By Micah Naziri
Just when we thought Apple Inc. couldn’t possibly get worse as a corporation, they go and proven us all wrong. Everyone seems to know that the iPhone producer’s hands are covered in the blood of virtual slave labor in China. But the products are so useful and effective that it is hard for most of us to make a break from the huge multinational corporation which has banded itself as essential to all things “hip.”
This is not a judgment against those of us who use the corporation’s products. Far from it. This is no more an attack on Mac users than a critic of the military industrial complex is an attack on all of us American tax-payers.
Instead, this is a criticism of Apple as a corporation, and the policies which they implement which coincide so well with those who seek to monitor and control the masses, managing and suppressing dissent.
How do the corporate policies of Apple serve the interests of a Police State or surveillance society? Let’s examine what they have done…
STEP 1: Make an extremely useful product that EVERYONE “has to have” like the iPhone.
STEP 2: Prevent people from using this product against the State, by giving police the ability to shut off the phone from recording them.
STEP 3: Block any apps that would allow the device to be used to monitor the State monitoring you.
These steps have all been taken by Apple. First, they make sure that everyone has an iPhone or a competitive devise. Even in low income areas, it is not uncommon to find people with iPhones. It’s hard to avoid “Keeping up with the Jones’s” when the product makes your life easier. Few would say that the iProducts are useless or only for show. What about alternatives like Android devices? We’ll get to that.
In the meantime, the proliferation of iOwnership, is advanced by companies like TMobile who provide ways for the device to be paid for monthly by low-income subscribers. So even if you don’t have the money for the device, you can still get one. They do however – not coincidentally – make sure you pay much, much more for the device this way.
With widespread iPhone ownership established, Apple Inc. has patented a piece of technology which allow government and police to block transmission of information, including video and photographs, from any public gathering or venue they deem “sensitive”, and “protected from externalities.”
In other words, these powers will have control over what can and cannot be documented on wireless devices during any public event…
While the company says the affected sites are to be mostly cinemas, theaters, concert grounds and similar locations, Apple Inc. also says “covert police or government operations may require complete ‘blackout’ conditions.”
“Additionally,” Apple says,” the wireless transmission of sensitive information to a remote source is one example of a threat to security. This sensitive information could be anything from classified government information to questions or answers to an examination administered in an academic setting.”
Authorities and police can now use the patented feature during protests or rallies to block the transmission of video footage and photographs from the scene, including those of police brutality, which at times of major events immediately flood news networks and video websites.
Such a block would be activated by GPS, and WiFi or mobile base-stations, which would ring-fence (“geofence”) around a building or a “sensitive area” to prevent phone cameras from taking pictures or recording video.
Just as disturbing for civil libertarians, Apple has blocked a new app that would make people aware of the presence of drone surveillance.
Drones+, the latest endeavor from Brooklyn-based app developer Josh Begley, provides information from real and reputable news sources about executions conducted by unmanned, remote-controlled aircraft from high in the sky, the likes of which has become a hallmark of America’s wars abroad and has come with a daunting tally of deaths, both intended and collateral. At least it would do as much, that is, if Apple ever allows it to be available to iPhone users.
Josh Begley has pitched his Drones+ phone application to the team that approves programs for the Apple iPhone three times now, and three times Josh Begley has been rejected. He’s also heard a trio of excuses from Apple — each one a new reason for excluding his brainchild from the their app store — and now suggests that it might be more than just a user-experience or interface issue that’s keeping Drones+ from being downloaded on iPhones around the globe.
First, Apple told Begley that Drones+, an application that maps known US-involved drone strikes and aggregates news articles about them, was “not useful,” despite the list of other news aggregation apps being all but endless. Days later, they delivered a second rejection regarding the appearance of a corporate logo within the interface. Now for the third time in only a month, Begley tells Wired that Apple thinks the content included in Drones+ could be considered “objectionable and crude.” The same, of course, could be said about the strikes themselves.
Begley, a graduate student at NYU, sees Drones+ to be useful, though, and doesn’t quite agree with the reasoning of “objectionable” content is a qualifier for exclusion. After all, he says, all his app does is offer news on a specific subject; judging by a video teaser of Drones+ he’s put on the Web, its functionality ends right there.
With drone strikes becoming increasingly more commonplace and the death toll only growing, mainstream media recognition of the attacks is still few and far between. Begley aims to make news articles about drones strikes that much more accessible for smart phone users, but says even his basic, functional, working and very real app is being excluded on the basis that the realities behind regularly occurring drone strikes isn’t something the world is ready to have handed to them so easily.
“If the content is found to be objectionable, and it’s literally just an aggregation of news, I don’t know how to change that,” Begley tells Wired.
And while other news aggregation programs are openly available for download through the Apple-sanctioned app store, it seems the leading smart phone producers aren’t ready to let the public have the ability to easily peer into the realities of drone warfare, or at least not from the palm of their hand.
“I wanted to play with this idea of push notifications and push button technology — essentially asking a question about what we choose to get notified about in real time,” Begley tells Wired, really making it as easy as having real-time drone updates beamed straight to the iPhone of anyone that installs the app. “I thought reaching into the pockets of U.S. smartphone users and annoying them into drone-consciousness could be an interesting way to surface the conversation a bit more.”
Apple, however, isn’t so sure. If Begley doesn’t bring his app up for another appeal, his third and final rejection would have been on the basis that his app “contains content that many audiences would find objectionable, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines.”
Not objectionable, according to Apple, are thousands of other games and applications available for download through its app store. Pocket God, at $.99 per installation, asks players, “What kind of god would you be? Benevolent or vengeful?” Other applications that let users add a moustache to the face of friends — or remove hair from their head with a program called Baldify — are among the most popular paid apps available. Trigger Fist, a third-person shooter game that puts the player right into a warzone with an arsenal of weaponry, is the second most popular game available on the iPhone right now.
“I’m kind of back at the drawing board about what exactly I’m supposed to do,” Begley says.
Not only that, but now the chief competitor of the iPhone, Android devices, now give the FBI the ability to remotely access your phones as a spying device. The claims were made in a Wall Street Journal article published yesterday.
It was not long ago that this was the stuff of movies. Now, it is our real life Brave New World. Worst of all, most people don’t even know this is going on.
Spread the word and let your friends, family, neighbors and anyone else know just what is going on. Nothing will change without widespread outrage. That means change is up to us!
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to those who look down their noses at phone users. I look down my nose at you 
