Apple’s transparency report on governmental data requests assures the
company mostly helps investigating criminal offences, such as thefts of
Apple products. The company complains of a ‘gag order’ banning
disclosure of number and core of such requests.
The report - supposed to give Apple customers a better idea as to
under which conditions their personal data can be handed over to
government intelligence agencies - calls for more transparency
and measures to counter the negative effects of Edward Snowden’s
revelations.
Following shocking publications by former National Security
Agency (NSA) contractor Snowden, Apple Inc. suffered a number of
accusations that some of its products are dual-purpose.
Just in October, Anonymous hacking group accused Apple’s Touch ID
sensor of sending people’s fingerprints directly to the NSA.
So the company, whose name has been mentioned along with
Facebook, Google, Microsoft and other IT giants in practically
all news about the NSA global spying, has rushed to sooth the
privacy pains of its customers.
The Apple’s
seven-page report on data requests from
government bodies covers a relatively short period, the six
months from January 1, 2013, to June 30, 2013.
Apple has officially admitted that it cooperates with law
enforcement, both in the US and abroad, though it claims it fully
controls the process and is capable of denying sharing
information with the government.
Apple assures it is not
“amassing personal information,”
such as location data, Map searches or Siri requests, because
this is none of the company’s business. Steve Jobs’ successors
have no doubt that
“innovative security solutions,” such
as the Find My iPhone tracking program and
Touch ID fingerprint verification protocol
adopted on iPhone 5 make this world
“more secure and more
convenient.”
The report explains that there are two types of request existing:
account requests and device requests. It is the first type’s
statistics that US law enforcement prefers to keep secret. The
account request means Apple is demanded to share personal
information entered by client to an account, whereas a device
request is brought in when some kind of an Apple device is stolen
or lost and is being searched for.
“The US government does not allow Apple to disclose, except in
broad ranges, the number of national security orders, the number
of accounts affected by the orders, or whether content, such as
emails, was disclosed,” the report says, claiming that in the
given period of time the company received between 1,000 and 2,000
official US government requests.
"We strongly oppose this gag order," the document said.
“We believe that dialogue and advocacy are the most productive
way to bring about a change in these policies, rather than filing
a lawsuit against the US government,” the report said,
informing that Apple has
“filed an Amicus brief at the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court) in support of a
group of cases requesting greater transparency.”
Though the electronics giant complains about the US government’s
‘gag order’ prohibiting it from publicizing the exact number and
nature of government data requests, the data presented in the
report is quite telling.
The request statistics published in the report’s two charts -
account and device requests respectively - reveals that American
law enforcement has requested personal data from Apple on a
couple of thousand occasions at the most in the first half of
2013. And that during that time in all of the US there were 3,542
cases of Apple devices lost or stolen, totaling 8,605 separate
items. However Apple proudly informs that it agreed to co-operate
on a mere 3,110 device requests. It is not clear why the company
refused to help finding almost two-thirds of the stolen goods.
The statistics for requests outside the US is many times smaller.
The largest numbers of account requests, 127 of them, were
received from the UK, and the company claims that only in only 37
percent of the cases some information was disclosed.
“When we receive such a demand, our legal team carefully
reviews the order. If there is any question about the legitimacy
or scope of the court order, we challenge it. Only when we are
satisfied that the court order is valid and appropriate do we
deliver the narrowest possible set of information responsive to
the request,” the report says.
Moreover, the company refused to have anything to do with the
notorious Patriot Act that enabled surveillance on the US
citizens after the 9/11 attacks.
“Apple has never received an order under Section 215 of the
USA Patriot Act. We would expect to challenge such an order if
served on us,” is specifically stressed in the report.
The first major hit of Edward Snowden’s revelations has been the
world learning the fact that America’s National Security Agency
has direct access to servers of giants like Facebook, Google,
Microsoft and Apple.
Though the latest Apple report finally admits the fact that the
company does cooperate with the US government agencies on a
lawful basis, the document doesn’t contain a single word about
the NSA having direct access to company’s databases, an activity
for which it wouldn’t have to ask for corporate approval.
While from the very beginning Apple
denied any knowledge about such access to its
servers existing, it never presented solid proof of its position.
Reuters/Dado Ruvic
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