Dear Mr. Vice President, Please Take Off Your Apple Watch | Hacker News Reader

Dear Mr. Vice President, Please Take Off Your Apple Watch

watchesofespionage.com

112 pointsKrasnol59 comments

The article suggests to order a Breitling through a special program they have for White House employees to engrave the White House seal on the watch.

What if they do more to the watch than engrave it? Talk about a targeted supply chain attack…

It’s presumably easier to detect a bug in a watch that shouldn’t have one than to verify that a watch whose design includes recording the owner isn’t doing so surreptitiously.

That assumes the department modifying those watches isn’t adding a bug. I’d trust a stock Apple Watch more than one modified by the spooks: https://www.politico.eu/article/when-the-cia-infiltrated-a-p...

I think the article is mostly about foreign concerns, not domestic ones. But even so: I'll go ahead and speculate that the US's intelligence services don't need to go to the trouble of putting a bug in a mechanical watch to know what VPOTUS is saying.

(This is all for the sake of argument, since I don't think even the underlying premise is true: the US IC has as-good or better access to iOS, etc. 0days than any other intelligence community.)

Charitable interpretation of the comment. I thought the person was implying the White House engraver is susceptible to being infiltrated or influenced by North Korea to install a mic and battery into the VPs watch, what spy movie is this?

Why North Korea? Germany still owes the US a friendly tap..

What spy movie is this from? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6622476

All the major technology companies have special isolated security clearance offices. Most regular employees including managers and directors do not and cannot know what's going on in those places. Secrecy is priority. In the US it's a requirement to never discuss security clearance if you have security clearance.

The banal non-conspiracy explanation is these employees work for military and government clients on regular products but with their classified data.

> I’d trust a stock Apple Watch more than one modified by the spooks

People have been known to trust stock pagers more, to their detriment. The level of deception the game is played at nowadays is unimaginable, stock or bespoke solutions aside.

> I’d trust a stock Apple Watch more than one modified by the spooks

All Apple Watches include an NSA bug by default and if you didn't expect this from the get-go frankly you are a moron: https://www.xstore.co.za/stuff/2024/01/kaspersky-finds-hardw...

Trusting any Apple hardware is what pseuds do to prove that they don't actually care about privacy or security. That's what this goddamn article is about in the first place...

I’d assume the military has a process for vetting technology for staff use.

I wouldn’t assume it’s being used, though.

In Thailand, if you ask to install a screen protector on your phone, they may take your phone to a back room, attempt to install malware. Similar risks apply to all second hand device updates.

Don’t smartphones pose all the same risks? The only thing unique to an Apple Watch is that the screen stays visible at all times, so maybe something could leak there via a notification or whatnot.

If he’s doing things right, the VP should have two phones with the watch tied to his personal one, reducing whatever risk the watch introduces further.

It is, and they give them special phones for that reason. Obama had a special Blackberry limited to 10 people.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/dec/05/barack-ob...

Your comment's interpretation is ambiguous. I interpreted as there are/were 10 people that had these special Blackberry phones, when the article says Obama's Blackberry was just limited to contacting 10 people.

I would guess, three for family, three for end-of-civilisation emergencies, two for politics, that leaves two for miscellaneous.

The default behavior is for notifications not to show content until the watch is unlocked. This can happen by accident, but notifications can also be turned off completely for messages and email, if this is a concern.

Thought this was pretty cool, but as the article progressed, it seemed to be selling various analogue watches, so that took the glee out of it a bit.

Never mind the visible hands of the analog watch precisely timestamp any photo — possibly useful to "the enemy"!

I’d argue that the VP himself is greater threat to this country than his Apple Watch.

Their agents too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX7f1PwXEWg

I love the comment on the article "Lol. Lmao. You think a watch is going to be the biggest insider threat? What about the unelected foreign national rifling through every server closest in the DC metro area?"

I feel like this is a cute little nicety compared to the whole Trump files business, plus a bunch of unvetted non-employees having access to the whole of USAID and an increasing number of other systems, simply by barging in the front door.

Missed edit window: this sort of thing https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/02/teen-on-musks-doge-team-...

(Nb Krebs is not a neutral source, but who is, really)

The photo makes it clear that the kid suffers from assholitis, cut it some slack.

Just making it easier for his sponsors to keep tabs on him.

I find it cute that the CIA is worried about his smartwatch getting "hacked", when they are openly collaborating and selling out to foreign actors. No hacking needed.

He could use a golden pager provided by the Mossad:

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/06/middleeast/netanyahu-trum...

In any case, the tech bros he is aligned with do not care much about security or quality software.

https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/the-watches-of-president-b...

