Apple denied Chinese government requests for source code twice in last 2 years
Chinese authorities have asked Apple to turn over source code twice in the past two years, but the company refused in both cases, Apple general counsel Bruce Sewell told a hearing of the U.S. House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on Tuesday.
Sewell was defending the company against accusations that the company is willing to hand data over to the Chinese government for business reasons, but unwilling to help U.S. law enforcement access private data, Reuters reported. Today's hearing is related to a House Judiciary Committee gathering in March, where Sewell also spoke to defend Apple's encryption practices.
The company's dealings with China became contentious earlier in the hearing, when Captain Charles Cohen -- a commander with the Indiana State Police -- brought up the idea that Apple is willing to give data to Chinese officials. His position was attacked by Representative Anna Eshoo, a Democrat from California, who forced Cohen to admit that his only source of information was media reports.
In Apple's latest Report on Government Information Requests, released Monday, the company said that China filed 32 requests for information relating to 6,724 accounts, up from 24 requests tied to 85 accounts six months earlier. It's not clear how many of these Apple complied with.
In a separate Tuesday panel, also in front of the Energy and Commerce subcommittee, Sewell contended that building any backdoor into Apple products would create problems for "one hundred percent" of its users.
Calling attention to potential usefulness of accessing private data, however, Thomas Galati -- the chief of intelligence for the New York Police Department -- told the hearing that between October 2015 and March 2016, investigators had been unable to open 67 Apple devices. These were linked to 44 violent crimes, include 10 homicides, two rapes, and the shooting of an on-duty officer.
New York is now the focus of the conflict between Apple and the U.S. government over encryption, following the Justice Department withdrawing an order asking Apple to help break into the iPhone of San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook. An anonymous third party helped the government instead.
The Justice Department is appealing a March ruling by New York Magistrate Judge James Orenstein, who argued that Apple can't be forced to undermine its own security in the instance of an iPhone linked to a local drug case. On Friday, lawyers for Apple suggested that the government has failed to prove it needs Apple's help in extracting data.
Sewell was defending the company against accusations that the company is willing to hand data over to the Chinese government for business reasons, but unwilling to help U.S. law enforcement access private data, Reuters reported. Today's hearing is related to a House Judiciary Committee gathering in March, where Sewell also spoke to defend Apple's encryption practices.
The company's dealings with China became contentious earlier in the hearing, when Captain Charles Cohen -- a commander with the Indiana State Police -- brought up the idea that Apple is willing to give data to Chinese officials. His position was attacked by Representative Anna Eshoo, a Democrat from California, who forced Cohen to admit that his only source of information was media reports.
In Apple's latest Report on Government Information Requests, released Monday, the company said that China filed 32 requests for information relating to 6,724 accounts, up from 24 requests tied to 85 accounts six months earlier. It's not clear how many of these Apple complied with.
In a separate Tuesday panel, also in front of the Energy and Commerce subcommittee, Sewell contended that building any backdoor into Apple products would create problems for "one hundred percent" of its users.
Calling attention to potential usefulness of accessing private data, however, Thomas Galati -- the chief of intelligence for the New York Police Department -- told the hearing that between October 2015 and March 2016, investigators had been unable to open 67 Apple devices. These were linked to 44 violent crimes, include 10 homicides, two rapes, and the shooting of an on-duty officer.
New York is now the focus of the conflict between Apple and the U.S. government over encryption, following the Justice Department withdrawing an order asking Apple to help break into the iPhone of San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook. An anonymous third party helped the government instead.
The Justice Department is appealing a March ruling by New York Magistrate Judge James Orenstein, who argued that Apple can't be forced to undermine its own security in the instance of an iPhone linked to a local drug case. On Friday, lawyers for Apple suggested that the government has failed to prove it needs Apple's help in extracting data.
Comments
China will never bar Apple from its country because they're not stupid, like certain politicians running for office this year, and they need Apple's money. As for IP theft, that happens all over the world and our own judicial system can't protect Apple's IP from theft. Don't blame the Chinese on this one.
Now go and read up on the history of the United States. About the land grabs from the native peoples and the biological warfare promoted against them. Go and read up about slavery and how it caused a nation to go to war against itself exposing the extreme prejudice of BOTH sides, not just the Confederacy. The Union states only calculated a black person as 3/5's of a white person for population purposes.
Was slavery ever codified in China the way it was in the US? Was genocide practices the same way?
China is a competitor, but their government is no more evil than what exists in the US.
They never invaded another country on the false pretext of weapons of mass destruction leaving a political mess and sowing the seeds for the development of one of the most extreme movements of our time.
Eisenhower warned us to beware of the military industrial complex. We didn't heed those warnings. The Chinese government controls their military manufacturing. The opposite is true of the US. So from my vantage point, the US is worse than China. And it isn't even close.
http://www.transparency.org/cpi2015#map-container
#1 Denmark and #2 Finland are the least corrupt.
#9. Canada
#16. USA
#18. Japan
#37. South Korea
#83. China
#119. Russia
Somalia and North Korea tie for 167th out of 168th place.
So China is dead center of the corruption index.
The problem with the political system, in any country is that there is too much money influencing everything from regulations to asinine behavior laws. China gets a lot of flack because of it's Human Rights record, specificly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_offences_in_China look at how many things result in the death penalty, and yet China still runs around producing deadly-everything... for export. That is the the essence of the problem. Foreign companies want the cheap labor, but not the cost of protecting that cheap labor. If Chinese employees had the same benefits that American workers had, they would cost the same as American workers. Want to see that change? Tell the American politicians to make it illegal to outsource anything to a company that doesn't treat their employees as good as in-house workers. Sure most of the cheap currently china-produced consumer products will become 10 times as expensive, but hey we stop treating employees like garbage.