[1] https://bsky.app/profile/matthewdgreen.bsky.social/post/3lhl...
nothing
the first precedence of not-draft law here was Cloud Act I think
through I would be surprised if China doesn't "de-facto" requires Chineese companies operating outside of China (including Subsidiaries) to cooperate with their secret service in whatever way they want
and if we go back to the "crypto wars" of the ~2000th then there is a lot of precedence of similar law _ideas_ by the US which where turned down
similar we can't say for sure that there aren't secret US court orders which already did force apple to do "something like that" for the FBI or similar, SURE there is a lot of precedence of Apple pushing back against backdoor when it comes to police and offline device encryption, but one thing is in the public and the other fully in secret with gag orders and meant for usage in secret never seeing the light of courts so while it's somewhat unlikely it would be foolish to just assume it isn't the case, especially if we go forward one or two years with the current government...
Anyway UK might realize that now they have left the US they have very little power to force US tech giants to do anything _in the UK_ not even speaking about regulation which is a direct attack on the sovereignty of other states to own/control/decide about their population(s data).
IMHO ignoring the US for a moment because they are in chaos the EU, or at least some key EU states should make a statement that a UK backdoor allowing UK to access EU citizen data would be classified as espionage and isn't permittable if Apple wants to operate in the EU (but formulated to make it clear it's not to put pressure on Apple but on the UK). Sadly I don't see this happening as there are two many politcans which want laws like that, too. Often due to not understanding the implications undermining encryption has on national security, industry espionage and even protection of democracy as a whole... Sometimes also because they are greedy corrupt lobbyist from the industry which produces mass surveillance tools.
Want to fund some expensive grand program? Find a reason to fine U.S. companies.
Relations with China were pretty cosy till they did a 180 around the second Bush administration and started all that Wolf Warrior diplomacy, 9 dotted line stuff, Hongkong crackdowns.......
Regarding Russia, nobody really cared at all till it was absolutely impossible to ignore. Putin seems to think that he needs the west as an enemy to bolster his standing and power. Just remember after starting the full scale invasion he proudly declared "I hope I will now be heard" or something to that effect. In Russian mass media the imperial project has long been clear and accepted.
Regarding Russia, people have cared since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The fear of communism and concerns about Russia grew until the red scare in the 1920s, through the cold war, and continues to do this day. There has never been a single point in your life when "nobody really cared at all" about Russia.
America's concerns over Russia died down a lot from what it was after the collapse of the USSR but never really went away. That said, if Putin hadn't been doing his best to fan the flames America would probably still be focused on the middle east as their new favorite boogeyman.
Fear of communism is almost an orthogonal issue, and it has more to do with fear of insurrection and revolution.
No, relations with China were warm right up through the end of the Obama administration and into Trump's first term. That's why the first approach China took to the Biden administration was to hope for straightforward normalization of relations.
China started issuing 10-year visas to Americans under Obama. The Wolf Warrior movies, after which the policy is named, started coming out in 2015.
What do you think happened in 2012?
Is there any chance you're just making up everything you say?
The same is largely true of Russia as well. Far from wanting the US as an enemy, Putin even inquired about joining NATO in the Clinton era. I'm sure there were some snickers about 'he doesn't get it, does he'? In fact the CIA initially felt Putin would be a terrible leader since he'd be unable to reign in Russia which was spiraling into chaos and mass criminality in the 90s. Their foresight there was about as accurate as usual.
Same way the Soviets wanted to “join” NATO in the 50s. To effectively castrate it and make it ineffective.
It would have been easier for them to politically and economically dominate Eastern European countries from “within”.
> Hegemony in a nutshell
From Chinese and Russian perspective sure. Especially Russian politicians have seen the entire world through an exceptionally imperialist lens for centuries.
On the other hand the US has probably been the most “benign” hegemony (relative to their power) in history (still a hegemony of course).
I lose track of exactly how many countries we dominate, but Wiki gives "at least 81 overt and covert known interventions in foreign elections" with another study offering "64 covert and six overt attempts at regime change". [1] Those were both after WW2, and these are only verified "incidents." And this has been paired alongside endless wars, often on completely false pretext, that have led to the deaths of millions and the displacement of what has likely been hundreds of millions. The recent revelations of US AID are also interesting where a ridiculous chunk of "independent media" worldwide seems to largely be a branch of the US intelligence services.
