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Comment by vulcan01 | Hacker News Reader

Theory: Apple has a deal with the government to not properly encrypt iCloud backups in exchange for the government not regulating them through antitrust.

This is pure speculation, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is why the government has been so lax on antitrust regulation with Big Tech.

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This theory implies a level of coordination and agreement that the US Government is simply not capable of. The group most interested in such backups (intelligence) does not coordinate with the regulatory committees, and even if they did such an agreement wouldn’t be disclosable to the public and wouldn’t hold up if demands for regulation got hot.

The most likely reason we haven’t seen antitrust action is more boring: it’s hard, our politicians are old and don’t even use email, and they’ve been consumed with more pressing matters.

While only guessing, it would seem more likely that Apple knows they do what they are doing, which keeps most people's data safe and private (and people who don't use icloud backups can have complete privacy), vs if they encrypt all backups, FBI will make sure to remind the public and congress more loudly everytime they can't catch someone because of it, and then much more likely they congress will ban encryption completely resulting in far less security and privacy for all users. With so many people moving to Telegram and Signal, that might end up happening any way, but what they are doing would simply seem a way of avoiding/delaying that.

Maybe stupid question, but how can you do deals like that with a democratic government? What binds the next cabinet to uphold the bargain?

Well, you can make a deal with each administration. It's probably in the best interest of any DoJ, Democrat or Republican, to be able to access data unencrypted. So these deals probably* carry over each time the administration changes hands.

* With the recent investigation into Apple [0] by the DoJ, I don't see this deal continuing for far longer. Unless the investigation is just for show.

[0]: https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-team-continue-scrutini...

Theoretically nothing, but neither party wants to piss off the FBI.

The FBI and DoJ working together isn’t hard to imagine.

Well, also, the sky is blue. The FBI is part of the DoJ, so by definition they are working together. The Attorney General is the FBI Director's boss.

https://www.justice.gov/agencies/chart

this phrase always bothered me. Technically the sky isn't blue. That becomes quite clear every single night.

Okay, then "s/sky is blue/water is wet/g" or "s/sky is blue/fire is hot/g"

Edit: I can't just let this lie. Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not true. The sky at night is still blue, there's just not enough light for human eyes to see it. I have plenty of footage from night skies where the sky is still clearly blue. This footage [0] is clearly taken at night while the moon is below horizon then the sky becomes blue again (still at night) when the moon rises. The light reflections in the water as well as still being able to see the stars in a blue sky shows the sky is still blue even at night.

[0] https://vimeo.com/241600503

Go watch a sunset and be amazed at a non-blue sky.

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