



  2. Oversight and Accountability
  3. Transparency About Government Demands
  4. Respecting the Free Flow of Information

The group’s site also includes an open letter to government officials, which chides the government for overstepping its constitutional limitations and violating the rights of the companies’ users. The letter points out that the group complies with all legal requests for information that are “reasonable in scope,” and has historically “pushed back” against unreasonable requests.

Finally, the letter requests that the United States ensure that future surveillance be confined by law and placed under the oversight of independent parties.

Dear Mr. President and Members of Congress,






Whether the U.S. government will take the group’s concerns to heart and take meaningful steps to reform its spying tactics is anyone’s guess, but it seems that for the first time a concerted effort is being made by the tech industry to let the government know exactly where they stand on the issue of surveillance.

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4 Responses to “Apple joins tech titans in calling for government spying reform and limitations”

  1. Winski says:

    This initiative is likely to makes things WORSE !!!

    One of the two or three hundred spy agencies over the last week launched NEW surveillance satellites with their log of a huge Octopus swallowing an earth globe with the logo ‘Nothing Escapes US”. painted on the side of the satellites launch shell !! (the enclosure that covers the satellites at the top of the rocket as they are launched for protection and missile stability)

    The stated intent of these satellites is to collect MORE information on US citizens than the agencies do now!!! So these ‘tech titans’ accomplished what??


  2. I think this is a good start. But Apple should take this to hart themselves inhouse. For example they should bring back SyncServices in one or another form. They removed them from Mavericks and therefore the possibility to locally sync Addresses, Calendars, Bookmarks, etc. between your Mac and your iDevices.
    The official way is to use iCloud for those personal data and then have one’s devices automatically synced. Alternatives are using other cloud services (not better protected from spy agencies) or setting up a local CalDAV/CardDAV server. I did the latter, but I think this is too complicated for many normal users.

    Data which is not required on an internet server by the user should not need to be there. Then Apple does not have to protect them from secret services, hackers or errors in software and business processes.