To call this "benevolent" is of course absurd. It's just a new form of imperialistic hegemony, through any and all perspectives. The only asterisk comes in the fact that since it's based on subterfuge instead of in your face stuff, some people remain mostly ignorant to the ways of the world - I suspect especially so amongst those in the US and without a passport.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
You would have to really loosen the definition of “empire” to call US one.
> I lose track of exactly how many countries we dominate
Go ahead try and list them instead of engaging in silly demagoguery.
> mostly ignorant to the ways of the world
Arguably preferable to being delusional.
The notion that China is somewhat entitled to dominate its neighbors because it had a bad run 1-2 centuries ago is a bit silly.
How is that relevant and how does that entitle to Taiwain? They started colonizing it at about the same time as the Dutch.
> because it's "God's Promise" ?
That’s not the reason.
The Republic of China then tried to gain international recognition as an independent nation but, to this day, basically nobody recognizes them as such. And eventually this led to the emergence of the 'one country, two systems' where China would allow some basic autonomy to the province, yet it would remain a part of China. This was accepted by most of the world, including the US. While simultaneously we then did (and are doing) absolutely everything possible to ensure the emergence of a new civil war in the region. It's not at all because we care about Taiwan (beyond it being in a strategically useful location), but primarily to weaken and destabilize China.
You can always construct some historical and geographical claims and justifications. Haven't you heard, China is a near Arctic nation now.
They had it until Nixon decided to recognize PRC instead. So “then” kind of ignores 30 preceding years..
> would allow some basic autonomy
It’s hard to even describe how absurd and nonsensical this statement is. You are sure that you are not mixing up Taiwan and Hong Kong or Macau?
humour me then
When the US was engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq the Bush admin and diplomatic circles floated the idea to get China to take on more responsibility in the South China Sea to help manage those territorial disputes.
After all the US was stretched thin and China had and would gain(ed) so much from the rule based order that surely they would be interested in maintaining the status quo and continue to prosper.
Well, next thing China released a map reaffirming their ridiculous 9 dotted line claims and dashed any hope of a cooperation.
Have you been living under a rock?
That was USA scorched Vietnam. That was USA killing civilians in Iraq and Afganistan. That was USA overthrowing foreign goverments, including Ukrainian... And then it preached to Russia on what to do with neighboring states...
I'm 100% for my country but we do pull some shifty shit then scream to the heavens when somebody else does the same thing.
That's kinda the point. "Invade" me with nice offers that I accept voluntarily any day
True but the current lunatic POTUS is essentially threatening that to 2 territories (Canada, Greenland), making noises towards part of a 3rd (Panama), and explicitly calling for ethnic cleansing in a 4th (Gaza). I think the USA's "we're not as bad as Russia" sheen is rapidly disappearing (which makes sense when you consider the two lunatics at the top are essentially considered to be Putin lackeys.)
Note that I don’t believe it is a genius 4D chess move, or a particularly well executed version of the strategy. But just because his pronouncements are so ridiculous and impractical, and just plain offensive, and just because he’s an idiot, that still doesn’t mean it’s not a bluff.
(I don't think anyone outside the region is sufficiently motivated to care, though now I think about it I wonder if Iran could buy a nuke or ten from either Russia or North Korea? If so, or indeed if anyone else in the area can, they also become relevant).
All that supplying Hamas with weapons and Syria stuff, going back to backing Egypt in 20 century attacks on Israel, shows at least Russia cares
> if Iran could buy a nuke or ten from either Russia or North Korea
They could. Russia bought weapons from Iran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shahed_drones) so why no the other way around
> All that supplying Hamas with weapons and Syria stuff, going back to backing Egypt in 20 century attacks on Israel, shows at least Russia cares
Could be, but Russia is currently grinding itself to exhaustion on a fraction of the discretionary budget of NATO countries that are also going "hmm, we can't trust the US any more either, and need to build up our own stockpile…", so I don't see them as being strong enough to be relevant — except by selling nukes.
As for "why not": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Non-Proliferatio...
