Op-ED: Scum Rises to the Top at Apple

By Brian Hews

In a continuing thoughtless effort to keep from handing over information on a terrorists’ phone, executives at Apple sent what they called “their top ranking Latino,”  who is probably Mexican, to warn Univision viewers that the FBI’s demand could give investigators new surveillance powers.

He then did a Donald Trump on the viewers and said “including information all you immigrants.”

Once again Apple is ignoring the relatives of the murdered people in San Bernardino and several investigators and district attorneys by not allowing the FBI to penetrate that one, and I stress one, phone.

So Apple, in its usual corporate manner, is going after segments of society trying to gin up fear so those segments would go out and support the tech giant.

Never mind that an Apple employee, who already knows what it takes to break into a phone, can go “tech crazy,” write the program and hand off to hackers or another terrorist organization.

Here’s a novel idea. Apple should create a department that will keep the code safe and where nobody else from the outside world can touch the code.

The FBI and CIA do that right now.

A phone would be confiscated, employees would be checked in and out of a special room using biometrics, and, most important, the code would never leave room.

The US does this with nuclear bomb silo operations, so why not Apple?

Here is a company that was just slammed with a $453 million dollar lawsuit trying to fix the price on e-books. Apple admitted it and is now paying out the $450 million.

This is a company that pays entry-level employees $1,000 per week providing them buses so they can ride free from San Francisco to Apple headquarters and back.

This practice is the height of corporate irresponsibility, it is gentrifying San Francisco causing skyrocketing rents and hundreds of the evictions.

This is a company that in 2011 was sued for privacy invasion because the iPhone tracked users locations.

Then into 2014, the Apple Computer was set by default to secretly send your browser search terms back to Apple so they could sell those tendencies to advertisers.

This is a company that is now going after certain segments of society and trying to scare the hell out of them that the iPhone they used could be compromised if they release the code.

I don’t know about you, but there is nothing important I would put on my phone given that I might lose it one day.

I would guess that millions of other people do the same thing and could care less if Apple created the dreaded code.

I don’t have to guess at this: If terrorists killed Tim Cook’s family and left a locked phone behind, that code would be written in one day.

Yet Cook, in an effort to calm users, espouses on his website it’s all about marketing.

Yes marketing scum, and scum rises to the top at Apple.