iImpersonate The Police - Printable Version

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iImpersonate The Police - James Lewis - 04-09-2011

I don't know if this belongs here or not, but I saw this and had to post it. Absolutely unbelievable.

Introducing iImpersonate The Police: Apple's Corporate Security Team Searched A Man's House While SFPD Waited Outside.

September 3rd, 2011
In my opinion, the fact that CalderÃ³n consented to the search, even though he thought the Apple employees were police officers, is the most terrifying aspect of this.
No warrant, no search. It's pretty simple.

Why he opened the door, and said anything to these people, is also a mystery to me.
Anyway, here's a link for Apple's investigators to review: California Penal Code Section 538d:

Quote:Any person other than one who by law is given the authority of a peace officer, who willfully wears, exhibits, or uses the authorized uniform, insignia, emblem, device, label, certificate, card, or writing, of a peace officer, with the intent of fraudulently impersonating a peace officer, or of fraudulently inducing the belief that he or she is a peace officer, is guilty of a misdemeanor.

Via: San Francisco Weekly:
The bizarre saga involving a lost prototype of the iPhone 5 has taken another interesting turn. Contradicting past statements that no records exist of police involvement in the search for the lost prototype, San Francisco Police Department spokesman Lt. Troy Dangerfield now tells SF Weekly that "three or four" SFPD officers accompanied two Apple security officials in an unusual search of a Bernal Heights man's home.

Dangerfield says that, after conferring with Apple and the captain of the Ingleside police station, he has learned that plainclothes SFPD officers went with private Apple detectives to the home of Sergio CalderÃ³n, a 22-year-old resident of Bernal Heights. According to Dangerfield, the officers "did not go inside the house," but stood outside while the Apple employees scoured CalderÃ³n's home, car, and computer files for any trace of the lost iPhone 5. The phone was not found, and CalderÃ³n denies that he ever possessed it.

In an interview with SF Weekly last night, CalderÃ³n told us that six badge-wearing visitors came to his home in July to inquire about the phone. CalderÃ³n said none of them acknowledged being employed by Apple, and one of them offered him $300, and a promise that the owner of the phone would not press charges, if he would return the device.

The visitors also allegedly threatened him and his family, asking questions about their immigration status. "One of the officers is like, Is everyone in this house an American citizen?' They said we were all going to get into trouble," CalderÃ³n said.

One of the officers left a phone number with him, which SF Weekly traced to Anthony Colon, an investigator employed at Apple, who declined to comment when we reached him.
Reached this afternoon, CalderÃ³n confirmed that only two of the six people who came to his home actually entered the house. He said those two did not specifically state they were police officers.

However, he said he was under the impression that they were all police, since they were part of the group outside that identified themselves as SFPD officials. The two who entered the house did not disclose that they were private security officers, according to Calderon.

"When they came to my house, they said they were SFPD," CalderÃ³n said. "I thought they were SFPD. That's why I let them in." He said he would not have permitted the search if he had been aware the two people conducting it were not actually police officers.

It remains unclear whether these actions might constitute impersonation of a police officer, which in California is a misdemeanor that can bring up to a year of jail time. Apple has not responded to our requests for comment. "I don't have any indication of that. I'm not going to go there," Dangerfield said, when asked about whether the Apple detectives might have misrepresented themselves.

http://cryptogon.com/?p=24678

iImpersonate The Police - James Lewis - 04-09-2011

And then there's this:

iPhone Keeps Secret Record of Everywhere You Go

April 20th, 2011
Via: Guardian:
Security researchers have discovered that Apple's iPhone keeps track of where you go and saves every detail of it to a secret file on the device which is then copied to the owner's computer when the two are synchronised.

The file contains the latitude and longitude of the phone's recorded coordinates along with a timestamp, meaning that anyone who stole the phone or the computer could discover details about the owner's movements using a simple program.