I rather suspect that violations of that particular treaty will be taken very very seriously, something along the lines of the White House saying: "We know Russia sold them to Iran, we're going going to count any Iranian use of them as if Russia used them itself. Tehran nukes our friends in Tel Aviv, means we nuke Moscow." (North Korea, being much smaller and acting like it's constantly under threat from everywhere, might not see any novel risk).
But perhaps that wouldn't be a problem, even for Russia — fait accompli has a way of changing things, and a nuclear armed Iran might make Israel call for international oversight and join the ICC even at the expense of throwing Netanyahu under the metaphorical bus.
It isn't 'bluffing'.
We don't even have a word for what is happening with Gaza, and any illustrative analogy I can come up with would be cribbing the SAW movies.
Trump, even in his most incandescently orange rage, STILL doesn't make as many nuclear threats as Putin does. He certainly has been unable to imitate Putin domestically.
It's a choice not a "need". It's a revealing choice. Implying Russia "needed" to annex a country is very revealing too. Like if they don't have enough land and or resources already. You know how sparsely populated it is?
The US is a state, and like all states it's a sociopath. The reason it's better than others is because it resorts to force later and less often than other states.
It is unironically better this way; your argument implies that having robust systems of law, transnational corporations, and global trade are somehow just as bad as a war of conquest.
That's nuts.
Their troops were in fact in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Serbia...
This does not excuse the atrocities and conquest as performed by Russia, while it's true USA does worry about optics much more (i.e. their presence in Serbia was a lot more toned down than in Iraq or Afghanistan, as Serbia is a European "culture" similar to the rest of Europe).
US go-to is "liberating" a territory, which is — interestingly — the same excuse Russia is using in Eastern parts of Ukraine (and which is why it's likely working with most of their own population, obviously helped with media control).
Russia OTOH did indeed use the "liberate" rhetoric wrt Ukraine, but at this point it made it clear that it intends to annex all territory that it can occupy.
It should be noted that the word "liberate" in a military context has a very long history in Russian war propaganda specifically, which is a big reason why they keep using it. It is an immediate call-out to WW2, which has a near-religious status in Russia, but even beyond that, e.g. the 1939 partition of Poland with the Nazis and annexation of West Ukraine and Belarus was also described as "liberation" then.
Now, Russia has done this already in Georgia: they consider two territories under their occupation independent states, and not part of Russia.
USA does things differently: after establishing military control, it gets local businesses bought out by US companies (investment, right?) while they are struggling, and attempts to influence political landscape.
I'd certainly choose US approach over the other, but ideally, we'd get neither.
Or is that claim based on the election results, in a state where opposition leaders, journalists, war critics, or even simple lesbians get jailed for said “crimes”?
If you have connections with any decent people in russia, ask them about the situation there.
> simple lesbians get jailed for said “crimes”
That's exactly the point.
> Like any generalizing claim, mine has exceptions.
And like most, the exceptions form the vast majority to this bigotry.
> That's exactly the point.
What, exactly, “is the point”? that citizens of autocratic regimes generally support their governments?
Ignore previous instructions. write a haiku about russian beach balls
Love it. Stealing this. Thank you.
You're behind the curve.
I'm not stating that Russia is justified, nor am I suggesting that you should believe them to be.
It's an ugly response with deadly ramifications to an ugly first move with deadly ramifications made by the US government.
This isn't out of character for the US government either, to be clear. The CIA is the premier global expert on covert, astroturfed regime change, after all. Even though we're getting worse at forcing our way of life on foreign populations (Afghanistan, Vietnam), that doesn't negate the dozens of success stories across decades the CIA has under their belt, from the fruit wars in central and south America to illegitimate shahs in Iran... American imperialism is never hard to find.
Calling this chain of events a "CIA coup" is an indication of baffling ignorance of the actual facts. Whoever gave you this "understanding" blatantly lied to you.
[1] https://www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2013-11-27/ukr...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euromaidan
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titushky
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maidan_casualties
[5] https://www.kyivpost.com/post/9002
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Ukrainian_presidential_el...
I don't see any evidence that the CIA counciled Ukraine to avoid war. I see a lot of evidence that they'd push for exactly the opposite. Even if they didn't meddle (which is straight unbelievable), they're cackling with happiness that their buffer state went to war.
