Tim Cook’s Company-Wide Email on Hkmap.live Doesn’t Add Up

I'm not intimate enough with any of the parties involved in this situation, so my reply will also be comfortably generic:

Yes, it's a reasonable demand. If public opinion is asking something of Apple, and its CEO chooses to answer, every aspect of the answer is open to scrutiny. Gruber indeed lists the specific evidence he would expect:

> - When was HKmap.live “used maliciously to target individual officers for violence”?

> - When was it used to “victimize individuals and property where no police are present”?

> - What local laws in Hong Kong does it violate?

It's unlikely that a CEO would be so thorough. Apple is particularly obsessed with secrecy, and tech companies in general seem to not want to disclose details when they restrict access to a product or platform.

But it's still a reasonable demand from an individual standpoint.

This is exactly what authoritarian governments do. They muddy the truth and make official and important sounding institutions make official statements that paint a situation in exactly they need it to be to further their own goals. I don’t understand how anybody can trust any information that comes out of the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau when the whole issue is that the HK government is no longer independent.

And beyond the actions of the Chinese government, corporations like Apple have no integrity upon which to base trust for them anymore. They need to cough up real proof instead some canned response that basically tells us to trust them on blind faith alone.

> Moreover, what are these incidents where protesters have targeted individual police for a premeditated attack? Can Mr. Cook point to a single example? Can anyone?

The message stated that they had credible sources. That really should be enough in that type of communication. He was not trying to make a court case providing evidence he was describing the company decision to employees.

Now if there actually haven’t been any such cases then it adds question to the sources not to Apples decision or communication.

And really you can’t expect a company like Apple to start employing foreign government spies to infiltrate government institutions in order to provide credibility checking of information provided. If the police are saying they have reports of misuse of the app and violent attacks Apple has to act on that.

I'm just not sure what that evidence could look like. Like I said, don't we have sufficient evidence that this app was used to organize protests in Hong Kong, and that some protesters in Hong Kong committed violence against officers and against individuals and property where no police were present?

As for Hong Kong law, I can agree that it might be nice to cite a specific law, but I also don't find it at all difficult to believe that any government would have a law that allows the government to prohibit a communication medium that is being used to organize anti-government protests that have been sometimes violent.

I agree that Apple's stated rationale for removing the HKmap.live app is embarrassing and the removal is a capitulation to China's government.

The reasons China's government has decried the app are bogus, but those false reports and allegations do not originate with Apple.

However, Apple appears to be accepting those reasons at face value and probably because Apple is kowtowing.

Regarding whether iMessage is free from backdoors, Apple has given no reason for anyone to believe they are outright lying about the technical features of their software and hardware or their position regarding privacy.

In other words, Apple appears to be caving into pressure from the Chinese government and Apple are openly admitting this surrender.

However, Apple has not to date lied about what they are doing and we do not yet have a reason to doubt their representations about the security of their encryption.