Please stick to the facts.
What you're seeing in Putin is the ability to be independent. He gets to enjoy watching the Americans squirm at low cost. What's the US going to do to Russia? Our diplomats will be rude to each other, maybe we won't attend the Russian summer ball and snub the Russian ambassador, each country will declare some spies persona non grata.
At the end of the day, the areas in which the Russians and Americans cooperate are areas that they have a mutual interest to do so.
Others, like the Germans or Spain are different. They piss off the US, we cut off the faucet of intelligence, money, privileges, etc.
Not that it would be necessary in an obvious case like this, but each one of Microsoft/Skype, Google/Youtube, Apple and Facebook could easily have hired the nation's best and brightest one thousand lawyers at $1,000 an hour, full time for 10 years to defend privacy. It would have been well within their means. Yet, each of them chose to back down. Each of them chose to fail their users' trust.
I don't think its due to cowardice. If these organisations cared the slightest bit they would have acted to protect their users. Not in the wildest scenario would the US government have jailed the leaders of Apple, Google or Microsoft. My best guess is they got something in return.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/06/yahoo-failed-fisa-f...
It's possible that there's as-yet undisclosed legal action with some of the others; the secrecy around just about any proceeding in the FISC makes it very hard to tell.
Take the battle to the real courts and ask them to decide on the matter.
It's not a court just because congress says so.
Congress certainly does have the 'say so' -- at least with 'inferior Courts'. That still leaves the Supreme Court though as final arbiter.
That may be naive. Most people have skeletons in their closets. The government would use these to pressure those leaders to acquiesce. I suspect the most dangerous skeletons are ones which seem harmless to you, but cast in the proper light they can be used as a justification for punishment. E.g. Something which seems harmless now can retroactively be used to claim you were doing insider trading. Few people would step up to defend you, even if the charges are baseless, because recently it's been fashionable to hate capitalists, and trading stocks is the epitome of capitalism. So it'd be very much "obey us or we will litigate you into bending your knee anyway."
Jobs was immune because he was the CEO equivalent of a rockstar. To try to pull baseless charges against him would outrage the public. Yet I'd imagine the public would get grim satisfaction out of seeing Ballmer punished, even if the charges were baseless, because most people don't like him. It's shallow, but it seems true.
On one hand, the CEO of Qwest was convicted of insider trading, and he claims it was retaliation by the NSA because Qwest would not participate in warrantless wiretapping.
On the other hand, the federal government had a perfect excuse to prosecute Steve Jobs in 2006 with the options backdating scandal, but chose not to. Those would not have been baseless charges--Apple really did backdate those options. The government just concluded that Jobs was not personally culpable.
That's actually a perfect example of leverage that the government would have used against a technology company to pressure them into doing the government's bidding.
In contrast, I can't imagine anyone targeting Oprah. She'd destroy (PR-wise) anyone challenging her. Recall that beef lobby's attacks.
Jobs is like Silicon Valley's Oprah.
That means if you fight, they put a server in your shop.
It was just not worth it until now. That's going to be the real legacy of the Snowden leaks.
http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2013/06/can-apple-re...
tl;dr:
* Apple distributes the encryption keys
* Multiple keys can be associated with an account (iPhone, Mac – and the NSA?)
* Apple can retain metadata
* Apple doesn't use certificate pinningBarely any change at all, I'd bet. And not worth the legal hassle they could have been up against if it came to a knock-down, drag-out battle with the US Government over <spins the dial>.
That's not the Steve Jobs I read about. Like him or not, he was a man of principle.
Having your factory retool weeks before you launch an unproven product because you don't like the glass? Not very pragmatic.
everything is worth a fight.
This reminds everyone to look at different angles when we criticize people/companies and understand that, even now, an individual makes a lot of difference.
http://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/10/27/mystery-solved-why-st...
This reminds me of a friend of mine who proxies all his web traffic through something which strips user agents and referrers. It's very easy for me to tell when he visits my website, because the logs show "-" for each of these fields.
I wonder if the best strategy, then, is to figure out a very common user agent string and use that. The EFF's Panopticlick might be a good start: https://panopticlick.eff.org.
Simply drawing attention to the fact that his attempt at anonymity acts a key personal identifier in this instance.
It is really simple.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobileMe
.Mac: July 17, 2002 – July 9, 2008
MobileMe: July 9, 2008 – June 30, 2012
iCloud was launched on October 12, 2011, one year before Apple entering Prism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICloud
The main difference before iCloud was that you had to pay for it. I can however remember that I've had free .me account before iCloud, so even .me must have had enough users.
It is fun to think of Steve Jobs as the lone person saying "fuck you" to the NSA. But it isn't realistic. It isn't like the other companies are run by meek people who love bending over to authorities.
Looking at the PRISM company list, we are talking data service companies with users in the tens of millions (minus the oddball Paltalk). Apple just wasn't in that group until recently.
That's incitement enough to try to get them on board.
Why go after the myriad of handset manufacturers when you could just get the network providers on board?
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/06/steve-jobs-security...
I find it hard to believe that the NSA didn't see one of the most valuable and popular companies in the world as a priority until 2012. I bet they were salivating as soon as the first iPhone launched.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA
http://www.cracked.com/blog/five-fun-facts-about-the-cia-and...
1. Whether you're likely to voluntarily leak any secure information.
2. Whether someone who dug up some dirt on you could blackmail you into leaking secure information.
Or as the saying goes, it's fine to have a mistress, but having a mistress that your wife doesn't know about is a problem...
I believed they polygraphed you about drug use, and I recall that they had a threshold number of "experimental" sessions with marijuana that were ok, as long as you disclosed them during the background check and polygraph.
Generally, the key things were, "are you a crook? are you liable to be bribed/coerced?".
E.g. one chap was a transvestite, but the appeals court ruled that since his wife and minister knew, it wasn't something that could be leveraged against him.
Apple not being a priority for NSA until Oct 2012? Pfft.
Apple, on the other hand, could have come out smelling like a rose, but following the death of Steve Jobs, who apparently refused to play ball with the NSA, it stupidly jumped on board to join the PRISM club.
According to the Prism slides, it really looks so:
Steve Jobs: February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011.If it's true, it's one reason more to deeply admire him.
And can you just imagine how much more sales Apple would get now for not being on that list?