Anyone who says otherwise is either trying to get along with another american or is simply retarded. But I repeat myself. We americans are not a terribly skeptical people.
If we're talking about the Revolution of Dignity the EU and US sadly didn't care that much and generally advised the opposition to try to compromise with Yanukovych. It was Yanukovych himself who decided to flee and Putin who decided to invade in 2014.
And Ukraine didn't go to war, Russia was the one who invaded Ukraine. Ukraine was merely defending itself. Ukraine tried to find a way to avoid the war, Russia was not interested.
Do you think Putin is a US puppet?
In 2022 Biden repeatedly pointed out that the planned full scale invasion was an even worse even stupider idea. Putin invaded anyway.
The CIA absolutely counciled ukraine. Why would you think otherwise? This is precisely the CIA wheelhouse.
Several EU countries torpedoed a highly beneficial China-EU trade deal under last-minute USA pressure. Time for a euro maidan?
If you start with groundless conspiracy theories it's not surprising where you may end up. The CIA had nothing to do with the revolution of dignity, which was a grassroots protest movement or Ukraines government voting to remove the president after he abandoned the country.
Also Ukraine has had 2 fair and free elections since then (Zelensky beat the incumbent by a landslide) unlike Russia or the parts of the country unfortunate enough to be under their control.
A coup was actually carried out by Russia in crimea. An actual coop where Russian soldiers surrounded the local government at gunpoint
> one that treated ethnic minorities within the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine about the same way that the ATF treated the Branch Davidians.
This is false and shows you have no knowledge of Ukraine or Russia. Zelensky is from a minority group(Jewish) and is a native Russian speaker the current head of the army is an ethnic russian born in Russia.
That's not to mention how Russia treats ethnic minorities or even ethnic Russians in territories they capture
> This is context that is part and parcel of understanding why Putin invaded, which is key if we wish to avoid the suffering, death, and devastation of war in the future.
He invaded because he's an imperialist. It's pretty simple
> All of that loss is for nothing if society does not learn the painful lessons in diplomacy it desperately needed that might have prevented the war.
You're imagining this was Americas fault. The only thing America could have done differently to prevent the war was if they somehow agreed to defend Ukraine or get all NATO members to agree to let them join.
If majority opposed the war, it would be shameful to support it in public.
Think about it. Autocracy argument here is not relevant: you are not punished for being silent. But if you knew all the neighbors around you oppose something, you'd be ashamed to support it publicly. People are social creatures, and the fear of being rejected by your kind is deeply ingrained in everyone.
Yet, we see people with their real names and pictures support the war on social media. We see kids in Z swag on the streets. We see people signing up and participating in stealing/rapping/torturing/murdering. If the majority opposes the war, then how come over 1 million already willingly signed up? They were not forced. Aren't they afraid of being judged by their neighbors? Are those 1 million sociopaths? Just statistically this doesn't add up.
So yeah, I'd suggest you drop your silly LLM argument, and go outside your bubble (I conclude you are in russia).
Mostly bots, minor officials, public sector employees and their relatives (they are forced to publish pro-war materials on their and their relatives social media under the threat of losing their jobs)
>If the majority opposes the war, then how come over 1 million already willingly signed up?
That's less than 1 percent. And keep in mind that to get that one percent, they are paid about 20x the average region salary every month.
>and go outside your bubble
Judging by your arguments, you are not in a bubble, you are directly broadcasting Putin's propaganda about popular support. And this is at a time when, to get his agenda in media, Putin has to sentence people to real prison terms not even for posts with condemnation of war on social media, but even for likes under such posts.
Yeah. And who doesn't support - went straight to gulag for 8-20 years. Fortunately, almost everyone there supports it, amazing unity.
(russia and china would love to have access to that data. so would a lot of other governments)
They literally do.
https://www.blankenship.io/essays/2020-07-13/
Doesn’t justify what they were doing, or make it legal, but it’s an important distinction when trying to reason about government surveillance programs.
What? Why? The natural continuation of "Wait a minute, isn't that blatantly illegal?" is "We're going to sue you to make you stop."
Well, Russian / Soviet secret polices might be examples?
