The leaked Apple entry tells how companies are fighting leaks.

Former NSA agents, security managers in development teams, and a worker inspection system are more powerful than those of the US Transportation Security Administration

The recording of Apple's internal briefing, received this month by The Outline magazine, talks about what the world's most expensive company is ready to do to prevent leaks of information about its new products.

An informational meeting titled “We stop people revealing secrets - keeping Apple confidential” was hosted by Global Security Director David Rice, Worldwide Investigation Director Lee Friedman, and Jenny Hubert, working on the global communication security and training team.
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According to the hour-long presentation, Apple’s global security team includes an unidentified number of investigators around the world who are working to prevent the transfer of information to company competitors, counterfeit firms and the press, and to find and catch sources of leaks. Some of these investigators previously worked for US intelligence organizations such as the National Security Agency, law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and the Secret Service, as well as in the US Army.

The briefing, which sheds light on the company's obsession with secrecy, was the first of many planned presentations for company employees. On it, Rice and Friedman spoke openly about the attempts made by the company to prevent leaks, discussed how the previous informants were caught, and answered questions from about a hundred of those present.

The presentation begins and ends with video clips, inspired by photos of Tim Cook presenting Apple’s new product at a public demonstration, stating that Apple’s secrecy comes first. “When I see a leak in the press, everything inside me turns upside down,” an Apple employee said in the first video. “I get sick of it.” Another adds: “When you divulge information, you let us all down. This is our company, our reputation and the hard work of various teams. "

Passion for secrecy of Steve Jobs during his management of the company is well known. In 2004, Apple even unsuccessfully tried through court to force technical bloggers to disclose their sources of information. Cook first mentioned the increased work on keeping secrets at a technology conference in 2012, and this presentation appears to be intended to demonstrate the results of these attempts.

“This challenge has become very important for Tim,” says Greg Joswiak, Apple’s vice president of marketing for iPod, iPhone and iOS, in one of the videos. "In fact, literally for all the people at Apple it should be clear that we are not going to put up with it anymore." Later he adds: “In the depths of my soul, I believe that if we hire smart people, they will reflect on this, understand it and as a result do everything right - namely, they will keep their mouths shut”.

And to make sure of this, Apple created the infrastructure and the team, "informant hunters," as Josvyak says, and "they work very effectively."

Upon completion of this video, Hubert addresses the audience. "You heard Tim say," We have something else. " And what is it? ”She asks. “Surprise and delight. Surprise and delight associated with the announcement of a new product, about which nothing was known. This has a very positive effect. This is our DNA. This is our brand. But code leak happens, it has even more impact. It hits us directly. ”

“So today we’ll share with you the details of the leaks that occurred in the supply chain, as well as right here in Cupertino,” she said. “Let's outline the situation with this team that we organized on behalf of Tim.”

She represents David Rice, who makes a report on the team responsible for the safety of new products. This is part of a larger global security team, which, according to him: “in fact, is a secrecy group - they called us not quite correctly”. Rice worked for four years at the NSA as an analyst on the vulnerability of global networks, and before that he was a cryptologist in the US Navy. According to his LinkedIn page , he has led Apple’s global security team for more than six years. Hubert also represents Lee Friedman, who previously worked as the head of burglary crimes at the US federal prosecutor's office and was an assistant to the US attorney general in Brooklyn. He joined Apple to lead worldwide investigations in 2011.

Hubert says that the security team for new products “is very closely monitoring the supply chain,” and this is the focus of the first part of the presentation.

Historically, it turned out that the company’s largest leaks occurred after the theft of spare parts from Chinese factories. These parts got into the media - for example, a picture of the 5th iPhone leaked to the network in 2012 - or sold on the black market.

But, according to Rice, Apple is so successfully engaged in the prevention of leaks from factories, which now leaves more information from Californian company campuses than from foreign factories. “Last year, for the first time, more campus leaks happened than the supply chain,” Rice says. “There are more campus leaks than the sum of all providers combined.”

