Apple Details US Requests For Customer Data 116
An anonymous reader writes "Not to be left out Apple has released details about government requests for customer data. The company said it received between 4,000-5,000 government requests, affecting as many as 10,000 accounts or devices. From the article: 'The iPad maker said that it received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement agencies for customer data from December 1, 2012 to May 31, 2013, and that 9,000 to 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in the requests. Apple did not state how many of the requests were from the National Security Agency or how many affected accounts or devices may have been tied to any NSA requests.' Facebook and Microsoft released their numbers this weekend."
Just keep calm, nothing to see here (Score:5, Insightful)
Less complaining, more fixing (Score:5, Insightful)
It's easy to criticize the status quo. It's harder to work on a long-term solution [metagovernment.org]. But the fact is, we won't be able to control the rise in totalitarianism in government if we continue to cede our control of the government itself.
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Theres not much help when even anti-authoritarian communities like slashdot are willing to submit to "think of the children arguments" when it comes to the 2nd amendment and 5th amendment [slashdot.org].
Or are the folks advocating their abolition truly the minority on here? I certainly hope so.
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Slashdot is not anti-authoritarian. Majority of slashdot posters, and certainly modders are liberal, which is as authoritarian as it gets.
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You must not have been around for very long. It gets much more authoritarian than that.
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I'm much more worried about the 3rd amendment. If the military controls the computers in our homes, shouldn't we call them soldiers and demand a just compensation for quartering them in our homes?
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They dont control the computers in our homes. PRISM means a lot of things, but thats not one of them.
Take a deep breath, and lower the hysteria about 2 notches.
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Hyperbole. Humor. Wikipedia.
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Shocked I am not. (Score:5, Insightful)
these are "normal" warrants that we knew about alr (Score:2)
The Government is doing what we said they could (and in some cases insisted) do. Not sure why everyone is acting so shocked.
look, these are just the normal warrants. like for robberies, drug dealings and such.
these are not the nsa secret mass warrants, since they're not at liberty to tell about those. but they can try to move the focus to the warrants we already knew all the fucking time about, since they're used in court regularly as evidence.
apple just jumped on this semi-revelations train since others did it too.
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look, these are just the normal warrants. like for robberies, drug dealings and such.
these are not the nsa secret mass warrants, since they're not at liberty to tell about those.
My interpretation is this: Apple (and probably Microsoft, Google, etc. ) have got permission not to tell us how many "secret" warrants they received, but how many warrants in total - secret and the "normal" ones. I suppose they won't be allowed to give the number of "normal" warrants anymore. So if they say "about 5,000" that could be 10 normal and 4,990 super secret, or 4,999 normal and 1 super secret warrant, we don't know. If you define "mass warrants" as "more than 10,000" then there were no "secret nsa
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If you demand security by all means, means will be tried that take away other things. So demand rights AND security. It's incorrect that we can't have both (as Bruce Schneier has iterated for the last 15 years).
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The Government is doing what we said they could (and in some cases insisted) do.
Yeah. I certainly voted for the allow the government violate the constitution and secretly interpret the law however they want and lie to congress about it provision. And of course the rest of my patriotic American comrades voted for too. It had that rider on it that allowed the executive branch to detain US citizens indefinitely without due process and even murder them if the president thought it was important. I check that part twice.
How do you vote against it?
Re:Shocked I am not. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Shocked I am not. (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps you meant "those who idly watched as the Patriot Act was passed are silly to be mad about the current events"? Not everyone who posts here "idly watched"...your post makes the incorrect assumption that everyone did -- apparently by the fact that the Patriot Act still remains active. Just because it remains active does not mean that there was a minority of those who were against it.
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Well considering many of us are outside your country where we were not able to object to your government passing these laws, but are still somehow subject to them, I think the outrage is justified.
Tech industry is not the problem, (Score:2, Insightful)
The problem is not technical at all, we have secret courts that account to no one, and have no public records - these are referred to as FISA courts but they could also be called Kangaroo Courts.
The second issue is the national security letters that companies like Apple, MS, Google and Yahoo receive - they cant even acknowledge that they got the damn letter! how re they then supposed to be upfront with their customers about what they hand over?
