Apple Is Playing Spygames With Fedguv

Fascinating battles are playing out behind the scenes:

We’ve known for roughly two years the US government has programs devoted to intercepting computer hardware mid-shipment. These programs are used to insert backdoors or spyware deep into a system’s firmware before it even arrives at its destination. A new report claims Apple is looking into building its own servers as a way to thwart this type of insertion…

Apple has long suspected that servers it ordered from the traditional supply chain were intercepted during shipping, with additional chips and firmware added to them by unknown third parties in order to make them vulnerable to infiltration, according to a person familiar with the matter. At one point, Apple even assigned people to take photographs of motherboards and annotate the function of each chip, explaining why it was supposed to be there. Building its own servers with motherboards it designed would be the most surefire way for Apple to prevent unauthorized snooping via extra chips… Google publicly announced it would begin encrypting all data that travels through its data centers after information leaked that the NSA had tapped undersea cables to spy on Google’s data centers from the inside, where data was once unencrypted.

Very few understand…

This is chilling. There was a time long ago, back when a government agency couldn’t penetrate the private sphere of a private sector entity, unless there was probable cause that a crime had been committed. Even then, they had to present that cause to a judge and get a warrant before they could do anything. That desire to limit domestic government action was the entire reason our overseas intelligence agencies were barred from operating on American soil and targeting American citizens. It was thought that a no-holds-barred free-for-all between the government and the private sector, outside of the bounds of the law, would be a bad thing for the nation. Trust in government would erode, and the citizenry would begin to view government as an enemy rather than an ally in the struggle to make America great. Even worse, the government would begin to view the citizenry as an enemy.

Now, those days of limited government action are gone. Now, the manufacturers suppliers are penetrated, the manufacturer is penetrated, the wholesaler is penetrated, the shipper is penetrated, your own company is penetrated, and your customers are penetrated, all in a myriad of ways, from technically to in-person, by a government with limitless resources, and it is all done without any of those targets having been involved in any crime at all. It is done preemptively, “just in case.” Even worse, now you have a government which views law abiding citizens who want to lead their own private lives in peace as enemies of the state, and every secret as it’s own personal domain.

There is an ominous air about it, because it feels like what we see now is merely the beginning of a trend, which has some ways to go before it reaches the final destination where it will settle. Already the rules are gone. Now we will find out just how gone they can be. What will happen then? Nobody knows.

Moreover, the guys who serve in the military and join LE would seem the types who would tend to not condone this type of governmental attitude in their nation. That raises the questions of where it is coming from, who it is at the top who is ordering it, and what they see coming which is driving them to pursue it so relentlessly.

Even better, just when you thought the future couldn’t appear any more ominous, the Apocalypse approaches. What an Apocalypse would look like, if the government dissolves and all of this machine is turned loose in the private sector absent the last vestiges of government oversight, is something I don’t even want to imagine. The chaos might be the least problematic aspect of a collapse.

All of your secrets are now the property of somebody – and as of now, nobody even knows who.