For some phones, there could be almost a year's worth of data stored, as the recording of data seems to have started with Apple's iOS 4 update to the phone's operating system, released in June 2010.

"Apple has made it possible for almost anybody a jealous spouse, a private detective with access to your phone or computer to get detailed information about where you've been," said Pete Warden, one of the researchers.

Only the iPhone records the user's location in this way, say Warden and Alasdair Allan, the data scientists who discovered the file and are presenting their findings at the Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. "Alasdair has looked for similar tracking code in [Google's] Android phones and couldn't find any," said Warden. "We haven't come across any instances of other phone manufacturers doing this."

http://cryptogon.com/?p=21888

iImpersonate The Police - Magda Hassan - 04-09-2011

People are so ready to give up their rights at the first sign of authority.

This is a strange one. I wonder if Apple does this all the time or if there is some thing so wondrous about the new iPhone that it had to resort to such underhanded actions? I wonder what the consequences will be?

iImpersonate The Police - James Lewis - 04-09-2011

Well, Apple has been known to resort to extreme measures in order to protect the secrecy of their product launches, but I've never heard of this kind of thing before. My big question is this: Why did the guy let them in in the first place? Beats the hell out of me.

Magda Hassan Wrote:People are so ready to give up their rights at the first sign of authority.

This is a strange one. I wonder if Apple does this all the time or if there is some thing so wondrous about the new iPhone that it had to resort to such underhanded actions? I wonder what the consequences will be?

iImpersonate The Police - James Lewis - 04-09-2011

And never forget, Magda, most Americans love authority. Authority is their father, government is their mother, and they'll do anything to stay in the good graces of the Family.

iImpersonate The Police - Magda Hassan - 04-09-2011

One of my dear friends is a Criminologist. He says that police hardly ever solve crimes using detective work. Maybe 5% or a bit more of the time they solve it that way. Mostly it is people giving up others or themselves with out the slightest acknowledgement to the protection of the law that is theirs by right. Confused

mallprint:

iImpersonate The Police - James Lewis - 04-09-2011

Absolutely. Most Americans forget that these simple words - "I want a lawyer" - can save them a lot of grief and harassment...sometimes.

Magda Hassan Wrote:One of my dear friends is a Criminologist. He says that police hardly ever solve crimes using detective work. Maybe 5% or a bit more of the time they solve it that way. Mostly it is people giving up others or themselves with out the slightest acknowledgement to the protection of the law that is theirs by right. mallprint:

iImpersonate The Police - Greg Burnham - 04-09-2011

James Lewis Wrote:Absolutely. Most Americans forget that these simple words - "I want a lawyer" - can save them a lot of grief and harassment... sometimes.

Yep. Just look what those words did for Lee Harvey Oswald! (Oh wait, you're right. You said "sometimes..." didn't you?) Big Grin

iImpersonate The Police - James Lewis - 04-09-2011

Yeah, sometimes. And if you have a court-appointed lawyer, "sometimes" becomes "nearly none of the time".

Quote:Yep. Just look what those words did for Lee Harvey Oswald! (Oh wait, you're right. You said "sometimes..." didn't you?)