Rice compares Apple's job of verifying factory workers with what the US Transportation Security Administration is doing. “Their peak load is 1.8 million [people] per day. Ours, for our 40 factories in China, is 2.7 million per day. ” This number rises to three million when Apple increases production, and all these people need to be checked every time they enter and leave the factory.

“In total, we have 221 million passes a day. For comparison, 223 million is the maximum number of passes for the 25 largest entertainment parks in the world, Rice says. - So we have one big amusement park. People enter, go out, billions of parts rush back and forth at any time. Combine this pile of moving parts with a bunch of moving people, and the leaks will no longer seem surprising. ”

The global security team in China is “tearing its asses” in trying to solve the leak problem from factories, Rice argues, describing these attempts as a “non-stop trench warfare”.



“We have very talented opponents,” he says. “They are very resourceful, and no matter how tricky we are with our security checks, they become even more cunning.” Black market vendors lure workers from factories by posting ads at bus stops and in hostels, he says, offering a good price for Apple parts.

Apple Chinese workers have many incentives to leak or smuggle in parts. “Most of these people, 99.9% are good people who come to where there are vacancies, they want to earn money, go home and open a business in their district, or do something else with this money, support their family - says Rice. “But there are people who are tempted — what if I offer you three monthly salaries?” In some cases, the amount of rewards for the theft of spare parts reached an annual salary. " Workers at the Apple factory earn about $ 350 / month, not counting processing, according to a 2016 report from the Chinese Labor Supervision Authority.

The most valuable part for a thief is the case, the metal back of the iPhone or MacBook. “If you have a case, you already know what kind of product it will be,” says Rice.

Workers are hiding parts in the toilets, putting them between their toes, throwing them through the fence, washing them to the toilet, and then finding them in the sewers, Rice says. “8000 cases were stolen from us by women who hid them in bras,” he says. - They go to a lot to steal. But this is not only the case, this is all that can tell about the product before its release. "

Often stolen parts pop up on one of the largest Huaqiangbei markets in Shenzhen in southern China. There are half a million people working on the market and scrolling about $ 20 billion a year, Rice says. 2013 was a particularly painful year when Apple tried to buy 19,000 cases before the iPhone 5C announcement, and then 11,000 more before the phones began to flow to customers. “So we buy it all at the maximum speed so that information does not leak into any blog on Earth,” says Rice.

In the years that have passed since Tim Cook’s promise to redouble his efforts to ensure secrecy, Rice’s team has been better able to handle case protection. “In 2014, 387 buildings were stolen from us,” he says. “In 2015, 57 cases, 50 of which were stolen on the night of the announcement, it was awful.” In 2016, the company produced 65 million cases, and only four were stolen. “The loss was about 1 in 16 million, which is unheard of in our industry.”

Later, while answering the questions, Rice happily recalls the blog entry of John Gruber, who had long tracked the company's progress. In the recording, Gruber criticizes the hunter for unknown details of Mark Gourmet , now working in Bloomberg, for the fact that even he did not have any details about the new HomePod speaker before it came out.

The presentation then shifts from China to leaks occurring on Apple campuses in the United States. In the past, company employees were irritated by draconian security measures, Rice said, due to leaks from the supply chain. “There were always dissatisfied people who asked why we needed all this security if we had so many leaks from supplies,” Rice says. “It has always been noisy about this, and as soon as the situation with suppliers improved, we realized that now our problem is here.”

Apple is deploying members of the global security team, privacy managers, to some development teams to help employees keep secrets. But when valuable information is leaking, investigators Lee Friedman get involved and begin to figure out what happened and who is to blame.

“These investigations continue for a long time,” Friedman tells the audience. For example, one investigation that uncovered an informant on the Apple campus took three years. "We have no defeatist attitude, we do not say:" Oh, well, there will still be leaks. " We do not believe that "it will still appear in blogs, and we must accept this."

Hubert asks him to tell about two large informants caught last year, one of which “a couple of years” worked in an online store, and the other worked in iTunes “for about six years”.