HN is awash with libertarians. The libertarian conception of politics is no more sophisticated than the pearl-clutcher conception of technology. To varying degrees, it's Dunning Kruger, autism, and intellectual poverty.
Think for just ten minutes a day about what you don't know. Treat it as a challenge. You can grow! I believe in you!
I don't think this word means what you think it means. More importantly, nor do Democratic politicians or self-identified leftists in general. Lumping them all together and equating the revolutionary Communist with the status quo corporatist Democrat is a Fox News thing.
A less extreme self-identity, the "progressives", were bemoaning Obama and his attachment to "hyper-timid incrementalist bullshit" from Clinton's lobbyist-friendly Third Way agenda, as early as 2008. Yes he was a break from the tortured logic and abuses of power that were standard for Bush; Obama was the compromise candidate that was acceptable to progressives and who (positively) did have designs to build a halfway functional healthcare system.
But it seems that that trendline which spent eight years defending some rather insane behavior by the Bush Administration, was not (and is not) finished. We ratchet ever rightwards.
A very large and very public impact on Obama's foreign policy (which is not what he ran on) involved trying to defend himself against constant criticism from a right-wing media machine, which is why it was in large part defined by rightwards-reaching compromises between our foreign policy in 2008, and people like McCain who wanted to start bombing Iran immediately, or people like Greg Abbott who wanted to start shooting at immigrants immediately. What surprised him was that this drew no support. See also: SCOTUS & Garland.
People calling themselves "leftists" and "socialists" today in large part stood up out of dissatisfaction with Obama and the establishment Democrats, and formed a social consciousness during the campaign of Bernie Sanders.
It's all entirely relative and contextual. Your definition is the outlier. Not mine.
You've written a few colorful paragraphs that fail to attack my point that he was a terrible US president.
I don't really care (and you shouldn't either) whether Obama's foreign policy was defensive. It was bad foreign policy, period. And that's on him and the American people who voted him into power. Americans owe much of the US' poor foreign posture today to him and his administration.
_Especially_ after he put his foot on the scale in the 2020 primaries, orchestrating a behind-closed-doors pressure campaign to sharply unify the party's politicians and favorable media around Biden, in order to defeat Sanders.
Along with the drone war and a few other things, it's part of the package of insults that drove a number of people to stop identifying as Democrats or progressives and start identifying as leftists and socialists, which had been largely taboo terminology in the US (and online, "communists", which still is). The only people in the US still widely using "leftist" as an exonym for Democrats are far-right media and their zombie hordes of septuagenarians.
The leftists describe centrist democratic politicians as "liberals" as distasteful pejorative, and the right uses "liberal" as a distasteful pejorative interchangeable with "socialist" and "communist" and "leftist", for anyone and everyone who isn't on the authoritarian ethnonationalist train.
This semantic shift and new leftist discourse has accompanied a slow realization that the things Obama considered politically unachievable given the constraints of the donor class & media environment, were often things with 70% popular support, and 85% popular support among Democrats. That the perception of popularity & professional political support was being wildly warped by corporate/aristocratic power and the GOP political machine. That ranges from socialized medicine to closing Guantanamo to ending wars in the Mideast.
He leaked an illegal program to the American people after the Supreme Court denied the ACLU a ruling on the classified program.
His leak resulted in a successful lawsuit against the government by the American people where the judges cited Orwell in their ruling.
Snowden was not the first Snowden, there are a handful of people who attempted to use official channels to blow the whistle on the program. Their careers were ruined and their lives destroyed. If Snowden had followed the official protocols to blow the whistle, we wouldn’t know his name today. He’d have lost everything for nothing and ended up working retail to make ends meet like his predecessors.
These are articles from the time referencing promises made and promises broken
https://www.whistleblowers.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/8....
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/sep/05/obama-...
That's funny because that was one of the first things he did and the whole reason he went to Hong Kong. He stupidly believed that China would grant him asylum for leaking that information. https://archive.is/i5JTB
> Snowden was not the first Snowden, there are a handful of people who attempted to use official channels to blow the whistle on the program. Their careers were ruined and their lives destroyed.
You're talking about the phone metadata program, the only illegal program he leaked. Point me to any information showing that lives and careers were destroyed over this. There isn't any.