The problem is really that the judicial and legislative branches
Not the big problem (Score:2)
The big problem here is that the watchers entrusted with enforcing the laws have set themselves above the laws. Not exactly news but with more confirmation coming out every day more and more people are becoming aware.
But there are technical problems. Our technical systems (computers and the internet) are very poorly designed. I have been saying this since the 80s but everyone was focused on making something happen now, instead of designing it right so it would continue to work in the future. So we have comp
just FYI (Score:5, Interesting)
Another fun fact, terrorists don't tend to post giant posts on public areas like Facebook, Twitter, or Verizon text message with giant keywords like "nuclear bomb" and "terrorist attack" nor do they do it on the internet or a blog.
Re:just FYI (Score:5, Funny)
4 by terrorists on US soil.
The programs are working!
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Actually, my magic rock is what's helped to reduce the amount of terrorism in the U.S.. But, I'm afraid its magic is running out due to lack of finding. Perhaps you'd like to help fund my magic rock that keeps terrorists away? The government uses magic rocks too, but they toss in governmental jargon and slap acronyms on them to make it less obvious.
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You should start a White House Petition to fund your magic rock. Mine has permanent magic that keeps the Earth from flying off into space.
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The programs are working!
No, they're not. There are toddlers out there who are killing Americans at a rate even greater than the terrorist themselves!
It's long past time we declared a war on toddlers and do something save American lives. Think of the children damn it!
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Guns don't kill people, toddlers kill people.
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So by saying "nuclear bomb" and "terrorist attack" on a forum like Slashdot, by your logic, I've just been flagged as a non-terrorist?
For your information, I use nuclear bombs all the time in Starcraft II. Godamn zergs.
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http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/MSNBC/Components/Photo/_new/ss-130415-boston-bombing-tease.photoblog600.jpg [msn.com]
Yeah, that guy didn't die, because people saved his life (and many others) it wasn't because of lack of trying by the terrorists.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/specials/boston_marathon_bombing_victim_list/ [boston.com]
There is nothing like trying to minimalize tragedy to make a political point. You make me sick.
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The point (and it's a good one), is that we freak out disproportionately over things that scare us, like terrorism, and yawn at the things that kill many more people and are much more preventable (like children with guns).
We do more damage to our society with overreaction than the actual deaths and woundings by the attacks.
But all this is too complicated for your widdle bwain, so just repeat after me;
Baaa! Baaa! Baaa!
You scare the shit out of me.
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I get the point. I agree that we tend to freak out about loud noises (guns) and horrific acts (9/11, Boston) and over state their over all significance. More people are killed by clubs and bats than rifles, yet we are more scared of rifles, because they are "scary, loud", and not because people die. If people were concerned with people dying, we'd ban "assault bats".
But saying "only 4 people died" minimizes the tragedy. It flat out ignores the impact on other people, as if they don't matter at all. And equa
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More people are killed by clubs and bats than rifles, yet we are more scared of rifles
[citation needed] [snopes.com]
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citation given
original citation [fbi.gov]
Snopes says "Firearms", I said "Rifles". This is an example of not paying attention to the actual claim.
From the FBI's own statistics ... 323 (Rifles) vs 496 (Blunt Objects) (clubs / hammers).
You do know that SNOPES is not quoting the actual argument correctly now. Perhaps in the future you'll actually refer to what is claimed (rifles) and what SNOPES claims is claimed (all guns).
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citation given
original citation [fbi.gov]
Snopes says "Firearms", I said "Rifles". This is an example of not paying attention to the actual claim.
From the FBI's own statistics ... 323 (Rifles) vs 496 (Blunt Objects) (clubs / hammers).
Hammers are neither clubs nor bats, so even if we ignore the obvious fact that you left out all "accidental" deaths by focusing on murder, "no citation given".
"More people are killed by clubs and bats than rifles" [citation still needed]
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Now you're being a dickhead. Do you do that with every "statistic" or just ones you don't agree with. I gave the CLEAR example of the source, and my "quote" was meant to be illustrative of the point than actual "citation". But since you can't figure out obviousness of what I meant from the context of the actual citation, it is clear you lack higher level thought and understanding.
