14 DAY TRIAL // The balance between privacy and the need for national security has obviously not been reached, thinks Apple’s CEO Tim Cook.
In an interview for PBS, Tim Cook took the time to discuss a wide range of topics, including some related to Edward Snowden and the surveillance state that NSA has managed to put together over many years of barely-there oversight.
“I don’t think that the country, or the government’s found the right balance. I think they erred too much on the collect everything side. And I think the president and the administration is committed to kid of moving that pendulum back,” Cook said, as reported by ZDNet.
He added that there was a very thin line to walk on because they also needed to make sure that the American people were protected, while on the other hand, there was no reason to collect information on people.
Cook went on to continue to deny that Apple collaborated on PRISM, the infamous program that was revealed among the first reports based on NSA files.
“What we wanted was to instantly be totally transparent because there were rumors and things being written in the press that people had backdoors to our servers. None of that is true. Zero. We would never allow that to happen. They would have to cart us out in a box before we would do that,” Cook said of the days following the PRISM revelations.
The company mentioned at the time that messages and calls were not held on the company’s servers in an identifiable form. Furthermore, they said that even if the government came up with a subpoena, they couldn’t be able to provide data because they didn’t have a key. “When we design a new service, we try not to collect data. We’re not reading your email,” Cook reiterated during the interview.
PRISM, the NSA's way of ordering companies to hand over data
PRISM, as you may remember, is the data mining program that was unveiled last year thanks to Edward Snowden’s leaked files. According to top secret documents from the NSA, the program was launched back in 2007 and it slowly gathered up a lot of companies.
The list started off with Microsoft, continued with Yahoo, Google, Facebook, YouTube, Skype, AOL and, beginning October 2012, Apple. The files indicated that PRISM was the number one source of raw intelligence for the NSA’s analytic reports, accounting for over 90 percent of the agency’s Internet traffic acquired under the FISA section 702 authority.
All companies denied having any connection with PRISM or willingly sharing data with the NSA. Yahoo later revealed that they had not been allowed to share information about a lawsuit that they had been involved in years prior, in which they tried to resist the US government as they were ordered to hand over data.
Yahoo was not able to fight off the NSA, but they at least managed to clear off their name to some extent.