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Apple takes down ICE tracking apps after pressure from DOJ

foxbusiness.com

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Re: Apple takes down ICE tracking apps after pressure from DOJ

#241

Post by saurik »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #235
jjav wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem isn't the centralized control, it's the power the governments have. The governments will always have the power, that's pretty much built into the definition of government. So, technology needs to be built with this reality in mind. Thus, avoid all centralization.

The governments will always have the power, that's pretty much built into the definition of government. Not the definition of our government. Our founding documents state that "Congress shall make no law" along the lines of what Apple is being pressured to do here. And the executive branch isn't supposed to be making laws at all, even though that's what they're doing. As the GP says: the problem is the power. But whe…

It isn't just our government: Apple sells these devices around the world and they pull the same shit in every jurisdiction, and so the Chinese government has been granted by them an extremely powerful axe to just ban software they dislike, a tool they use quite often, forcing Apple to pull apps for VPNs and other P2P tools used by protesters to coordinate in a world where the Internet is locked down. If you are going to create a device and sell it in this world, you have to understand how this world works, and in this world, if you create and defend a centralized bottleneck, you WILL become a patsy.

Re: Apple takes down ICE tracking apps after pressure from DOJ

#242

Post by renewiltord »

saurik wrote: post #238
renewiltord wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

FWIW, you are legally required to pay your taxes, and there are going to be serious consequences to your life and your family's life if you don't; the moral decisions in that situation are much more difficult. However, Apple obviously is not and never was legally required to build a centralized App Store... hell: it isn't even clear that that it is legal that they did it, and these arguments are still playing out in…

[flagged]

Re: Apple takes down ICE tracking apps after pressure from DOJ

#243

Post by saurik »

b_e_n_t_o_n wrote: post #163
jjav wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem isn't the centralized control, it's the power the governments have. The governments will always have the power, that's pretty much built into the definition of government. So, technology needs to be built with this reality in mind. Thus, avoid all centralization.

The government is a centralization of power, it doesn't matter if our devices are "decentralized" if the government can simply make it illegal to use unlocked devices. Or encryption. Or VPNs. Etc.

But that isn't how this has worked, even in places like China where the regime would seem to have that level of power: while they absolutely require Apple--who went out of their way to create a bottleneck on software and information that is just too juicy not to assert external control over--to remove various apps from their store, it is not actually illegal to own or use unlocked devices.

Re: Apple takes down ICE tracking apps after pressure from DOJ

#244

Post by appleFanboy25 »

sherry-sherry wrote: post #223
appleFanboy25 wrote: post #181

[flagged]

The app doesn't do that. It gives people a heads up that constitution-hating armed forces are in the area, forces that can search you and tear up your home without a warrant. This is happening now. Armed and masked intruders who don't have to identify themselves should be forced out of cities. Those federal employees should be shunned for the rest of their lives for blindly enforcing the whims of a dictator.

> Armed and masked intruders

You mean federal law enforcement officers

> The app doesn't do that.

With a name like ICEBLOCK, how would one ever come to the conclusion that the app might be blocking federal law enforcement from carrying out their sworn duties!

> enforcing the whims of a dictator.

You mean a president that was elected twice. The hysteria really does make me laugh.

Re: Apple takes down ICE tracking apps after pressure from DOJ

#245

Post by bigyabai »

no_wizard wrote: post #51
stingraycharles wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t Apple mostly interested in making more money, though, instead of spending money? The way I see it of all the top tech giants, Apple has the most to lose with all the tariff shenanigans, so it’s in their [shareholders] interest to stay friends with the current administration. Apple has never had moral values other than earning money by making great products. And I say this as someone who is deeply embedded in th…

Part of the brand after the FBI fiasco was about being a privacy forward company that didn’t simply capitulate to government demands on a whim. They demonstrated in smaller tests they were willing to put up a fight for those principles. That of course was now almost a decade ago. They seem to have changed their entire messaging and with it, seemingly their interest in being more than a ROI machine. It’s a regression…

> but this was legitimately a step in the right direction I felt

I'll steelman against this, but only because I really enjoy entertaining the idea. Even back then, it was a branding farce. The San Bernadino event was in 2015, pretty close proximity to the Snowden leaks which disclosed Apple's 2012 cooperation with PRISM. Best-case scenario, it was an extremely lucky press junket; worst case scenario it was a false-flag operation designed to manufacture trust from the ground-up. In the aftermath, Apple cooperated with local police and federal authorities perfectly well, and the passcode to the shooter's phone did eventually come out. Apple continued providing device access in situations where warrants were issued. They even dropped their eventual charges against NSO Group.

If your tinfoil hat isn't tight enough yet, we're talking about events that happened over a decade after the Halloween documents. Apple's executives (and the three-letter spooks) know that Open Source can ship attestable and secure software that trounces their best paid UNIX or Windows Server subscription on the open market. If the goal is to expand surveillance and you've got a coalition of sycophantic tech executives (somehow, imagine that haha), then it would almost be trivial to program endless RCEs into the client-side with "secure" binary blobs. All the "E2EE" traffic can get copied onto tapes and sent to a warehouse in Langley. Would be like taking candy from a baby.

Re: Apple takes down ICE tracking apps after pressure from DOJ

#246

Post by mlrtime »

beeflet wrote: post #197
andsoitis wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re still not shaming me.

If you buy apple products, work for the company or own its stock then you are financially facilitating this. I don't know who you are and I don't care, I am just saying this is the basic cause and effect. Things cannot improve unless stakeholders use their levers to change or abandon the company.

I do 2/3 of those things and have no problem with what Apple is doing. There is no universal right side in this. This being a top comment here doesn't make it true.

Re: Apple takes down ICE tracking apps after pressure from DOJ

#248

Post by pmdulaney »

I'm not a lawyer and I have no insider information, but I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is concerned that if anything happened to an ICE agent, they could be criminally and civilly liable if it could be shown that the attacker became aware of the location of the agent through use of the app.

Re: Apple takes down ICE tracking apps after pressure from DOJ

#249

Post by saurik »

renewiltord wrote: post #242
saurik wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, you are legally required to pay your taxes, and there are going to be serious consequences to your life and your family's life if you don't; the moral decisions in that situation are much more difficult. However, Apple obviously is not and never was legally required to build a centralized App Store... hell: it isn't even clear that that it is legal that they did it, and these arguments are still playing out in…

[flagged]

FWIW, this much should at least be pretty obvious: if you go far far far out of your way to do something that no one required you to do to defend something that pretty clearly leads to a specific result, you are certainly MORE complicit in the results of that action than if you take an action that you are required to do at gunpoint and which only very indirectly and at very low impact causes the result (to the point where I don't even think the analogy of the Nurenberg Defense applies... but, I guess you aren't claiming to understand it well).

Like, I dunno... it just feels like such an ingenuous argument to try to claim that paying taxes -- of which only a very small percentage could possibly be claimed to cause this specific problem, particularly so as this exact same issue happens with iPhones in other countries (such as China, where Apple has become a very clear patsy to the regime and "complicit" barely scratches the surface of their involvement anymore) -- is somehow similar to actively defending the existence of a bottleneck on information and access to software that has time and again been used for censorship and authoritarian control.

Re: Apple takes down ICE tracking apps after pressure from DOJ

#250

Post by tempodox »

x1unix wrote: post #119
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #3

Methinks this won’t be the last politically-motivated removal from Apple’s App Store; the more apps they remove then the more they weaken their own arguments about how a locked-in walled garden is in consumer interests.

Apple removed a lot of apps from the store in order to stay present in Russia. Just business

Only goes to show how the U.S. are becoming more like Russia by the day.
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