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Comment by 40acres | Hacker News Reader

This back and forth between Bloomberg and Amazon/Apple reminds me of the recent allegations against Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh.

In both situations it's difficult to identify who is telling the truth and is probably impossible to know the truth from the outside looking in.

In both cases I've taken a "who has incentive to lie?" view on the allegations and denials, now this does not mean my hunch is correct at all, but it seems way more likely to me that it's in the best interest of Apple and Amazon to deny this story strongly as it makes both parties look bad and the investigation may be ongoing. I don't believe that Bloomberg made this story up but its understandable to question that maybe their sourcing was iffy, based on Bloomberg's history and the level of sourcing that they have cited I'm leaning towards believing the story as accurate.

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I personally don't think this is much like the Kavanaugh situation.

For example, Dr. Ford stepped forward publicly, in full knowledge that a massive machine would swing into action to besmirch and defame her, whereas the allegations about espionage were made in confidence. The six(?) individuals making these allegations are risking nothing at this point.

Also, Dr. Ford's allegations reach back into time and are difficult to conclusively prove,* while this is a situation where physical evidence does exist somewhere. It may not be presented to us at the moment, but if the allegations are true, there were physical motherboards that could have been examined to demonstrate the exploits.

What the two have most in common is that we the public are unlikely to be provided with a full and transparent investigation. The FBI's "investigation" into Dr. Ford's allegations did not involve speaking to her or others who could corroborate aspects of her story. Others from Yale approached the FBI and did not get interviewed.

The same is probably true of this story. Even if the allegations are true, for diplomatic or other strategic reasons, the government is unlikely to shine a spotlight on the details.

* Note that "Conclusively prove," is not the same thing as "Obtain enough confidence based on other reports to make a decision about job fitness."

I think similarly to how Dr. Ford knew she would be questioned and pushed into the spotlight when making these allegations public, Bloomberg similarly would've had to calculate the risk that Apple, Amazon, and China would push back on this story vigorously and try to discredit Bloomberg.

I guess my basic premise is that I'm more liable to believe that Bloomberg is operating in good faith in reporting this story. Now that does not mean that their sources may not be credible, but I'm more likely to believe they published this story in good faith rather than Amazon and Apple denying the story in good faith.

I agree that Bloomberg is reporting this in good faith, and that they corroborated as much as they could have given the information they received.

The credibility of their unnamed sources, their motives, and so forth, this is all unclear at this point. It may turn out that they are courageous patriots blowing the whistle on something very, very big. One can imagine a cover-up at the highest level, with these six individuals risking their careers and possibly their lives to reveal the truth.

Or one can imagine that there are some trade negotiations coming up, and a coördinated effort to plant a story so that politicians can take credit for swooping in and enacting regulations around the security of technology manufactured outside of the USA.

Who knows? I don't.

I'm inclined to believe bloomberg as well - however, "who has incentive to lie" seems reasonable on its face, but is a bad heuristic because you will never know the mental state of all the players, and what their motivations are.

I was originally siding with Apple since they flat-out denied that they ever found a planted chip(and didn't waffle with a 'no comment' or something), but re-reading the statement seems like they may be weaseling out with their phrasing "Apple has never found malicious chips, “hardware manipulations” or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server." Bloomberg claimed that Apple found suspicious chips on the motherboard, which may have not been considered a "server" at that point.

In what way does this story make them look bad? They're allegedly the victims of a state sponsored attack. It would only make them look bad if they were co-operating with the Chinese to enable this.

I think it's in the interest of both companies, especially Amazon as AWS servers are critical to this story, to maintain an appearance of having iron clad security systems both to investors and customers.

Didnt all the companies lie about working with the NSA before the Snowden revelations?

No. Snowden's documents show they worked with the FBI, which we already knew and the companies have always admitted to.

This article shows different: "Blanket denials from Microsoft, Google, and Facebook -- and efforts to clear their names -- are the opposite of what AT&T and Verizon did in response to reports saying they opened their systems to the National Security Agency. " [1]

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/nsa-surveillance-retrospective-at-...

As I said in my earlier post, those denials are accurate according to Snowden's documents. They integrated with the FBI to process court ordered user data requests. They obviously would have no knowledge of a downstream NSA data processing system or its code name.

Your article itself says that the initial reporting was incorrect and links to https://www.cnet.com/news/no-evidence-of-nsas-direct-access-... which correctly explains how PRISM is an NSA system that processes court ordered electronic wiretaps obtained by the FBI.

This is completely untrue, snowden documents showed full cooperation from many companies with the NSA (not FBI) PRISM program.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program)#C...

Snowden's documents show otherwise. Here is the relevant document itself: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-...

If Apple and Amazon are lying, they're committing securities fraud.

And?

I mean, what would the impact of them committing securities fraud be? Who would go after them and how much would the ensuing lawsuit cost them? The government isn’t gonna go after them if they asked them to keep it quiet.

Probably significantly less than telling their customers they’ve known about and hidden the fact that their systems were compromised for years (even if it was at the behest of the government).

As long as you're a shareholder you have standing. You can sue them right now.

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