I think this part is key and is something I've always wondered about:
>While it may seem flattering to be approached, it’s important to remember that you’re getting played. The success of these outsiders is measured by obtaining Apple’s secrets from you and making them public. A scoop about an unreleased Apple product can generate massive traffic for a publication and financially benefit the blogger or reporter who broke it. But the Apple employee who leaks has everything to lose.
I completely understand what's in it for the reporter, but I've never understood what the employee gets out of it. I've been reading Mark Gurman's scoops about Apple for years so I'm definitely biased in wanting that to continue. It just seems like there's tons of upside for the reporter and only downside for the leaker.
Also I wonder what goes through a reporter's head when one of their sources get fired because they leaked to them. I'd feel extremely guilty if someone was fired or prosecuted because of me. Not sure how they do it.
The intelligence services have done a great deal of research into the persona of the press leaker/Wikileaks leaker (as distinct from the more traditional espionage leaker). A common trait is for the press leaker to be either highly over-qualified for their job or believe themselves to be over-qualified for their job. The belief coming out of that research is a sense of being under appreciated and a deep need to be recognized by someone (even themselves) for something they’ve done is the primary motivation for this class of leaker. The “leaking good and important things” blanket that the leaks are wrapped in then becomes a secondary factor that is used by the leaker to justify their actions to themselves in their quest for the recognition they need. I doubt if corporate press leakers have been studied as heavily as intelligence sector leakers, but the chances are good there are some similar motivations at play.
The leakers that come to mind immediately are Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning whom both suffered greatly for their leaks (Snowden had to leave his life behind and Manning was kept in isolation and had her medical needs neglected amongst other things). While they both may have wanted to be recognized as having done something good, they also clearly wanted to let the public know what the government was doing in their name.
> The intelligence services have done a great deal of research into the persona of the press leaker/Wikileaks leaker
Taught in a counterintelligence 101 type class, there's generally four types of intel leak. Not always mutually exclusive, sometimes there's a combination of factors influencing the behavior of any single person.
MICE
Money - for financial gain. Robert Hanssen would be one example.
Ideology - Typical cold war stuff, a person that deeply believes in the political ideology of power group A becomes a mole inside opposing political group B.
Conscience - Something happening is deeply wrong and unjust in the view of the leaker. Snowden.
Ego - Sometimes combined with the Money part. The persons receiving the intel find a way to flatter the ego of the leaker, about how important their role is on a grand strategic level.
The leaks an Apple employee makes is about inconsequential stuff like what features the next iPhone will have. It's not even in the same ballpark as someone who is leaking something illegal going on at the company or someone at Facebook leaking the Boz memo, for example.
The cyberpunk dna in me thanks you for this.
Sounds like how a sociopath would interpret the motivations of a good person.
An example from this week. Someone was asking about the usual questions. Stuff on our website that I can comfortably answer. Then they casually led the conversation to the tech side in appreciation that I'm an engineer doing a great job. He eventually asked, "what feature in your latest release are you the most proud of?" I badly want to tell you because it's fucking cool stuff. But I won't because you're an investor for our competition.
Another great source is the airplane ride to the show. I've heard of at least one tech columnist that would watch people working on laptop presentations on the flights and pick up all kinds of scoops.
Pay attention to someone if they keep stuttering or "forgetting key" parts of the statement they're making, getting others to fill in the blanks is one of the easiest ways since our minds just want to do that. So you intentionally pretend to have difficulty remembering what you're saying and let the other person tell you.
1. Immediate Financial - They either have a direct quid-pro-quo with the leak recipient, or stand to benefit directly from the leak.
2. Disagreement with the direction/decision-making - They want Apple to do something different, and internal (legitimate) attempts to influence this decision have failed; usually because the leaker doesn't have the political capital.
3. Vanity/Ego - More of a contributing factor to #2, but they want a feeling of power that comes from leaking.
4. Trolling - A subset of #3 really. Some people just want to watch the world burn.
5. Revenge - Feeling screwed out of a promotion, or otherwise neglected? Leak!
6. Low self-esteem - If you're approached by a reporter or blogger, having something of value is a way to boost yourself.
There's four reasons people leak information:
1. Out of moral responsibility to report unsafe or illegal activity.
2. To cause direct harm to the root organization because they feel slighted by some action in the past.
3. The "leak" is officially sanctioned as part of a submarine.
4. Ego.
Numbers 3 and 4 are the biggies.
