01.10.12
Apple’s Backdoorgate and New Antitrust Class Action
Summary: Apple gets unwanted attention for putting back doors in its software in order for authorities to intrude; more antitrust lawsuits (class action) brought against Apple
APPLE received a lot of flack (hot fire even) in recent day after it turned out that it had set up a backdoor for governments, validating many suspicions that we wrote about before. To quote Slashdot:
“In a tweet early this morning, cybersecurity researcher Christopher Soghoian pointed to an internal memo of India’s Military Intelligence that has been liberated by hackers and posted on the Net. The memo suggests that, “in exchange for the Indian market presence” mobile device manufacturers, including RIM, Nokia, and Apple (collectively defined in the document as “RINOA”) have agreed to provide backdoor access on their devices. The Indian government then “utilized backdoors provided by RINOA” to intercept internal emails of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a U.S. government body with a mandate to monitor, investigate and report to Congress on ‘the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship’ between the U.S. and China. Manan Kakkar, an Indian blogger for ZDNet, has also picked up the story and writes that it may be the fruits of an earlier hack of Symantec. If Apple is providing governments with a backdoor to iOS, can we assume that they have also done so with Mac OS X?”
This is an important development because with documents in our hands it will no longer be possible for Apple to duck serious allegations. Apple has more bad publicity coming as another antitrust class action is brought against it:
Four American iPhone users have launched a class action suit against Apple over its exclusive deals with carriers in the country and the way it runs the App Store.
Apple partnered with US carrier AT&T when it first brought the Jesus-mobe to stores in 2007, in a five-year exclusivity agreement that tied users to an AT&T SIM card with no option to use another network.
AT&T conspired with the government to spy, oppress and censor too. We wrote about this in previous years [1, 2, 3]. So AT&T and Apple have more in common than the common man (or woman) may realise. █
Content is available under CC-BY-SA
Michael said,
January 10, 2012 at 11:50 am
If Apple is doing this, and the evidence seems to indicate they are, then this is *WRONG* and I fully support your adding to the bad publicity Apple is receiving over this. Sadly, much like with DRM, Apple (and MS and others) are likely pushed into this, but with DRM Apple has been honest. If they have done this without being honest about it (as it appears) then there is really no excuse for their behavior.