Tim Cook: what a hero.
Proudly standing in front of the Apple Computers logo for The Right to Privacy.
You know Apple: the guys who invented The Mac, The iPod, and the iPhone. As CEO, Cook is now standing strong for The Individual.
Read Kevin Williamson’s great National Review article Hooray for Tim Cook, comparing Apple’s private-sector success to that of the FBI and the Federal Bureaucracy. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/431491/apples-tim-cook-right-resist-governments-demand
It’s a rip-roaring bashing of the incompetence and untrustworthiness of the Federal Government, and similar to the stories overflowing out of the pages of the upcoming book Bureaucratic Bombs.
But it misses the hypocrisy of Apple.
While the company has made untold billions in profits off the American people, it has also ignored Americans too. Although the company started in a California garage and blossomed into an Icon of American Success, it builds all its products in 19 factories outside of the United States—in China and other countries—but has no factory here in America employing American citizens. http://www.engadget.com/2015/02/02/apple-turning-factory-into-data-center/
So much for standing up for America and its client base.
But Tim Cook is good at paying lip service and checking off all the trendy issues important to The European-American Left movement:
- Solar energy
- Gay rights
- Environmentalism
- Radical feminism
- Fair labor practices
(And of course, all those issues are valid inside the United States, not necessarily in the factories which build Apple products)
The list is endless, and fluctuates with the ever-changing winds of The Left. In its way, Apple follows whatever Google, Facebook and Microsoft do when it comes to Leftist causes. Although each is an industry leader, they follow along like unthinking lemmings when it comes to appeasing The Political Left.
And in 2014, Apple gave its political money to 37 Democrats, and only 3 Republicans. https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/toprecips.php?id=D000021754&cycle=2014
It’s ironic, considering how innovative Apple has been as an industry leader in developing new products, and in ways to hide its profits outside the U.S. to avoid paying high taxes to the IRS.
So when Tim Cook came out last week boasting that Apple would ignore the court order to hack into the phone of the San Bernardino murderer, I chuckled.
Because it shows Cook to be a hypocrite.
If those two murderers had been a married couple from Alabama with a Confederate Flag sticker on the bumper of their pick-up truck, and had shot up an abortion clinic killing 14 people and maiming another 22, Cook would’ve been the first man on TV to announce that Apple would be sending a team of its top 30 Tech Gurus to assist the FBI to swiftly hack into that phone.
If the murderers had been a couple of tattooed skin-heads who had shot up a gay-rights party planning the next Human Rights Campaign rally, Cook would again have bolted to the nearest camera to announce his cooperation with the FBI.
So please–enough of the media campaign to present Apple as the new bastion of constitutional liberties.
We know better.
–The Beltway Bandit