Saying leaked out of “ego” is equivalent to saying it was leaked “because”. We know it was something internal to the leaker’s psyche, but research should help us understand what led up to that point and how it could have been avoided.
For example, would you say a gossiper gossips because of “ego”?
They can also be extremely manipulative. Like pretending they know something already, and so its ok to comment on it, OR they say they are going to print with something that is wrong and damaging for the company. For example the next iPhone only has 6 GB of storage. You can either not confirm that, or you correct them, and say "I think you mean 600 GB", at which point you just leaked a major new feature.
So if Apple or Facebook wants leaks to stop happening they need to reverse course and stop the unofficial mandate to connect the world or get a device into every person’s hands.
These things are becoming global phenomenon pervasive in nearly everyone’s lives and yet they demand a near total lack of transparency of how they operate. Seems hypocritical and unfair at best and maybe unethical or immoral at worst.
Massive organizations and businesses, people and families rely on these things so they at least should have some insight into their operation.
[0]: https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/08/18/ex-yahoo-employee-adm...
For employees it was like they were doing favors for their friend, and the things they were asking were generally pretty small, but could increase over time.
We were warned about this happening since it happened before, so I'm sure similar techniques that worked 20 years ago still work today. It's just a form of social engineering.
I'm not sure how many reporters have done jail time to protect their sources, but I'm sure that more than a few have been threatened with it.
Reporters cultivate relationships with sources and sharing some inside information can come to be seen as just helping out a friend with some tidbit that doesn't really hurt anything.
Furthermore, there can be an ego thing around sharing things you know that other people don't.
They may get money?
Some of these companies have valuation in hundreds of billions, and a small bit of news can nudge that +/- 0.5-2% or more which could be a couple billions dollars. If you own just 0.1% of the stock, that would be several $m opportunity . So, paying your informer, say, $100K or something, sounds reasonable, if you can execute it properly, even accounting for fake informers.
Revenge against a real or imaginary slight, by senior managers, or even their own line manager.
Bucks?
Is it Apple's company size and culture that make leaks inevitable?
Netflix is a software/service company. When they've got something new, they can just ship it right away. Or if they decide to change something at the last minute, they can do that.
Apple is a hardware company, and they produce everything at volume (millions of units). Their products, by nature, have long lead times. The design must be finalized well before it ever ships.
If I were a tech reporter looking for leaks, I wouldn't place much trust in anything I heard from Netflix, because it'd be too easy for them to change it completely before it ships. Also, if the final product might be released to everyone tomorrow, my incorrect info will still be fresh in everyone's mind.
This applies with Apple, too. I hear a lot more rumors/leaks regarding the shape of the next iPhone, than I do rumors/leaks about the on-screen visuals of the next iOS (which could easily change).
I'm sure there are some things but there are very few tech company announcement details (outside of financial results) that so many people are anxious to learn ahead of time as specs and features of upcoming Apple products.
Nielsen, studios, and the press would love to get their hands on Netflix’s viewer numbers and associated demographic data for a given show or movie.
And listen to just about any earnings call and you'll hear lots of financial analysts trying to extract some more "color" from behind whatever numbers were released.
Off the top of my head: viewership and engagement by content, new content deals currently being negotiated and their terms, how much they spend on infrastructure and what they spend it on. It's valuable info for investors and traders, agents, tech industry analysts.
It seems they are still pining for that "shock-and-awe" of Steve Jobs original 2007 iPhone introduction, but don't realize that's no why people buy Apple products these days.
Think of the negative repercussions of this. Creating a hermit kingdom, with chilling effects where people worry about collaboration with the outside world. It has certainly had some effect on the ability to recruit AI researchers.
The more you can hide from them, the more of a head start you can have over them.
Really, I think the world would be better if they published more openly and were more open, and I don't think it would really hurt their ability to outsell their competitors at all. Let's say they're working on AR glasses (which they probably are) and Samsung catches wind of this and rushes to market with Samsung AR glasses. How many Apple fans actually think this will make a difference to people in the Apple ecosystem buying Apple AR glasses?
At this point I think the secrecy does more harm than good.
Well, Apple had to backtrack there and allow its researchers to publish because otherwise nobody would work there.
