“‘We didn’t hear anything for a few days,’ says Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO and the successor to the late Steve Jobs. ‘I think it was Saturday before we were contacted. We have a desk, if you will, set up to take requests from government. It’s set up 24/7–not as a result of this, it’s been going for a while–and the call came in to that desk, and they presented us with a warrant as it relates to this specific phone,'” Lev Grossman reports for TIME Magazine.
“We spoke in his office at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino – the address, famously, is 1 Infinite Loop. It’s a modest office, an askew trapezoid, almost ostentatiously unostentatious, with a few framed “Think Different” posters on the walls, some arty photographs of Apple stores and a large wooden plaque with a quote from Theodore Roosevelt on it (the ‘daring greatly’ one),” Grossman reports. “Jobs’ office is next door. It’s dark, with curtains drawn, but the nameplate is still there.”
“George Orwell knew mass surveillance would invade our homes. The twist he didn’t see coming was that it wasn’t Big Brother who would do it. We did it to ourselves,” Grossman reports. “‘It wasn’t very long ago when you wouldn’t even think about there being health information on the smartphone,’ Cook says. ‘There’s financial information. There’s your conversations, there’s business secrets. There’s probably more information about you on here than exists in your home.’ The question is, now that we have this deeply, richly, intimately installed new surveillance infrastructure, should Big Brother be allowed to access it? And if so, when and how? Or should private citizens have the means to protect it, from hackers and thieves but also from the government?”
Tons more in the full article – highly recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: A great article. Read it!
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Arline M.” for the heads up.]