Can I play devil's advocate for just a moment? Gruber asks for evidence. His only complaints seems to be the lack of evidence and a question of whether the app violates local (Hong Kong) law. Cook's memo directly addresses both of those issues:
> However, over the past several days we received credible information, from the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau, as well as from users in Hong Kong, that the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence and to victimize individuals and property where no police are present. This use put the app in violation of Hong Kong law.
So then, is the complaint simply that Cook is not providing direct evidence of these claims? Is that a reasonable expectation? What evidence could Cook provide that would directly tie violence (we know that Hong Kong protesters have committed violence) to this particular app? It seems like everyone agrees that this app was useful for organizing Hong Kong protests, and that some Hong Kong protesters have committed violence and broken local laws.
Please don't take this as some statement of political support for any particular government, company, or group. I'm attempting to address the specifics of this memo and Gruber's complaints. I am not attempting to make any argument of the form "the Hong Kong protests are [good, bad] and therefore any tool that helps the protesters is [good, bad]." The overall merits of the Hong Kong protests are not, from what I can tell, relevant to Apple's decision to ban this app or Gruber's complaints about Apple's decision and memo.
Even if the alleged crimes allegedly abused the app (something certainly not endorsed by the app makers), the same can be said for a lot of other apps. Thieves use facebook to look for people who give details on when they are on vacation for example. Snapchat and Skype and kik and whatapp and every other social messaging and social media app and service is abused by pedo criminals grooming their victims. etc
But those alleged crimes could not have possibly helped by the app, as has been pointed out: you don't get to see individual officers' locations and it does not show areas with no police at all either, just police hotspots (and technically, most areas even in a dense city like Hong Kong are without immediate police presence most of the time, anyway).
But even if we played devil's advocate and took the allegations of criminal activity that abused the app at face value, and assumed Tim Cook is not free to share specifics as the information might be confidential, he could at least answer what local laws were allegedly violated by the app itself. Those laws certainly are not confidential information.
Dude, in HK the police raise are legally obliged to raise flags to warn the public of things such as firing tear gas, dispersing crowds, illegal assembly etc. They will also post on Twitter to notify the public where and when they will disperse the public. The HK police force wants the public to know where they are, so in the context of HK, banning this app is kind of ridiculous.
Considering the brutality of the HK police force in recent months, I would argue that this app is great at providing the public with information on how to avoid being tear gassed, beaten or arrested by avoiding the police. A lot of locals have been extremely pissed off with the police force. They have gone into very residential areas and fired tear gas unnecessarily among a whole host of other things.
The police are phsyically attacking the people, it's quite different. Yes, this app helps protestors, but it also helps the public avoid being treated extremely violently by the police.
A friend of mine is a police officer and regularly posts on Facebook about the events he's policing. By your logic, if someone used that information to track him down and attack him he's the one breaking the law?
Incidentally if he posted about a riot in our city (thankfully pretty much unheard of) he'd be carrying out exactly the same function as this app!
No, listing where the police are is not a crime. Attacking the police is a crime. Inciting to attack the police is probably a crime too in most jurisdictions around the world. Neither the app nor the app makers attacked police nor endorsed let alone incited attacking the police.
This is a fair point. Laws are different, so procedures can be different. Not to mention the city’s situation is critical - protests - violence from both side.
Following US procedures in HK does not make sense. Companies always obey local laws but not laws in another country.
That's why I said Tim Cook should actually spell out what local Hong Kong laws were violated, if any. There actually could be some, but so far I did not see anybody actually pointing out any such laws, neither the Hong Kong government, nor the myriad of journalists covering the story about the app, nor Apple which surely had their in-house counsel and maybe evn external counsel look into this matter.
After that, the next question is if Apple, which even kinda positions itself as the new "Don't be evil" company including fighting some governments e.g. when they get told to subvert their own security tech, should side with such draconian laws or with the app makers.
Every time there is a major protest or football (soccer) game in Germany, facebook and twitter and everything else is full of messages regarding major police presence. It's the protesters or fans warning each other, it's the local residents warning each other, oh, and the police itself is often an avid user of facebook and twitter itself warning people to avoid certain areas if there is violence to help regular citizens avoid getting caught up in it.
The vast majority of people do not post or read those messages to coordinate violence against the police, but merely to stay out of the way when police and black block protestors or football hooligans clash.
I live near a football stadium, and there are some violent clashes of drunk hooligans and police after many games, but thankfully usually only on a small scale involving maybe 10-30 people against the police. Nonetheless, I made it a habit to avoid certain area for a couple of hours after a home game.