iImpersonate The Police - Magda Hassan - 08-10-2011

What Everyone Is Too Polite to Say About Steve Jobs

[/url]In the days after Steve Jobs' death, friends and colleagues have, in customary fashion, been sharing their fondest memories of the Apple co-founder. He's been hailed as "a genius" and "the greatest CEO of his generation" by pundits and tech journalists. But a great man's reputation can withstand a full accounting. And, truth be told, Jobs could be terrible to people, and his impact on the world was not uniformly positive.
We mentioned much of the good Jobs did during his career [url=http://gawker.com/5847124/steve-jobs-is-dead]earlier. His accomplishments were far-reaching and impossible to easily summarize. But here's one way of looking at the scope of his achievement: It's the dream of any entrepreneur to affect change in one industry. Jobs transformed half a dozen of them forever, from personal computers to phones to animation to music to publishing to video games. He was a polymath, a skilled motivator, a decisive judge, a farsighted tastemaker, an excellent showman, and a gifted strategist.
One thing he wasn't, though, was perfect. Indeed there were things Jobs did while at Apple that were deeply disturbing. Rude, dismissive, hostile, spiteful: Apple employeesthe ones not bound by confidentiality agreementshave had a different story to tell over the years about Jobs and the bullying, manipulation and fear that followed him around Apple. Jobs contributed to global problems, too. Apple's success has been built literally on the backs of Chinese workers, many of them children and all of them enduring long shifts and the specter of brutal penalties for mistakes. And, for all his talk of enabling individual expression, Jobs imposed paranoid rules that centralized control of who could say what on his devices and in his company.
It's particularly important to take stock of Jobs' flaws right now. His successor, Tim Cook, has the opportunity to set a new course for the company, and to establish his own style of leadership. And, thanks to Apple's success, students of Jobs' approach to leadership have never been so numerous in Silicon Valley. He was worshipped and emulated plenty when he was alive; in death, Jobs will be even more of an icon.
After celebrating Jobs' achievements, we should talk freely about the dark side of Jobs and the company he co-founded. Here, then, is a catalog of lowlights:

Censorship and Authoritarianism

The internet allowed people around the world to express themselves more freely and more easily. With the App Store, Apple reversed that progress. The iPhone and iPad constitute the most popular platform for handheld computerizing in America, key venues for media and software. But to put anything on the devices, you need Apple's permission. And the company wields its power aggressively.
In the name of protecting children from the evils of erotica "freedom from porn" and adults from one another, Jobs has banned from being installed on his devices gay art, gay travel guides, political cartoons, sexy pictures, Congressional candidate pamphlets, political caricature,Vogue fashion spreads, systems invented by the opposition, and other things considered morally suspect.
Apple's devices have connected us to a world of information. But they don't permit a full expression of ideas. Indeed, the people Apple supposedly serves "the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers" have been particularly put out by Jobs' lockdown. That America's most admired company has followed such an un-American path, and imposed centralized restrictions typical of the companies it once mocked, is deeply disturbing.
But then Jobs never seemed comfortable with the idea of fully empowered workers or a truly free press. Inside Apple, there is a culture of fear and control around communication; Apple's "Worldwide Loyalty Team" specializes in hunting down leakers, confiscating mobile phones and searching computers.
Apple applies coercive tactics to the press, as well. Its first response to stories it doesn't like is typically manipulation and badgering, for example, threatening to withhold access to events and executives. Next, it might leak a contradictory story.
[Image: 1007_rtjobs_pullquote.jpg]

But Apple doesn't stop there. It has a fearsome legal team that is not above annihilating smaller prey. In 2005, for example, the company sued 19-year-old blogger Nick Ciarelli for correctly reporting, prior to launch, the existence of the Mac Mini. The company did not back down until Ciarelli agreed to close his blog ThinkSecret forever. Last year, after our sister blog Gizmodo ran a video of a prototype iPhone 4, Apple complained to law enforcement, who promptly ]raided an editor's home.
And just last month, in the creepiest example of Apple's fascist tendencies, two of Apple's private security agents searched the home of a San Francisco man and threatened him and his family with immigration trouble as part of an scramble for a missing iPhone prototype. The man said the security agents were accompanied by plainclothes police and did not identify themselves as private citizens, lending the impression they were law enforcement officers.

