[sneak]

Apple chose not-jail and not-ban when faced with the requirement that all iCloud users in China be subject to realtime CCP surveillance. Apple's iCloud operations in China (required under Chinese law for Chinese users) are in CCP-controlled datacenters.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce...

Then they did it again in the USA, preserving a backdoor in the end-to-end crypto of iMessage for the FBI:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

If you are large enough, the laws don't apply to the government's strong-arm treatment of you. They have all the machine guns, you have none.

Presumably Apple de facto does not have the right to widely publish surveillance-resistant end to end crypto without state retribution for same, even on home turf with ostensible 1A rights. This is why they are deploying clientside spyware to scan your local files for CP (or anything else they are forced to scan for in the future by a adversary-controlled DoJ or DHS (hello 2025)). The secure architecture of the iPhone and iPad make it impossible to alter or disable this functionality even on your own device.

The power dynamic is the same in all large countries, regardless of political structure.

You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

[O__________O]

What Apple does publicly and privately are not the same thing, and if anything, Apple has a track record of not removing loopholes that would reduce the surface area available for secret agreements and/or orders; for example, iCloud being able to view data.

Related: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter

[sneak]

iCloud Backup is not end to end encrypted and is readable by Apple. Same again for iCloud Photos. The Apple-readable iCloud Backup contains the keys for your iMessages, which means Apple can read those in realtime as they transit the servers (due to relaying the ciphertext, and having the keys from the non-e2e backup).

Even if you disable iCloud Backup, everyone else you iMessage with will back up all your iMessages from the other end, because it is on by default.

The idea that Apple can't read your data is mostly false. They can see all your photos and read all your chats, and all of the other files and app data from your device. They can do this without your device or password at any time.

They do this for the US government without a search warrant to over 30,000 user accounts per year, per their own transparency report.

[Tepix]

> If you are large enough, the laws don't apply to the government's strong-arm treatment of you. They have all the machine guns, you have none.

Interestingly this also works for small fish: If you are too small, you can get by without sticking to the rules because you won't be on the governments radar.

[sneak]

It's true. The rules applied (in practice) to small exchanges are not the same rules applied to Coinbase.

Equal application/protection under the law is a myth.