By removing this app some amount of public opinion swings towards the notion that the HK Government (and police) are the victims here. Let's not forget the decision that led to the protests and the incidents of police brutality that have occurred since.
Perhaps avoiding police is the primary use case of the app.
This is exactly what authoritarian governments do. They muddy the truth and make official and important sounding institutions make official statements that paint a situation in exactly they need it to be to further their own goals. I don’t understand how anybody can trust any information that comes out of the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau when the whole issue is that the HK government is no longer independent.
And beyond the actions of the Chinese government, corporations like Apple have no integrity upon which to base trust for them anymore. They need to cough up real proof instead some canned response that basically tells us to trust them on blind faith alone.
This is exactly what authoritarian governments do. They muddy the truth and make official and important sounding institutions make official statements that paint a situation in exactly they need it to be to further their own goals.
And how is this different than the current American administration?
The difference is that there is media that is free enough to speak out about how the administration is lying. There are institutions that can resist, whoever little, and reveal the truth in some way. You have none of this in China. Companies, media, individuals, government institutions - all are beholden to the CCP in a way that prevents any kind of accountability, transparency and responsibility.
The US is currently a clusterfuck, yes. But if they were anything like China, the media would be in a blackout, thousands of political enemies would be sent to gulags and people across the board would be losing their jobs for speaking out.
To pretend that the US is in any way comparable is such an absurd distortion of reality, and really plays into China's narrative. Why criticize China if the US is just as bad ?
So, news in a non-authoritarian country are all truth? Non-authoritarian gov never “muddy the truth and make official and important sounding institutions make official statements that paint a situation in exactly they need it to be to further their own goals” ?
Would it not make more sense, in such a highly charged political environment, that Apple should tie their own hands and only remove the app at the mandate of a court order?
That would make it obvious that Apple is complying with law, and that they haven't "bowed to pressure" from either side.
If there is a claim that the app is violating law, then that should be validated by a judicial process, not by the operating nuances of a company.
If Apple are receiving reports from users that the law is being broken, they should be passing those on to law enforcement, and publicly complying with the response, not acting as their own arbitrator.
I think that could be a valid choice for Apple to make, and I think reasonable people could disagree about which choice Apple ended up making.
But it seems very plausible to me that Apple was presented with credible information that this app was being used to organize violent attacks and that Apple made a reasonable choice to ban the app according to Apple's policies about following local laws as well as Apple's internal policies about apps causing harm. I think that can be the case regardless of anyone at Apple's views about the merits of the Hong Kong protests as a whole.
Absolutely. The problem with Apple's, and many other companies, early response policies is it depends on the source of truth, such as the police, not being complicit.
If they always wait for a court order, PR disasters happen, and polticians dredge up 'think of the children' arguments.
If they don't wait for an order they can become part of the machinery of ill-intentioned polticial or commercial forces.
Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
However, I still think waiting for an order, especially in tense environments, is the right moral choice. I concede it probably isn't the right economic choice a lot of the time.
I totally agree. But there is a point you may not aware.
Government, law enforcement and court are not separated in China, they all belonging to the same central government. So if you really want a court order, they’ll issue one quickly.
That’s the tricky situation. Companies must obey local laws, but local laws are built on behalf of central government, and court exists for protecting central government.
No problem with that. I presume gp focused on a court order since that's the way it works in his local culture. The important part is Apple not acting as their own arbitrator.
If the order came from the HK gov, citizens know who is responsible for it and can act accordingly. And I'd expect this to be the reason Apple received pressure to remove it "by themselves".
Against individual officers though? That is what's absurd.
And what of Twitter and Telegram and Messenger and Gmail and Weechat and Outlook?
This is also the same organization whose spokesperson that called a protestor being brutalized by officers a "yellow object" and who have been routinely documented fabricating evidence. Taking their word at face value is patently absurd.
Apple was in a similar situation with the FBI asking to unlock suspected terrorist phones, and they pushed back.
Let's not give them a pass here, as it's quite obvious why they're accepting the Chinese statements at face value, because of how dependent they are on the Chinese market.
> Let's not give them a pass here, as it's quite obvious why they're accepting the Chinese statements at face value, because of how dependent they are on the Chinese market.
Let's not forget that in the United States, Apple has recourse to push back against government requests within the system of the law.
They (very quietly) created a special version of iCloud which is entirely run by a Chinese state-owned company. I don't see how that's any different to "a special version of the OS with a backdoor".
