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> Forcing companies to add backdoors in secret is

We have precedent: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...

  Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government “prohibited” the company “from sharing any information,”
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To be fair, most apps are guarding against this now by having the push notifications contain just a wake-up signal, the app then wakes up and retrieves the real content.

"secretly sharing notification data" (ie. asking for records kept in the usual course of business[1]) is not the same as "forcing companies to add backdoors in secret"

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/1732


I think it's safe to assume that there's a Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) at every major US company that deals in communications. That said, there's no reason to think that ICE or local law enforcement get access to the data being collected. iCloud may be completely backdoored either way, but there's a big difference between the NSA and ICE in terms of what they care about going after and what capabilities they want publicly confirmed.

Thinking something is "unprecedented" is not an argument against it happening. Apple has surprised us before, I see no reason to expect ADP is any different.

>Apple has surprised us before

It really isn't. The reason I used the specific wording for "records kept in the usual course of business" is that's the legal standard for subpoenable information. It shouldn't be surprising to any legal expert that it was fair game for the government to request. The only thing surprising is that we didn't know it specifically happened before, so it's only as "surprising" as chatgpt logs being subpoenaed. Yes, it's "surprising" for the people using chatgpt as their therapist and think it should have been protected, but ask any lawyer and they'll all agree it's fair game. On the other hand forcing apple to specifically insert a backdoor runs into all sorts of constitution/due process issues.




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