Take for example the idea that other companies copied Apple's thin bezels. The predecessors for that were the Sharp Aquous, Xiaomi Mix, Samsung Galaxy S8, and Essential Phone. Samsung even had "True Tone" long before Apple started marketing it, but were accused of copying it.
I favor Kirby Ferguson's take on this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wq5D43qAsVg), and we are better served by companies taking designs from others and improving on them, and open publishing and sharing, and the incessant cry of "Redmond Start Your Copiers" is really wearing thin.
Steve called out the blue one afternoon and said "Hi Martin, this is Steve." Martin had worked with Steve in his early days at Apple before Steve's departure. "Hi Steve." "Look, we know you've been sending emails to Henry Norr who works at MacWeek. We can't read them because they are encrypted, but you better have an explanation of why you are talking to journalists." "He is in my running group. That's it." "That's it?" "Yep, that's it." "OK, make sure it stays that way." and Steve hung up. Martin was flustered by this call so got up and left his office. In the hallway were his manager and a couple security goons just standing around. "Hey." "Hey." and he went off to the restroom. When he came back the goons were gone. It never came up again.
I miss Martin.
edit: [Spellcheck corrected "Minow" to "Minnow" and I failed to notice. You should find plenty more hits on "Martin Minow"]
(giving leakers heart attacks is a hobby of mine)
Always thought that’s the best way to narrow down the leaks. Give variations of info to subgroups, and target the group based on which variant was leaked.
Specifically, I noted one place where I thought a comma should normally have been. Perhaps it's "paranoia", but it seemed like that is one possible "variation" that could have been used.
I don't know how many Apple employees would view this memo (it seems unlikely that all ~135,000 would) but it doesn't seem like it would take very many slight differences like this to be able to generate a unique version of this memo for each viewer.
At that point, Apple just has to sit back and wait for the memo to leak. Compare the version of the memo posted in TFA to the "unique versions" rendered to the employees and you've either identified the leaker or, at the very least, significantly narrowed down the possibilities.
If Bloomberg were being careful, they would attempt to obtain copies of the memo from multiple "leakers" and compare them very carefully before publishing, making sure to look for these minute differences between them. If any were found, they'd have to be very diligent when posting the memo for all the world to see -- if they were being careful and if they cared about protecting the leaker's identity (one would assume they do but I think it'd be safe to assume there's a limit to how far they're willing to go).
Regardless, it's pretty clear that this is a huge attempt by Apple to deter any leakers or potential leakers from doing so.
Here are a few of the interesting bits:
Watermarks https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/86rkbq/e...
NDAs https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/86rkbq/e...
Splitting films in reels https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/86rkbq/e...
Perhaps management should look at themselves also why people are leaking now and weren’t before.
What we do see now that's different than it was 10 years ago are supply chain leaks. Apple has to have such a long ramp to manufacture it's first week worth of iPhones, that it's inevitable that some of the 10s of thousands of people in the supply chain will leak. Often for money, given the culture and pay scales in China...
These days Tim takes a much more relax approach, comparatively speaking. You have employees that doesn't even know what you should or should not talk about. ( The Person responsible for NFC ).
Steve's era employees used to joke about Information leaking from the higher up management, which was true. Nowadays it seems to be going out everywhere.
There were leaks in the Jobs era, and pretty substantial ones too. Here's a notorious case: https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-settles-with-worker-bee/
> why people are leaking now and weren’t before
This assumes it's the same people. I would not know one way or the other, but my gut feeling is that newer employees are more prone to leaking, and Apple is a lot bigger than it was under Jobs.
Frankly, when you tell a room full of people about something it's practically guaranteed to leak. The exceptions seem to be (a) secrets nobody cares about ("We're rewriting our ductwork design software!") and things that involve government secrets (and that doesn't always work).
I had a couple of housemates who were in the US submarine service. They never talked about what they did, even 20 years retired, and were very upset when the book Blind Man's Bluff was published.
Hopefully for Apple's sake, he never went to work for them.
In short, your personal goals and the goals of the corporation and its executives rarely align as much as you think.
Many companies are pretty flexible about what you talk about as long as giving out the information doesn't cause immediate harm. It's not unreasonable for people at much stricter companies to complain that their company is being unnecessarily strict in ways that are detrimental to the employees.
Question for those who've gone through CI training: Do Apple leaks all fit into one of the MICE categories? I don't think there is any new motivation.