Sweatshops, Child Labor and Human Rights

Apple's factories in China have regularly employed young teenagers and people below the legal work age of 16, made people work grueling hours, and have tried to cover all this up. That's according to Apple's own 2010 report about its factories in China. In 2011, Apple reported thatits child labor problem had worsened.
In 2010, the Daily Mail managed to get a reporter inside a facility in China that manufactures products for Apple and the paper shared a bit about what life is like:

With the complex at peak production, operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week to meet the global demand for Apple phones and computers, a typical day begins with the Chinese national anthem being played over loudspeakers, with the words: 'Arise, arise, arise, millions of hearts with one mind.'
As part of this Orwellian control, the public address system constantly relays propaganda, such as how many products have been made; how a new basketball court has been built for the workers; and why workers should 'value efficiency every minute, every second'.
With other company slogans painted on workshop walls - including exhortations to 'achieve goals unless the sun no longer rises' and to 'gather all of the elite and Foxconn will get stronger and stronger' - the employees work up to 15-hour shifts.
Down narrow, prison-like corridors, they sleep in cramped rooms in triple-decked bunk beds to save space, with simple bamboo mats for mattresses.
Despite summer temperatures hitting 35 degrees, with 90 per cent humidity, there is no air-conditioning. Workers say some dormitories house more than 40 people and are infested with ants and cockroaches, with the noise and stench making it difficult to sleep.

A company can be judged by how it treats its lowliest workers. It sets an example for the rest of the company or in Apple's case, the world.

In Person and At Home

Before he was deposed from Apple the first time around, Jobs already had a reputation internally for acting like a tyrant. Jobs regularly belittled people, swore at them, and pressured them until they reached their breaking point. In the pursuit of greatness he cast aside politeness and empathy. His verbal abuse never stopped. Just last monthFortune reported about a half-hour "public humiliation" Jobs doled out to one Apple team:

"Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?" Having received a satisfactory answer, he continued, "So why the fuck doesn't it do that?"
"You've tarnished Apple's reputation," he told them. "You should hate each other for having let each other down."

Jobs ended by replacing the head of the group, on the spot.
In his book about Jobs' time at NeXT and return to Apple, The Second Coming of Steve Jobs, Alan Deutschman described Jobs' rough treatment of underlings:

He would praise and inspire them, often in very creative ways, but he would also resort to intimidating, goading, berating, belittling, and even humiliating them... When he was Bad Steve, he didn't seem to care about the severe damage he caused to egos or emotions... suddenly and unexpectedly, he would look at something they were working on say that it "sucked," it was "shit."

Jobs had his share of personal shortcomings, too. He has no public record of giving to charityover the years, despite the fact he became wealthy after Apple's 1980 IPO and had accumulated an estimated $7 billion net worth by the time of his death. After closing Apple's philanthropic programs on his return to Apple in 1997, he never reinstated them, despite the company's gusher of profits.
It's possible Jobs has given to charity anonymously, or that he will posthumously, but he has hardly embraced or encouraged philanthropy in the manner of, say, Bill Gates, who pledged $60 billion to charity and who joined with Warren Buffet to push fellow billionaires to give even more.

"He clearly didn't have the time," is what the director of Jobs' short-lived charitable foundation told the New York Times. That sounds about right. Jobs did not lead a balanced life. He was professionally relentless. He worked long hours, and remained CEO of Apple through his illness until six weeks before he died. The result was amazing products the world appreciates. But that doesn't mean Jobs' workaholic regimen is one to emulate.
There was a time when Jobs actively fought the idea of becoming a family man. He had his daughter Lisa out of wedlock at age 23 and, according to Fortune, spent two years denying paternity, even declaring in court papers "that he couldn't be Lisa's father because he was 'sterile and infertile, and as a result thereof, did not have the physical capacity to procreate a child.'" Jobs eventually acknowledged paternity, met and married his wife, now widow, Laurene Powell, and had three more children. Lisa went to Harvard and is now a writer.
Steve Jobs created many beautiful objects. He made digital devices more elegant and easier to use. He made a lot of money for Apple Inc. after people wrote it off for dead. He will undoubtedly serve as a role model for generations of entrepreneurs and business leaders. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing depends on how honestly his life is appraised.
http://gawker.com/5847344/what-everyone-is-too-polite-to-say-about-steve-jobs?popular=true