Apple Stonewalls FBI Request, Part I.

A March 2016 Bridgewater Sunset, (Bergeron Image)

Apple continues to resist the FBI’s request to unlock the iPhone of San Bernardino terrorist shooter Syed Rizwan Farook.  U.S. Security experts have made unsuccessful attempts to unlock that phone and are now in court petitioning the judicial branch to compel Apple to cooperate.

 

Apple’s stance in resisting the FBI’s request is that to unlock the iPhone used by shooter Syed Farook would set an alarming precedent that would lead to weakening the privacy of all iPhone users.

However, Apple seems to have employed a very dissimilar set of standards in its approach to Internet security in its business dealings with mainland Chinese government officials.  The latter have very different ideas about how Internet security should be controlled and monitored within their borders.

This is not the first time that Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, has been embroiled in controversy:

On December 20, 2015, when Cook appeared on 60 Minutes, Charlie Rose pressed him as to why Apple produces the preponderance of its iPhones [70 percent overseas] in China-based manufacturing plants.  Conditions in some of these factories are reported to be onerous:  In at least several such company facilities, suicide nets were placed on the outside to discourage overstressed workers from jumping.

Part of Cook’s justification for moving production offshore is that “China focuses more on vocational education [than does the United States].”  However, that assertion was soundly rebuffed in a highly critical Huffington Post article stating that Apple’s CEO was “not being truthful,” that the real reason is “Apple manufactures in China because it can exploit a nearly endless pool of cheap labor.”

Apple’s current dustup with the FBI over its refusal to cooperate with it over the matter of U.S. Homeland security poses a critical question that needs to be clarified about the nature of Apple’s privacy policies: 

Namely, are Apple’s policies as implemented in the U.S. consistent with those that it reportedly employs in compliance with the dictates of the communist government on mainland China for its own citizens?

No. Certainly not as described in a report that appeared in the March 2016 issue of the insightful journal, Commentary.

   

That essay effectively dissambles Apple’s assertion of being squeaky-clean about its world-wide practices concerning Internet security.

Entitled The Road to Internet Serfdom, this well-researched piece was authored by Arthur Herman, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.  In it, he addresses the types of coercion used by authoritarian regimes to force American companies doing business within their borders to comply with technical demands that stifle Internet Freedom.

Please understand, dear readers, that this coercion is not originating from within the U.S., as Edward Snowden would have had us believe, but from overseas, principally from China and Russia, with China in the lead as both countries race to establish a closed Internet within their own borders.

In his article, Herman describes how “China’s leadership has evidently decided that allowing some limited and carefully monitored expressions of grievance against the government [over the Internet], even protests against censorship, is a useful political safety valve.”  But only up to a point.

He explains that, “The official term for this manipulative tolerance [by the mainland Chinese government] is adaptive authoritarianism, and it extends over China’s entire information-technology industry.”

In my follow-on post to be published on Wednesday, March 16, I will address how one American high-tech company, willfully or not, may be facilitating those insidious developments in China.

Thanks for reading.  See you then.

 “The outer world we have constructed is a reflection of the inner world of our thoughts, emotions and choices.”  (From Sacred Doorways)