Here's one, WHY do liberals support banning "assault rifles*", when they account for so few homicides (subset of 323) ? Same reas
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Now you're being a dickhead.
Because I point out that you keep moving goalposts? Boo-hoo-hoo.
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Blunt Instruments as represented by "clubs and bats". Clear enough you moron?
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And as usual, you miss the point being a dickhead moron.
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And as usual, you miss the point being a dickhead moron.
Projecting, eh?
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Blunt Instruments as represented by "clubs and bats". Clear enough you moron?
Or like your intellect. Sure.
They don't call you guys "gun nuts" because you like guns - but because you are nuts.
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Talk about moving goal posts. I'm nuts because I point out facts that you can't seem to grasp because you're hung up on the nuances of written communication styles and equating them to being legalese. You're the kind of guy who says Clinton was correct when he said "I did not have sexual relations with that woman", because he didn't put his dick in her pussy, but rather put his dick in her mouth, when everyone else knows he was lying his ass off. He and Monica had sex, oral sex, and if that isn't "sexual re
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I am a Libertarian, so guess where I stand on the whole NSA thing. And to go further, they put Boston and surrounds under martial law, for one guy, who was caught by a guy violating martial law and noticed something out of sorts in his backyard. Most of the military police were not even looking in the right place. If he hadn't been shot, they would likely never caught him.
Re:just FYI (Score:5, Funny)
Guns are safe! Ban toddlers!
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Guns are safe! Ban toddlers!
I would be okay with this.
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Only an American citizen would say "guns are a necessary evil". You don't see the average Canadian, Australian, European or Japanese joe carrying a gun.
Canada has a higher gun ownership rate than the US.
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and a far greater percentage of those are hunting rifles and shotguns as opposed to combat rifles and pistols.
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But what about the toddler rate?
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Guns are safe! Ban toddlers!
You'll have to pry this toddler from my cold dead hands
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Bundling bags. They solve all manner of problems.
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11 people were killed by toddlers accidentally firing guns in 2013 and 4 by terrorists on US soil.
To be fair –most europeans would argue that this is pretty retarded ;)
Contradiction (Score:3)
"The most common requests came from police investigating crimes or searching for people". Searching for people would mean that each request would affect one account. 4,000-5,000 requests affecting 10,000 accounts implies that each request touched on average two accounts (a caller and a recipient?). In addition, it doesn't say how much data was slurped out of each request either - is it a particular imessage or a whole dump of all imessage records, or is it tapping all imessages to come?
Re: Contradiction (Score:1)
TFA also includes Apple's statements about what they don't/can't hand over. Which includes iMessage and FaceTime calls which are encrypted with a key they don't have. And some other data which they don't record in a way that can be split out on a per-user basis to respond to requests like these.
Unless you believe that is a lie of course.
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I would expect for se
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conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data. Only the NSA can.
But the NSA said there were only 300 requests! (Score:4, Interesting)
That can't be right. The NSA said there were fewer than 300 requests total, and they would never lie to us.
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Well um, it's pretty clear that the total here is for all US law enforcement agencies, so it doesn't contradict the NSA number, really.
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Right, because there are no government agencies other than the NSA who might have made those requests. Most of those requests were made by local police departments and are related to ordinary crimes, missing persons etc and nothing to do with national security.
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From the Guardian's Edward Snowden Q&A [guardian.co.uk] (definitely worth a read):
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They are legally compelled to comply and maintain their silence in regard to specifics of the program, but that does not comply them from ethical obligation. If for example Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple refused to provide this cooperation with the Intelligence Community, what do you think the government would do? Shut them down?
Put their CEO into jail?
Next we can discuss what their ethical obligation actually is. Which probably depends on the numbers involved. If there were a million requests per year, then I would assume that there are an awful number of completely innocent people hit by this, and the companies would have an ethical obligation to do what they can to stop it (and it would be close to a situation where citizens should overthrow their government). If say Apple received 100 such requests, then it is much more like
This is Transparency without actual Transparency (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft gave a bit of detail about how this is done:
"We are permitted to publish data on national security orders received (including, if any, FISA Orders and FISA Directives), but only if aggregated with law enforcement requests from all other U.S. local, state and federal law enforcement agencies; only for the six-month period of July 1, 2012 thru December 31, 2012; only if the totals are presented in bands of 1,000; and all Microsoft consumer services had to be reported together."