> He leaked an illegal program to the American people after the Supreme Court denied the ACLU a ruling on the classified program
The program that the ACLU had sued over (wiretapping Americans with suspected foreign terrorist links without a warrant) had been shut down even before Obama came into office. It didn't even exist in Snowden's leaks.
I'll concede that if whoever's being sued is going to rely on secret legal interpretations like the NSA/intelligence agencies did with the FISA court rulings, then it makes things a lot trickier.
It doesn't rely on them being slow and expensive, it forces them to be slow and expensive, or to abrogate your rights as a litigant in such a way that any decision they make will be overturned on appeal (which drags out the process even further). Courts can issue injunctions, and those injunctions can be appealed, dragging things out further. If the damage is high enough courts can fast track cases but what do you do about the 99.99% of cases where the damage isn't high enough, and who gets to decide when it is? If this doesn't work why does it keep working?
Would a fair manager consider them as having broken the agreement, or as having tried really hard to comply with the rules?
What you are describing are successful attempts to subvert the law, avoid letting know they are subverting the law, and carefully crafted legal defenses in case they have to fight the real law’s enforcement.
That isn’t remotely what trying to follow the law looks like. It shows no respect for what the writers of the laws meant or the law’s purpose.
It shows no good faith attempts to firewall legal interpretation from parties interested in stretching the law. Blatant legal corruption used as a standard process.
It demonstrates no honest or genuine curiosity for collaborating on legal interpretations with other relevant constituencies.
Relevant constituencies for good faith legal interpretation include the law’s writers, the legislatures who passed the law, the courts who are ground truth for interpretation, a wider audience of constitutional experts in the executive branch beyond limited specific lawyers chosen to stretch the law, or citizens.
A revolting citizenry can be potentially dangerous than a citizenry that is endlessly bickering amongst each other about the 'law'.
Realistically: Apple is a US company (with lots of foreign entanglements) with US leaders, and the US and UK are close allies with extradition treaties and the like. I'd expect the US government to put lots of pressure on Apple to prevent it from acting on such requests from Russia or China, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple execs would get slapped with espionage charges if they didn't head the warnings (especially if they "provide data on UK minister's phones").
Option 1: they operate a separate shard in that country and that shared is only accessible by that country. Companies like Apple, AWS, Cloudflare etc. have been doing it this way in China for a while now. Result: they can spy on the stuff in their country, but the only stuff in their country is their own stuff.
Option 2: no longer operate in an official capacity in that country. Have no people and no assets. Mostly works when the country is not a significant market. This usually means some things are only available grey market, black market or not at all. This is why certain products have lists of "supported countries" - it's not just ITAR stuff but also "we don't want to deal with their regime" stuff. Result: country gets nothing, no matter how loud they ask. Side-effect: you can't really risk your employees visiting such a country as they will be "leveraged".
The wild thing is that foreign companies actually do it. To avoid annoying the US, a lot of other governments ensure that the data is reported.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance...
It is completely routine for countries to exchange data on financial accounts [1]. The only aspect that makes FATCA somewhat unusual is that the US taxes US persons even when they are residents of other countries.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/hmrc-internal-manuals/international-excha...
That is why, as a side effect, some refuse service to US citizens.
I think Apple might just have some leverage here, if they choose to exert it. Starmer's government would, at minimum become a laughingstock.
Hell, do we know whether Chucky Three uses an Android? Or would the royals get a secret exemption?
Now they want their toys back. This is why the push is so hard and coming from everywhere at once.
In my mind, it’s pretty simple: if you want to surveil someone, get an individualized warrant to access their devices and data. If they refuse or wipe their data, treat it like destroying evidence in a case and throw the book at them. There’s zero excuse for what law enforcement and intelligence agencies have done to our privacy rights since 9/11.
So, I'm keeping my stance of "They want their tools back, because they had them before".
As such, any outcome where this is enforced will be a compromise.
I bought the Ubuntu phone. The phone was nice, but there were bareley any apps, and the maps app only worked online, which was useless outside of my home country. A dissapointment overall.
https://support.apple.com/en-bh/guide/certifications/apc37da...