I'm not intimate enough with any of the parties involved in this situation, so my reply will also be comfortably generic:
Yes, it's a reasonable demand. If public opinion is asking something of Apple, and its CEO chooses to answer, every aspect of the answer is open to scrutiny. Gruber indeed lists the specific evidence he would expect:
> - When was HKmap.live “used maliciously to target individual officers for violence”?
> - When was it used to “victimize individuals and property where no police are present”?
> - What local laws in Hong Kong does it violate?
It's unlikely that a CEO would be so thorough. Apple is particularly obsessed with secrecy, and tech companies in general seem to not want to disclose details when they restrict access to a product or platform.
But it's still a reasonable demand from an individual standpoint.
I'm just not sure what that evidence could look like. Like I said, don't we have sufficient evidence that this app was used to organize protests in Hong Kong, and that some protesters in Hong Kong committed violence against officers and against individuals and property where no police were present?
As for Hong Kong law, I can agree that it might be nice to cite a specific law, but I also don't find it at all difficult to believe that any government would have a law that allows the government to prohibit a communication medium that is being used to organize anti-government protests that have been sometimes violent.
Apple should've given some kind of overview of how exactly the app was used to target police officers. Knowing that the app was aggregating info on police presence, I can see a dozen ways to maliciously use this info.
For example, it could have been used to identify locations where police is about to withdraw to target last remaining officers. Or to identify a good place for an ambush with good escape options and no video surveillance and then lure police into the ambush by reporting a minor accident. Information about location and movements of the adversary is invaluable for exactly this reason - it gives the other side advantage in planning.
If something like this really did happen and if Apple has any specifics, it should totally release it down to exact location and time of incidents and the aftermath. These are very serious allegations that need substantial proofs.
That is not what the application does though. it is not "being used to organize anti-government protests". that is not the reason it was removed. it was a map with icons. by that logic any and all communications apps ( telegram especially) would be outside the law because you can organize protests using them, way better than using icons on a map.
No, the complaint is not that Cook is not providing direct evidence, and it is a complete misrepresentation to suggest so. It makes your protestations of disinterest rather suspect, as those of supposed "devil's advocates" so often seem to be.
The complaint is that Cook's claims are extraordinary and seemingly impossible on their face because of the fundamental nature of the app in question. Its purpose is to show the aggregated position of large concentrations of police, so as to let users avoid confrontations with them. How can such an app be used to "target individual officers for violence", since it provides no information about individual officers?
When so extraordinary a claim is made, hearsay evidence isn't the issue. What is necessary is an explanation of how the seemingly impossible is possible. Cook does not provide this or even address the apparent problem. A neutral person, reading Cook's memo without the proper background, might be mislead into believing the app in question does provide tracking of individual police officers. I don't accept this is an accident on Cook's part. I think he is deliberately attempting to mislead his own employees regarding the nature of the app, and as a consequence his decision to ban it.
Cook's cited but unenumerated "credible" information received from a government body and users only compounds the situation. Cook could provide plenty of additional material to support his claim. He could provide more detailed information on exactly what information was received, in what volume, and in what form. He could explain the efforts the company undertook to perform independent corroboration of the evidence. He could provide a detailed account of why, in this case, he believes an autocratic government currently conducting a brutal repression of its own citizens can be trusted to communicate honestly about it, given neither it, nor any similar autocratic government, has ever spoken honestly about similar situations in the past.
Fundamentally, the problem isn't whatever evidence does or does not exist. It is that Cook's memo is a weak, politician's attempt to justify a misdeed by making absurd claims for which he provides no evidence at all. He is trying to make a problem go away, not engage with a difficult situation as a human being.
I don't understand why people would flag comments as 'suspect', have we reached McCarthyism or the hyper sensitive Chinese level yet? Why is it impossible for people to address the opinions and reasons within a comment specifically without resorting to 'suspecting the motives of the individual'? In other words, why does the motives of the individual matters to you if the opinion expressed within the comments can stand by themselves?
Maybe because the poster characterized the problem as: "So then, is the complaint simply that Cook is not providing direct evidence of these claims? Is that a reasonable expectation? What evidence could Cook provide that would directly tie violence (we know that Hong Kong protesters have committed violence) to this particular app?"
Whereas the article says: "The first allegation is that “the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence”. This makes no sense at all. The app does not show the locations of individual officers at all. It shows general concentrations of police units, with a significant lag. As the developer and @charlesmok, a Hong Kong legislator, have pointed out, the app aggregates reports from Telegram, Facebook and other sources. It beggars belief that a campaign to target individual officers would use a world-readable crowdsourcing format like this."
It could be incompetence, but it seems much more like clear disingenuousness, which is a pretty common thing nowadays.