That way nobody can really tell what these numbers mean...
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Now they should release detailed data on requests from all other U.S. local, state and federal law enforcement agencies, excluding the FISA/NSA requests.
This wouldn't give any precise numbers, but it would give a better estimate- and no super duper secret information would have been released.
And how many "special updates" did they push (Score:2)
To unsuspecting people? The kind of updates that change your device into a traitor.
First claim that iMessage is encrypted end to end (Score:2, Interesting)
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This is the not the first claim. iMessage/Facetime were stated to be encrypted end-to-end in the iOS security whitepaper that was released in mid-2012.
As a general rule, relying on "online consensus" from people who are not reverse engineers, when attempting to determine how a technical feature works, is foolish.
Re:First claim that iMessage is encrypted end to e (Score:4, Informative)
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An updated link to the whitepaper: https://www.apple.com/ipad/business/docs/iOS_Security_Oct12.pdf
It contains the sentence "iMessage and FaceTime provide client-to-client encryption as well."
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Trusting the security of regular documents or files in the cloud is foolish, even when behind a password and encryption. Storing and transmitting ones core passwords through the cloud should be unthinkable!
The iPad Maker (Score:1)
Ads masquerading as news (Score:1)
Bang for your buck (Score:2)
What About Bulk Data Dumps to NSA? (Score:5, Insightful)
At first glance, 5,000 or whatever "government requests" doesn't seem that bad out of millions of accounts. But that number doesn't account for data that the NSA has access to from eavesdropping / backdoors, bulk data dumps, and data acquired via 3rd parties.
Truthiness (Score:2, Insightful)
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Actually it seems that they are being compelled to be a bit less than truthful e.g. must be aggregated with all LE requests, only for a specific 6 month period, only reported in bands of 1000's.
How does that make it not truthful? "We received between 5,000 and 5,999 requests" if the numbers were indeed in that range would be absolutely truthful.
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What, if anything, compels Apple and the others to be truthful about these numbers?
The fact that the truth tends to come out eventually. A few employees at Apple _know_ the correct numbers. In a few years time, a few ex-employees at Apple will know the correct numbers. And eventually, some ex-Apple employee who is really unhappy with the company will know the correct numbers and tell them.
Missing the point (Score:1)
Bullshit stats (Score:2)
Apple, Facebook etc. are already playing ball with the government, so you can safely bet they wouldn't release this info if the US government hadn't OK'd it first. That alone means the numbers are probably suspect and that the gov. actually wants Apple and everybody else to release this kind of info. The reason? They think the 10,000 number will actually encourage most people as 10k is a drop in the ocean as a precentage of people that live in the US.
The fact that the US gov feel the need to respond (via Ap
Never link to the actual source (Score:2)
http://www.apple.com/apples-commitment-to-customer-privacy/ [apple.com]
Two weeks ago, when technology companies were accused of indiscriminately sharing customer data with government agencies, Apple issued a clear response: We first heard of the government’s “Prism” program when news organizations asked us about it on June 6. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer content must get a court order.
Like several other companies, we have asked the U.S. government for permission to report how many requests we receive related to national security and how we handle them. We have been authorized to share some of that data, and we are providing it here in the interest of transparency.
From December 1, 2012 to May 31, 2013, Apple received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement for customer data. Between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in those requests, which came from federal, state and local authorities and included both criminal investigations and national security matters. The most common form of request comes from police investigating robberies and other crimes, searching for missing children, trying to locate a patient with Alzheimer’s disease, or hoping to prevent a suicide.
Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it.
Apple has always placed a priority on protecting our customers’ personal data, and we don’t collect or maintain a mountain of personal details about our customers in the first place. There are certain categories of information which we do not provide to law enforcement or any other group because we choose not to retain it.
For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers’ location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form.
We will continue to work hard to strike the right balance between fulfilling our legal responsibilities and protecting our customers’ privacy as they expect and deserve.
Apple is a for profit company... (Score:1)