"Now we're talking ubiquity. When President Biden isn't wearing one of his many steel (or two-tone) sport watches, you'll likely find him with an Apple Watch. It's unclear why, or for which occasions he chooses the smartwatch out of his watch box, but he's worn it in the Oval, and at the Resolute, just as he has with any of his other watches. "

So when Biden wears it, it's OK. No 'former CIA' writes any open letters, no HN Commies "following orders". When the Vice-President wears it - they are stupid and they are threatening national security.

What a hypocrisy is the whole democratic party. Disgusting propaganda methods akin to Soviets.

Who cares about Biden? He's history.

Neither of them should have had access to the smart devices… when Obama had gotten a smartphone, it was a locked down BlackBerry. Trump came into office and did not seem too concerned about the IT security risk his unvetted personal phone posed.

Don’t what-a-bout it… they can both do wrong.

There are things to complain about with the Democratic Party, this isn’t it though.

Emotional posts like yours don’t really further the discussion of whether it’s good practice for US leaders to wear an Apple Watch.

Trump administration is stripping down the government and selling it to enemy nations and oligarchs so they can run their "Network-States." I don't think spying on an Apple Watch is exactly a priority here.

Please go on. You’ve made many claims there. Please elaborate.

A slew of people including Musk, Vance, Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and a few other VC billionares are trying to break up the US into nation states that they call network-states. Think of Cyberpunk with a heavy dose of Snow Crash. It's a completely authoritarian agenda. While I understand this sounds like conspiracy, Andreessen quite literally has a book called "The Network State" and Yarvin has blogged about this extensively.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpPTRcz1no&feature=youtu.be

https://www.vcinfodocs.com/what-is-the-network-state

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23373795/curtis-yarv...

https://www.thenerdreich.com/the-network-state-coup-is-happe...

> A slew of people including Musk, Vance, Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and a few other VC billionares are trying to break up the US into nation states that they call network-states.

Network states? Like, turning CNN, FOX and MSNBC into actual governments? That might not be such a bad idea after all, given the extent to which society gets divided along ideological lines these days. It might work along the lines of explicit "pillarisation" in the Netherlands.

> Network states? Like, turning CNN, FOX and MSNBC into actual governments?

No, turning Tesla, Meta, and etc into actual governments.

Don't feed trolls! They aren't being serious.

Thanks for the links. I hope my country gets out of this coup.

Thanks. The most important thing is to get the information out there.

And https://www.thenerdreich.com/reboot-elon-musk-ceo-dictator-d...

compares the plan with what is currently happening.

ok - that is interesting and detailed but.. the author of that piece, psychologically, is guilty in a similar way that many political people are guilty.. of vilifying the "other" who is unacceptable. This single, telling feature of the storytelling speaks volumes. "But they are so awful!" only adds fuel to the fire. That article is informative but unbalanced itself.

I don't think it needs balance. It is making comparisons between Yarvin's original plan and the actions Musk and Trump administration are taking and how they significantly overlap.

Don't worry, J.D. Vance doesn't have anything interesting to say of use to any foreign intelligence service.

The current president of the United States is Elon Musk, and Donald Trump is the Vice President.

J.D. Vance is just the coffee boy.

Yeah, sure. Tell me more about what they ordered you to say, comrade? :))))

Confused by the smileys, but the Time magazine pushes the theory of President Musk:

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/07/media/time-magazine-elon-...

The TASS on the other hand is walking on eggshells with respect to Trump.

So I guess your message is intended as a caricature of the usual USAID/NAFO interference whenever someone posts something critical of a current Western government?

the same Time magazine that named Hitler "man of the year"?

“Man of the year” is an award for notoriety and influence, not morality and positive impact.

I was ordered to call the “Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America,” but it wasn’t a communist who ordered me to do so.

> We are big fans of Apple and believe the iPhone and iPad are two of the most consequential products of the last century

Huh? How are they products of the last century? Other than that most things are

Because they were invented at some point in the previous 100 years.

Yeah, it’s ambiguous. They mean ‘of the last 100 years’, ie 1925-2025, not the 20th century.

(I can see an argument for the iPhone, but the iPad, really? I have an iPad, I like the iPad, but world-changing it is not.)

>I can see an argument for the iPhone

I don't give them that either. It is nether the first nor most ubiquitous at the global scale. US maybe.

“The last century” can mean both the previous century and (1900-1999) and the preceding hundred years.

“The previous century” or “the prior century” are more common ways to refer to the calendar century (19th, 20th, etc.)

Makes sense, because what if a Chinese company becomes owner of Apple? In a free economy, very possible.

Or, as per discussion two days ago, the UK orders Apple to spy for them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42970412

Or, since ARM R&D is based in the UK, the UK government could insert a backdoor that way.

Of course his watch is hacked. If anybody's tracking him, it's the boss. Anybody who's ever worked a regular job knows this.

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