They “provided bloggers with information,” says Rice. One of the informants began talking to a journalist via Twitter, Friedman said, and the other was friends with a reporter a long time ago.

"Is there a common portrait for the informant, a general outline of their activities?" Asks Hubert.

“The general scheme is that they look exactly the same as you,” Friedman says to the assembled staff. “They go to work, they are not different from others, their motivation also begins with the fact that“ I like Apple, it’s cool to work here, I want to improve the company. ”

In the past, Apple had cases when disgruntled employees disclosed information after their performance was low. “But it is often different. Often, people are enthusiastic about a new product, and they want to share it with someone, and they say: “Look what we did,” he says. "Or someone asks them a question, and they, instead of saying" I can not talk about it, "throw out too much."

Rice says Apple’s focus on secrecy hasn’t been intimidated. “Apple is unique in that our culture does not resemble Big Brother,” says Rice. “None of my team is reading the mail, is not sitting behind you on the bus, we are not doing this.”

But the presentation makes Apple employees feel like CIA employees. At some point, Rice even uses such a phrase as "revealing the personality." Often mentioned is the need to limit yourself in your personal life. "I make a lot of effort not to talk about what I do at work, with my wife, with my teenage children ... With my friends, family members," says one of the employees on video. “I’m not saying that all ties should be broken,” Rice says, “you just need to constantly monitor them.”

“Active seduction” is only part of Apple’s secrecy. There is a risk to mention something passively. Apple employees must maintain secrecy in their work. The corridors and lobby of the company are considered “red zones” where “you don’t need to talk,” Rice says. Perhaps because of the fear of a breach of secrecy, some newcomers who apply for jobs delete their Twitter accounts. Jonathan Zdziarski, a security professional, blocked his account after he was hired.

“We feel how worried the engineers of the company are:“ Oh my God, and what if I say something in the park? It turns out that I’ll break the privacy policy? ”Rice clarifies that the myth that has nothing to do with everything that isn’t posted on Apple.com is a secret has no basis. Employees can share information with outsiders - such as the negative qualities of their boss, their salary, or share information with law enforcement agencies, "if the company violates the law." Secrecy is connected with products, services, availability of products that have not yet come out - the company expects that its employees will not talk on such topics with people who do not have access.

Rice calls on employees who are worried about a possible breach of secrecy to contact him. 9 out of 10 times when people start having problems come because they tried to hide their mistake.

"Our team was created because for three weeks someone could not say that the prototype was lying somewhere in the bar," Rice said at a briefing, referring to the iPhone 4 prototype, forgotten at the bar by an Apple employee, and caught by Gizmodo in 2010. It was such a catastrophic leak that Steve Jobs personally called the editor of Gizmodo with a request to return the phone. "The crime was to conceal information."

Other technology companies, following Apple, began to inculcate a culture of secrecy in themselves. According to the 2016 Business Insider report , Porter Steve Jobs's Porter hangs in the office of Snapchat Director Evan Spiegel, and the company is also cultivating the same obsession about leaks. Facebook is now looking for a " global threat investigations manager, " but Google is facing a lawsuit in San Francisco about an internal employee surveillance program .

Some of the discussed examples of leaks, hypothetical and real, seem insignificant - the release of watch straps, or the fact that the iPad will be larger in size. But Cook believes that leaks are detrimental to the company. During a recent discussion of the company's results with shareholders, Cook blamed "an increase in the number of messages about future iPhones." Indeed, in connection with the iPhone 8, the announcement of which is scheduled for the fall, a lot of leaks were connected. "Apple is planning a major change in iPhone design in 2017, a glass case, and an edge-to-edge OLED display, with an integrated Touch ID fingerprint scanner and camera," according to MacRumors .

Perhaps it is because of such leaks the company and organizes such briefings on secrecy. Rice says that he expects every employee to have “adult” life and work, that is, in essence, respect for secrecy. “When I talk about adult responsibility, that’s what I mean,” he says. “You need to realize - I hope you will understand it - that Apple provides you with great opportunities.”