Not the same commenter, but it seems like the lengthy protestations of disinterest are a reaction to the prevailing online climate of exactly the kind of paranoid hysteria embodied in, for example, the assertion that anyone playing devil's advocate is probably on the devil's side so to speak. Being able to hold and consider multiple contrary or incompatible positions simultaneously is in fact a sign of a fairly sophisticated intellect in the process of doing a thorough inquiry.
Even the devil's advocate [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil%27s_advocate ] is supposed to cite facts and reason properly -- not claim a falsehood in support of the devil, which misrepresenting the article is.
You can't just precede anything with "just playing devil's advocate for a moment" and make it immune from scrutiny, that's the intellectual equivalent of "just a prank". From the WP article, emphasis mine:
> explore the thought further using a valid reasoning
I really did not intend to misrepresent Gruber's complaints. Gruber enumerates his complains quite clearly, and I believe I addressed them quite plainly and fairly.
I also don't think that Cook's claims are extraordinary or at all difficult to believe, so perhaps that's the more fundamental disagreement you and I have.
I think there may be a misrepresentation here. Apple is not a court of law for Hong Kong, so they did not gather evidence and make a call.
IMHO it is far more likely that a representative from the mentioned Hong Kong government agency reached out to ask the app to be removed for the reasons given, and Apple complied with their request. If I'm correct, Apple is taking the supplied information at face value and also as a formal (legal) request.
In that light, the reason for the (internal) statement here is due to the press this app already received and because many employees of Apple have a humanitarian interest in Hong Kong - or even have friends and family who live there.
> His only complaints seems to be the lack of evidence
That's seriously disingenuous. His complaints is about how what Tim wrote doesn't make any sense, not about evidence. He only ask for evidence because he is logical, he knows that he may have not thought of everything and could be potentially wrong.
> The first allegation is that “the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence”. This makes no sense at all. The app does not show the locations of individual officers at all. It shows general concentrations of police units, with a significant lag.
How could you explains this? I don't even need evidence, just a way for that to be possible (without outside coordination, that would be just absurd, simply use the same channel to coordinate instead).
I thought I provided a reasonable interpretation of Cook's comments in my previous comment, when I said "It seems like everyone agrees that this app was useful for organizing Hong Kong protests, and that some Hong Kong protesters have committed violence and broken local laws."
Of course the app doesn't show individual officers, but I don't think it's reasonable to interpret Cook's memo as claiming that the app literally showed the location of individual officers. An app that shows hotspots of police activity can obviously be used to find and target individual officers for violence.
> Of course the app doesn't show individual officers, but I don't think it's reasonable to interpret Cook's memo as claiming that the app literally showed the location of individual officers.
I'm not certain how else to read the passage below other than Cook claiming protestors used it to target individual officers somehow.
"However, over the past several days we received credible information, from the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau, as well as from users in Hong Kong, that the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence" -Tim Cook
My first question is whether the "Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau" is a reliable source of information under the current circumstances. I haven't been reading all the news about the Hong Kong protests, but what I have been reading suggests that China is applying an enormous amount of pressure to halt the protests, or reduce the international visibility of what is happening in Hong Kong.
It doesn't seem to me to take much of a leap of faith to think that China is applying pressure on the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau to get this app removed.
Cook's memo says that the reports, from the bureau as well as from the app's users, are "credible." That at least implies that Apple evaluated the credibility of the claims. I do understand that some people (like Gruber) might want Apple to provide material evidence, but is that really Apple's responsibility or usual behavior? It would seem extremely odd (and not at all comforting) to me if Apple, for example, released video evidence of a violent attack along with some record of this app being used by the attacker. That seems like something a government should do in a legal case, of course, but it would be seem strange to me for Apple to do that. And even if they did, I suspect it wouldn't convince people who are convinced that China is doctoring or inventing evidence to vilify the Hong Kong protesters.
This is the part of Cook's email that is harder to swallow. I doubt that reports from actual users (rather than Chinese cutouts) even exist.
The Hong Kong police force is not a credible source of information, given that it is the chief antagonist in the Hong Kong protests, and that a core demand of the millions demonstrating is an independent investigation of its conduct.
What is the generally accepted criteria for "credible information"? How could Apple have communicated better about how they reviewed or corroborated the claims given by the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau?
> [O]ver the past several days we received credible information [...] that the app was being used maliciously to [...] victimize individuals and property where no police are present.
Okay, but even if true, I've got very credible evidence that Twitter and Facebook (not to mention Safari!) have been used maliciously to victimize individuals and property. Will these apps be banned? If not, why not?
