customers. This excerpt – from “Complaints about NSA Spying Are Schizophrenic … and Misguided,” June 8, 2013 – is illustrative.
__________________
Americans complaining about the government spying on them is rather like Kim Kardashian complaining about the paparazzi taking pictures of her…
In this Information Age, tech companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, and WikiLeaks are masters of the universe. But they have created a schizophrenic human species – whose members share everything about everything, yet claim to be zealous about their privacy.
Only this explains the growing national outrage over the government’s National Security Agency (NSA) monitoring their promiscuous and indiscriminate digital footprints. But there’s no explaining why these nincompoops think it’s okay for tech companies to spy on them to sell them stuff, but not okay for the NSA to do so to keep them safe.
Not to mention how they blithely give up truly sensitive personal information for the convenience of buying stuff with credit cards. After all, records collected from such transactions make the generic phone records the NSA collects seem even less intrusive than a traffic cop’s speed gun.
But all we need is for terrorists to pull off another 9/11. For the same people venting outrage about government surveillance today will be venting even greater outrage over the government’s failure to monitor the footprints of those terrorists (i.e., connecting the dots).
__________________
Except that it’s one thing for tech companies to exploit the ignorance of their customers to sell them stuff. It’s quite another for them to defy a court order to help the government keep their customers safe.
Yet this is the incomprehensible and untenable defiance Apple is mounting today as if its corporate life depends on it.
The U.S. Department of Justice filed a motion on Friday seeking to compel Apple Inc. to comply with a judge’s order to unlock the encrypted iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters, portraying the tech giant’s refusal as a ‘marketing strategy…’
The Justice Department said its Friday motion was a response to Apple CEO Tim Cook’s public statement Wednesday, which included a refusal to ‘hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers.’
‘Rather than assist the effort to fully investigate a deadly terrorist attack … Apple has responded by publicly repudiating that order,’ prosecutors wrote in the Friday filing.
(Reuters, February 19, 2016)
Unsurprisingly, other tech companies are supporting Apple; its defiance furthers their commercial interests. But it is utterly stupefying that ordinary folks are doing so too. After all, judges routinely sign warrants which force us to open our homes for all kinds of searches and seizes. They sign similar warrants to force us to even give hair and blood samples.
Therefore, Apple must believe its customers’ iPhones are more inviolate than their homes, even their bodies. Only this belief explains its defiance. Never mind the schizophrenic premise upon which it is based; namely, that people who use iPhones to share everything about their private lives want Apple to protect their privacy.
Meanwhile, Apple’s compliance with the Chinese government makes a mockery of its defiance against the American government. Not least because this betrays the fact that Apple is all too willing to sacrifice customer privacy for corporate profit:
Detractors of Apple’s decision to refuse to hack an iPhone owned by one of the San Bernardino shooters for the FBI have questioned why, if the company feels it must protect ‘the security of its customers’ it apparently complied with the Chinese government’s demand to show it secret data one year ago.
In January last year Quartz reported that according to Chinese news agencies, Apple agreed to let the Chinese government perform ‘security checks’ to confirm that there were no ‘backdoors’ that might let the U.S. government read Chinese citizens’ data. The country had threatened Apple’s access to the Chinese market.
(London Daily Mail, February 20, 2016)
And if you believe the Chinese government used Apple to protect the privacy of its citizens, your naiveté is matched only by Apple’s hypocrisy.
To be fair, though, Apple merely did what other tech companies have done. I decried their hypocrisy over a decade ago in “Google Adopts Bush Administration’s Motto of Moral Relativism,” January 26, 2006.
__________________
Just days ago, I joined others in praising Google for defying the Bush Administration’s demand for information about the Internet searches and surfing habits of its customers. Google insisted that Americans had a reasonable expectation that their online activities would remain private.
Yesterday, however, Google made a mockery of that principled stand by following the compromised path into the Chinese market, which Microsoft, Yahoo, and other tech companies had already blazed. Like them, Google agreed to help China’s totalitarian government spy on and censor its citizens’ use of the Internet in exchange for market access.
But the headline for this latest example of corporate hypocrisy should read, ‘Google enters China but leaves its conscience back home.’
__________________
Of course, Google won fame and scorn in equal measure for writing in its code of conduct the motto, “Don’t Be Evil.” Therefore, it must reflect the company’s consciousness of guilt that it removed this motto as an organizing principle when it reorganized under new parent Alphabet last fall.
The point is that U.S. tech companies have been helping the totalitarian Chinese government invade the privacy of its citizens for years. Yet they would have you believe that – in refusing to help the democratic American government invade the privacy of one dead terrorist – Apple is standing on sound corporate principle. This should strike even stupid Americans as not only hypocritical but patently absurd.
Not so long ago, Hollywood stars like Robert De Niro acted as if doing commercials in America were déclassé while acting as if doing them in Japan were cultured. But their hypocrisy pales in comparison to that of Silicon Valley CEOs like Tim Cook – who crusade for civil liberties in America while helping to crush them in China; not least because the hypocrisy in this latter case pertains to matters of life and death.
To be fair, Apple is arguing that if it complies in this case, the government might force it to develop code to unlock every iPhone ever sold; further, that terrorists might hack this code. But this smacks of the specious, immoral, slippery-slope argument Swiss bankers once used to keep private the accounts of Nazi swindlers and narcotraffickers.
In any event, as indicated above, just as the police have the right to search any home pursuant to a judicial warrant, they should have the right to search any phone. More to the point, notwithstanding Apple’s propaganda about protecting your privacy, if the police have never had probable cause to search your home, chances are they will never have probable cause to search your phone.
On the other hand, Apple defying the government in this fashion is no more hypocritical and absurd than Edward Snowden complaining about U.S. mass surveillance while hiding out in Russia. After all, mass surveillance in Russia rivals what Apple helps government officials execute in China.
I can’t make this stuff up, folks. But I’ve decried it in many commentaries, including “More Evidence Snowden Leaks Undermining Global Security,” June 16, 2015, “From Spycraft to Stagecraft, Snowden Debuts as Putin’s ‘Useful Idiot,’” April 22, 2014, and “I Spy, You Spy, We All Spy,” July 2, 2013.
All the same, it gives me pause that buffoonish Donald Trump proposed the only meaningful way Apple’s customers can react to its defiance: They can boycott Apple products. Granted, Trump’s presidential campaign seems like little more than an organized version of the drug-induced meltdown Charlie Sheen acted out on TV a few years ago. Nonetheless, on this, I agree with Trump.
Alas, for most people, boycotting would be like cutting off your nose to spite your face. Indeed, late-breaking news is that its customers, for whom Apple can do no wrong, are organizing protests this week in cities throughout the United States. They intend to protest what they see as government persecution of Apple. Like I said: nincompoops!
This is why, given its willful failure to obey this court order, the only hope is for the judge to impose a fine for contempt that makes even Apple hurt where it counts.
Stay tuned.
Related commentaries:
Complaints about NSA spying…
Google…
Snowden leaks…
Useful idiot…
I spy…