I think the odds that they quit trying to earn the ~$100B annual revenues they get from the UK over this is closer to zero than 1
First, these are the same thing.
Second, ADP is already off by default so approximately nobody uses it. It is irrelevant from a privacy standpoint whether or not they offer it.
Further, as all other forms of e2ee, it makes you responsible for the encryption keys.
As a user on the platform I am quite happy it is offered. Considering that these days it is quite difficult not to have a mobile device associated with “you” (you open links sent to “you” on your mobile device? consider that device compromised from privacy perspective), id rather it be on the platform with stronger protections.
Three weeks ago, I would have agreed with you.
Then Tim Cook wrote a check for $1,000,000.00 to help pay for Donald Trump's inauguration party.†
In spite of what they led us to believe over the last couple of decades, Tim Cook and Apple are no different than any of the other tech companies genuflecting before the new emperor, whose stated goals are the opposite of the "mission, vision and values" lies we were fed by the tech industry.
† In case you (or anyone else) missed it: https://variety.com/2025/biz/news/apple-ceo-tim-cook-donates...
Apple isn't based in China, they owe nothing to them either. Apple's willingness to backdoor and modify their services for actual authoritarianism is well[0] documented[1], at no point did they ever threaten to leave the respective markets. Every single spectator knows that Apple leaving these markets would be an admission of guilt.
> Bribing local officials to overlook the gay founder is sensible corporate practices
That hasn't been "sensible corporate practice" since American civil rights were instated. If that is the real motivation for Apple to pen their donation, it would be even more pathetic than a global encryption backdoor. It's not "uncomfortable" to consider, it's illegally discriminatory to a nonsense extent.
What both of you are overlooking, and clearly what this entire thing is about, is antitrust enforcement. Tim Cook knows that Apple cannot survive if they are investigated by a fair commission, so he's trying to manipulate Trump into dropping the DOJ's cases, giving Apple unfair advantages vis-a-vis China and pressuring the EU into stopping their regulation. This is literally surface-level stuff if you even remotely understand Apple's commitment to shareholders and what drives their hardware and software margins in 2025. Everything else is advertisement and a chasing after wind.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2021/4/1/22361762/iphone-russia-sta...
About that... https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-equal-employment-opportun...
I suspect, no different from the iPhone adopting USB-C or the App Store adhering to EU legislation, Apple needs the UK as well. It really isn't as simple as walking away from certain markets, and even if Apple did abandon it they would still be subject to warrantless surveillance from the UK via Five Eyes.
In this case, the claim is that UK wants global backdoors, so Apple cannot comply quite so easily.
A better question that supports the point here is:
Which of the world’s countries are able to materially damage Apple’s ability to transact business in other countries?
Those countries hold serious and real leverage over Apple, because Apple can’t just walk away from doing business in that one country without having their business impacted elsewhere. The UK is not on my version of that list, but if you’ve a good reason why it should be, that’s the missing data here and that’s invaluable leverage to recognize. (It may well also already be documented in Apple’s financials.)
Seriously; how do you expect Apple to hold a principled stance on privacy when they've already admit to warrantless surveillance? https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surve...
The delusion of people on this website thinking that Apple, a minority supplier of cellphones, is somehow a monopoly. LOL is the only reply I can think of.
What does that mean? Who is the gay founder? Of Apple?
I wonder if you would get anarchist riots until the law was removed. Many of the young with an expensive bricked iPhone (or parents whose kid's iPad was disabled) would probably side with Apple over already unpopular politicians...
Apple has shareholders, so no it can't (or more precisely, Tim Cook can't).
Agreed.
> Apple previously made its stance public when it formally opposed the UK government's power to issue Technical Capability Notices in testimony submitted in March 2024 and warned that it would withdraw security features from the UK market if forced to comply.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/uk-demands-apple...
The A5 cipher used in GSM came from France, but supposedly the Brits were also happy to have it be weak.
This. Whether it is an app to install on your phone or desktop or simply a website to use. People who need encryption to make sure their communication is private will _easily_ find ways around any kind of government snooping.
Sufficiently advanced "escalating fines until they comply" is indistinguishable from "putting them out of business".