> So then, is the complaint simply that Cook is not providing direct evidence of these claims?
The complaint, I believe, is that nobody (including Cook) believes any of this. I'm sure he did get a message from the Hong Kong authorities (aka, the Chinese government) and at least one user in Hong Kong (aka, also the Chinese government) claiming the things he says they claimed. And he doesn't really believe they are true, but feels compelled to pretend he does, so he sent out the email, and now everyone else is being asked to pretend they're true too.
And Gruber is pointing out that they can't really be true, given the nature of the app. Which is quite right, but of course, it's beside the point. Cook isn't going to read Gruber's blog post, slap his forehead, and go "I've been hoodwinked!" and rescind the decision. He knows what he's doing.
> Is that a reasonable expectation? What evidence could Cook provide that would directly tie violence (we know that Hong Kong protesters have committed violence) to this particular app?
The claim is not that the app facilitated very particular types of violence, which we do not know has occured. (Although again, even if true, that's not a good reason to ban the app.)
No one has pointed to the Hong Kong law this app is supposed to be violating, including the Hong Kong authorities, who when asked basically said "go ask Apple".
Couple that with the fact that no officers have been targeted individually in Hong Kong protests since they began, and you begin to see that the whole thing sounds fishy.
What is the law being broken that no one knows about, and the cases of violence no one has heard of?
>Couple that with the fact that no officers have been targeted individually in Hong Kong protests since they began... the cases of violence no one has heard of?
This is the part I don't understand. Sky News UK has footage of protesters targetting an undercover police officer they'd discovered and setting him alight with a Molotov cocktail before trying to take his gun. It aired here on Australia's ABC News as well. (The Molotov cocktail incident happens at 0:17 https://youtu.be/VNGJK1k2MbY )
I'm with you on the other points, and I'm confident this app wasn't involved with that incident. But claiming the protestors have never been violent or targetted individual officers doesn't seem to match with reality.
(Of course, it's also worth questioning why there were undercover police with guns in the crowds in the first place.)
> So then, is the complaint simply that Cook is not providing direct evidence of these claims?
The complaint is that the claims are not credible given what we know of the app's capabilities. How could an app that highlights areas of heavy police activity be used to single out and attack lone officers without backup? If his claims were plausible, it might be different, but extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
The point is that this app collates information from other sources. Popular, encrypted sources where you don’t know the source like Telegram.
Why would one use this public app to target individual cops (when it doesn’t even reveal individual cops, and by virtue of its aggregation of data is likely to reveal groups of cops more often) when they could use any of the primary sources instead?
Maybe the other part is true, where criminals are using the app to target areas where cops are not present. That would actually make sense. But the first reason doesn’t add up.
Makes me sad we have lost soo much respect for liberty that people feel compelled to play "devil's advocate" in favor of a totalitarian regime.
I think it is clear that any "evidence" that has come from " Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau" should be rejected out right and not trusted at all
Further the fact that the app may have broken "local laws" should also have no impact at all on the discussion, we are talking about a Totalitarian regime with countless Human Rights violations, their local laws are objectively at odds with what anyone should consider just or proper
So it comes down "Does this app violate Apple Policies", given that apple like most companies write the rules so at any time anything can be a violation at their sole discretion then technically yes, but so could any app at any time.
At the end of the day allow me to Translate Apple's Statement SouthPark Style
"Like the NBA, Blizzard, and countless other companies, we welcome the Chinese censors into our homes and into our hearts. We too love money more than freedom. Long Live the communist party of China"
> However, over the past several days we received credible information, from the Hong Kong Cybersecurity and Technology Crime Bureau, as well as from users in Hong Kong, that the app was being used maliciously to target individual officers for violence and to victimize individuals and property where no police are present. This use put the app in violation of Hong Kong law.
So then, is the complaint simply that Cook is not providing direct evidence of these claims? Is that a reasonable expectation? What evidence could Cook provide that would directly tie violence (we know that Hong Kong protesters have committed violence) to this particular app? It seems like everyone agrees that this app was useful for organizing Hong Kong protests, and that some Hong Kong protesters have committed violence and broken local laws.
Please don't take this as some statement of political support for any particular government, company, or group. I'm attempting to address the specifics of this memo and Gruber's complaints. I am not attempting to make any argument of the form "the Hong Kong protests are [good, bad] and therefore any tool that helps the protesters is [good, bad]." The overall merits of the Hong Kong protests are not, from what I can tell, relevant to Apple's decision to ban this app or Gruber's complaints about Apple's decision and memo.