Apple has just issued an official statement to deny allegations that the U.S. government has direct access to its servers and can spy on people’s conversations without a warrant. In a rare for the company public statement, Cupertino made it crystal clear that it does not participate in the National Security Agency’s “Prism” program.
Apple clarified that it only gives U.S. officials information after examining legal requests. To prove that, it revealed that from the beginning of December until the end of May it has gotten between 4000 and 5000 such requests. Some of them - the company underscored - were rejected because of inconsistencies.
Any government agency requesting customer content must get a court order
Moreover, Apple also claims that encrypted messages sent via iMessage or FaceTime simply cannot be decrypted and all conversations via those channels remain private even when they are legally requested.
Two weeks ago, on June 6th, a huge scandal broke up after leaked slides revealed a secret "Prism" program that showed how companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Apple provide some form of a backdoor access to their servers directly to the U.S. government. The shocking revelation showed how officials can "extract audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time."
Two weeks ago, when technology companies were accused of indiscriminately sharing customer data with government agencies, Apple issued a clear response: We first heard of the government’s “Prism” program when news organizations asked us about it on June 6. We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers, and any government agency requesting customer content must get a court order.
Like several other companies, we have asked the U.S. government for permission to report how many requests we receive related to national security and how we handle them. We have been authorized to share some of that data, and we are providing it here in the interest of transparency.
From December 1, 2012 to May 31, 2013, Apple received between 4,000 and 5,000 requests from U.S. law enforcement for customer data. Between 9,000 and 10,000 accounts or devices were specified in those requests, which came from federal, state and local authorities and included both criminal investigations and national security matters. The most common form of request comes from police investigating robberies and other crimes, searching for missing children, trying to locate a patient with Alzheimer’s disease, or hoping to prevent a suicide.
Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it. Apple has always placed a priority on protecting our customers’ personal data, and we don’t collect or maintain a mountain of personal details about our customers in the first place. There are certain categories of information which we do not provide to law enforcement or any other group because we choose not to retain it.
For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers’ location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form.
We will continue to work hard to strike the right balance between fulfilling our legal responsibilities and protecting our customers’ privacy as they expect and deserve.
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