“Apple has launched a counteroffensive against the UK’s proposed new surveillance law saying the measures risk paralysing vast reaches of the technology sector across the globe and even sparking ‘serious international conflicts,'” Murad Ahmed and Sam Jones report for The Financial Times.
“The intervention from the world’s most valuable company comes amid growing anxiety from big US tech groups that the British proposals will set a dangerous precedent, as other countries look to upgrade spying regimes for the digital age,” Ahmed and Jones report. “The bill will give police and security services access to the records of every UK citizen’s internet use without the need for judicial authorisation. However, should agencies want the content of communications, they will need the authority of the home secretary and a new panel of judicial commissioners.”
“Apple on Monday led the Silicon Valley fightback in written evidence to a parliamentary committee scrutinising the draft bill. UK demands for the ability to access to data held in other countries would ‘immobilise substantial portions of the tech sector and spark serious international conflicts,’ the company said. ‘It would also likely be the catalyst for other countries to enact similar laws, paralysing multinational corporations under the weight of what could be dozens or hundreds of contradictory country-specific laws,'” Ahmed and Jones report. “In a rare show of unity, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo and Microsoft are jointly submitting evidence to the same parliamentary committee, according to people familiar with the matter. These companies plan to make similar criticisms to Apple, the people said.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: This is a dangerous proposal and Apple is 100% right to be staunchly opposed.
It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority. – Benjamin Franklin
“What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believe that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. The crises and reforms (real reforms too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. To live in the process is absolutely not to notice it — please try to believe me — unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, “regretted.” Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing). You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.” — A German professor describing the coming of fascism in They Thought They Were Free by Milton Mayer
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