Leaked recording: Inside Apple’s global war on leakers

“A recording of an internal briefing at Apple earlier this month obtained by The Outline sheds new light on how far the most valuable company in the world will go to prevent leaks about new products,” William Turton reports for The Outline. “The briefing, titled ‘Stopping Leakers – Keeping Confidential at Apple,’ was led by Director of Global Security David Rice, Director of Worldwide Investigations Lee Freedman, and Jenny Hubbert, who works on the Global Security communications and training team.”

“According to the hour-long presentation, Apple’s Global Security team employs an undisclosed number of investigators around the world to prevent information from reaching competitors, counterfeiters, and the press, as well as hunt down the source when leaks do occur,” Turton reports. “Some of these investigators have previously worked at U.S. intelligence agencies like the National Security Administration (NSA), law enforcement agencies like the FBI and the U.S. Secret Service, and in the U.S. military.”

“In it, Rice and Freedman speak candidly about Apple’s efforts to prevent leaks, discuss how previous leakers got caught, and take questions from the approximately 100 attendees,” Turton reports. “Cook first publicly mentioned doubling down on secrecy at a 2012 tech conference, and this presentation seems intended to reveal the results of that effort. ‘This has become a big deal for Tim,’ Greg Joswiak, Apple’s Vice President of iPod, iPhone and iOS product marketing, says in one of the videos. ‘Matter of fact, it should be important to literally everybody at Apple that we can’t tolerate this any longer.'”

“Apple has cracked down on leaks from its factories so successfully that more breaches are now happening on Apple’s campuses in California than its factories abroad,” Turton reports. “‘Last year was the first year that Apple [campuses] leaked more than the supply chain,’ Rice tells the room. ‘More stuff came out of Apple [campuses] last year than all of our supply chain combined.'”

“Rice urges employees to come forward if they are worried about having ‘broken secrecy.’ Nine times out of 10, when people get in trouble at Apple, he says, it’s because they tried to cover up a mistake,” Turton reports. “‘Our role at NPS was created because someone spent three weeks not telling us a prototype was in a bar somewhere,’ Rice says in the briefing, referring to the prototype iPhone 4 left in a bar by an Apple employee that made its way to Gizmodo in 2010. That leak was so devastating to Apple that Steve Jobs personally called the editor of Gizmodo to ask for the phone back. ‘The crime was in the coverup.'”

Tons more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: How ironic, and telling, that this article’s foundation is a leaked recording of Apple’s internal anti-leaking scare-fest. File under: Slap in the face.

Apple doesn’t leak like a sieve*, but it sure isn’t leakproof, either.

*not counting iPhones, where it most certainly does with annual regularity