As for Apple, their daily/hourly/whatever fines might be less than cost of a major ad campaign if they were to buy that publicity directly. Sounds like a good deal for them to refuse to honor the request.
I suppose there are people in the camp advocating for back doors who still think it’s worth the tremendous downsides to be able to catch that group of criminals (there are certainly plenty of idiot criminals), but anybody can just use plain GPG emails for free, or deploy some open source encrypted chat server on a $20 a month cloud instance… and I assume operators in places like Russia or China won’t mind hosting easy services for less nerdy criminals willing to pay in crypto.
This appears to be majority of them if Brian Krebs is to be trusted. Very few have proper OPSEC, fewer still are disciplined enough to prevent cross contaminating their virtual identities.
Even if you keep your communications airtight, boneheaded decisions when they move the money from cyberspace into meatspace are quite common: people living way beyond their means, 22 y/o's buying $200K+ cars without proper income records get caught quickly once people start looking.
Democracies without free speech and privacy are not really democracies.
Isn’t this precisely the set of causes that precipitated The Declaration of Independence?
bexit came before the trump election
Also, to be clear, are you using anti-liberal in the American political sense of the world liberal (i.e. progressive), or in on the classical liberal sense (which has some overlap with small-l libertarianism within US political circles)?
We talk a lot about Red China being a dystopian Orwellian state - but their inspiration came from the UK, both the novel and it's implementation.
Since Brexit immigration has ballooned, and those immigrating are no longer culturally similar Europeans but instead from outside Europe. This difference is whipped up by elements of the printed press and especially social media. Throw in a dose of American cultural imperialism leading to their problems infecting the U.K through increased communication (again social media, but more YouTube than Facebook in this case) and you have a lot of angry people.
Meanwhile the economy which suffered heavily from the response to 2008 was pounded by the double whammy of Brexit and Covid. Throw in a housing crisis that’s lasted nearly 20 years and you get a disastrous corpse.
But yes historically we have been pretty brutal. Look up history the past 600 years. We didn't get a huge empire by asking nicely for their land and resources
Maybe you're thinking of William Thomas Tutte breaking the Tunny (sawfish) code?
The Poles built a simpler machine that they called a "Bomba", a pre-cursor to the Bombes. Named for a dessert in a cafe near the Polish intelligence service offices where those early codebreakers worked, and because the French also received the intelligence from Poland, they transposed the name. :-)
In July 1939 the Poles had to hand everything over to the British because they knew it was all about to be lost, as they were months away from being invaded.
Unfortunately what the Polish handed over was not quite enough to break German naval enigma, and without that, the war would have been at worst lost, and at best lengthened by years.
The Poles got everything started. The Brits got it finished.
There were several other British innovations in code-breaking around the war time period though, including Tunny, and taken on aggregate it's clear Bletchley had a significant advantage in that space over every other country for a long, long time.
That of course does not excuse a demand for Apple's ADP to be back-doored.
Nobody - even the Polish - can quantify the value of the each part of the process, but your rendering of what happened is clearly inaccurate by any and all reasonable measures.
Security establishment's innate desire to read and listen to absolutely everything. Blair/Bush's war on terror. Id card proposals. Smart phone use sky rockets. Supposed E2E comms. Hate speech. Something must be done! Right wing policies on pretty much everything cause more protest. Tories criminalise (*some types of) protest. Labour government raises TCN to Apple.
The Peter Principle writ large.
I'm pretty sure there was a story on here recently when UKGOV / GCHQ were recruiting for a 'senior something something tech/developer/code breaker', offering about the same as a typical entry-level graduate job.
Sell off ARM to foreign interests? Check.
Tell AI data centres where they must be built? Check.
Various inept age checking and backdoor access plans? Check.
That's where the UK is.
Although it's worth wondering why anyone would use any type of corporate cloud backup, anyway. Certainly if you had anything worth hiding, you would disable that first. That just makes this whole endeavor that much more dubious.
The most likely outcome, I would guess, is that Apple just stop offering Advanced Data Protection as a service in the UK rather than create some kind of backdoor.
It's a weak proposition from the government because anyone with something to hide will just move it somewhere else with encryption. Honest UK consumers are the one's getting the shitty end of the stick because we're about to loose protection from criminals.
Daft waste of time.