Oh, I'm not making a value judgement. I think that these government agencies should absolutely try to get people into Apple adding secret undetectable backdoors that help them catch criminals. I also think Apple is completely within their rights to make them work for it.
Basically, I totally agree with pretty much everyone that people who abuse children and upload pictures of it to iCloud should burn in hell. But I don't think that Apple should be compelled to add hell to iOS 17 if that makes any sense. If the NSA wants to hire double agents that pass the Apple interview process and add sneaky undetectable code that reports those people to them, I think that's great.
I think I just like the chaos of it all. That's why nobody votes for me when I run for Congress or whatever.
You are making a value judgment, though, even in your followup. You’ve implied that employment of one of those people is prima facie surreptitious, despite a carefully-drawn picture of how nearly all of the cases you’re gesturing toward are benign and not worth your ongoing concern. Foreign governments doing exactly what you’re alleging, on the other hand…
To be honest, that opinion makes you unelectable because you’ve alienated a huge group of people (way, way bigger than you think, and across the political spectrum), partially by imagining the beltway and back rooms of FAANGs as a le Carré novel. Reality is boring. Do horror shows happen? Duh. But take PRISM, for example. PRISM is an efficient, automated legal warrant process to streamline subpoena and provenance of user data for national security purposes, nothing more, but everybody screamed oh my holy hell! because the Snowden slides didn’t contextualize that and could be taken to imply something far worse. It’s toil reduction. Ask anybody in compliance at major companies. Subpoenas are a huge bitch at scale and nearly all major companies have a PRISM equivalent facing the other direction precisely for the reason PRISM exists. It’s not cigar smoke and port mirroring but for some people that’s more fun to imagine, I guess.
Seriously, reality in all of it is far less interesting than you think, and that’s one example of many. And often the fetishization of the secrecy and imaginative scenarios takes away from the real issue, which is market forces incentivizing the erosion of privacy and civil liberties. So ironically, by worrying you’re weakening the worry.
> PRISM is an efficient, automated legal warrant process to streamline subpoena and provenance of user data for national security purposes
Dropping the euphemisms, it's a for cops to do their job easier. That's cool when they're doing it transparently, with sufficient oversight and protections against abuse, and with a high success rate. The extent to which any of those three is true is pretty dubious.
Even if you truly do believe in this, which I totally understand–I have plenty of friends who work in this area, they are really behind the whole "we protect America" thing and I'm guessing you're probably in a similar camp–the issue is even more fundamental: it's one of attitude. Just because you're doing something good doesn't mean you have the right to have your job made easier. That's just not how it works. You don't get to take nuclear secrets and work on them from your personal laptop on the beach, no matter how pure your intentions are. When you work on things that are "dangerous" you don't get to just do whatever you want. The PRISM leaks were a scandal because they made the American people feel like the government was not accountable to them, and that is the price you have to pay to do anything in this country. End of story.
But the real question is “why do so many people have these suspicious attitudes towards law enforcement and CIA and so on”.
Might it be because of the Hoovers and the Nixons and the countless CIA overthrows and the fake WMDs and the support for Israel and the military industrial complex and 2008 and ..
The government has most definitely not behaved in not earned our trust. And yeah, that will lead to scenarios where when we (the people) see violations of constitutional rights we don’t rush to nuanced investigations we rush to assuming it’s another instance of a corrupt government.
This type of shit is why I am always refusing to get a clearance. I wouldn’t be able to strut around proudly about how I’m destroying the country like this guy.
I think you two might be talking about different groups of people? I read your comment as "current employees of three letter agencies act as spies by embedding themselves into tech companies" while the comment you're replying to seems to be talking about "people who used to work for these places should be able to get jobs as civilians".
Basically, I totally agree with pretty much everyone that people who abuse children and upload pictures of it to iCloud should burn in hell. But I don't think that Apple should be compelled to add hell to iOS 17 if that makes any sense. If the NSA wants to hire double agents that pass the Apple interview process and add sneaky undetectable code that reports those people to them, I think that's great.
I think I just like the chaos of it all. That's why nobody votes for me when I run for Congress or whatever.