(Money, Ideology, Conscience, Ego)
Would be very interested to see what programs they have developed to intentionally generate false but plausible information internally, get it into the hands of specific people or workgroups, and see if/where/how/when it leaks. Usually done for the purpose of identifying specific leakers or compartments that are leaking.
Carries a fine or up to 10 years in jail, and yes - that US Code part means it's a federal offense.
The contrast between the aggressive privacy of companies (and government) and the non-existent privacy of individuals is shocking. Apple claims to have people arrested for violating its privacy; practically, I have no power - they can take almost whatever they want and do whatever they want with it, and there's nothing I can do.
In fact, the complete lack of privacy by individuals may the means by which companies find who released the information.
Finally, these moves are counter to an open society. In an open society, it's the powerful people and public institutions who need to be transparent - they are the threats to democracy and liberty - not the everyday private citizens.
The idea that this is some new Orwellian culture shift is so stupid...
Although, seeing how well that's worked out for labor, I'm not holding my breath.
And what happened to the other 17 (the majority)?
Were they "just" fired, were they hot iron branded or obliged to wear at all times a scarlet L ?
It's pretty weird to see the breach of an NDA in a corporate environment lead to an arrest rather than just a civil lawsuit between the two sides of a contract. Apple seems to be a bit eager here to play the fear card and I find it surprising that law enforcement would do more than take their statement and give them a copy of it. Breach of contract would be the worst that you could accuse a leaker of, which is not typically a criminal affair.
Is it normal to have people that break NDA's to be arrested?
But I wouldn't put it past Apple to try to prosecute anyone and everyone who leaks.
Is leaking the reason it was rushed out the door? If not, I can't imagine why he's upset about it.
You show up to work each day. You've been working a lot lately, but you're really excited about the thing you're working on. You're looking forward to when it's ready and ships. But it's not time yet. It's not ready. You want the world to see it when you're ready to really show them something. Not just the idea of a thing, but the actual thing. When they can see it, touch it, understand it and breathe it. When they can really appreciate what you've been doing.
You've been working on this thing for awhile. You know there's still a long slog ahead. But you think—hey, one day soon, we'll get to talk about this thing.
Then one morning, you get into the office and you see some blog is talking about your project. They have a bunch of the details wrong, but it's definitely the project you're working on. And they're saying it's coming out in the next update.
Your work never has the chance to speak for itself. Someone decided to speak for your work instead. Just so they could feel important. It wasn't even their work to speak for. It was yours, and you and others had already been making decisions on how you wanted to talk about it, what things you wanted to show and where and how you wanted the work to speak for itself.
Wouldn't you be annoyed about it?
Wouldn't you be disappointed that someone leaked your work when later when you do finally announce it people don't let your work speak for itself, but just compare your work to whatever their minds imagined, made up and idealized about what you might be working on, doing or building?
Many at Apple enjoy the reveal of what they've been working on, so they can go and tell other people about it. It kind of takes the fun out if it leaks early.
This is an email they sent to employees? It sure doesn't sound fun to work there.
What reason is there for leaking information about the company you are currently working for?
Of course, every employee at Apple knows the culture of the company, so it's not like it should be any surprise.
Perhaps if I had worked at some other company and saw highly unethical/illegal shit going on, I might consider whistleblowing, but I would never leak for the sake of leaking, even if it would cause a lot of hype or news commentary. It just seems sociopathic to do so.
Same goes for this memo. And if the leaker is reading this comment right now, then I ask, rhetorically, if you don’t feel comfortable with your employer’s preference for secrecy, then why are you working there?
To all the leakers: we need people like you, who are not afraid of the consequences of doing what you think is right. Many thanks to those who leaked the schematics and service manuals for various products (including Apple's), the HDCP master key, the AACS key, the SD card specs, the memory stick specs, everything on SciHub, and the list goes on... countless people would not have gained the knowledge and skills they have without your neighbourly efforts.
Some related commentary:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11008717
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16346174
Edit: interesting to see the points on this bounce up and down. It seems I've struck a nerve.
$50,000
$100,000
$200,000
more?
I am assuming they dont leak the information for free. And if they do it for monetary reasons - the amount has to be large enough to justify risking your job (freakonomics 101). If they do it just for their ego boost (oh i got approached by so and so i must be very important) - then they are dumber than i thought.
