Comment by JumpCrisscross
2 years ago
> that could have easily been a cover
The problem with conspiracies is everyone involved knows it’s a secret. If you’re the CIA, it’s much less risky to compromise a chip design engineer than have everyone from the CEO down at Apple in on the plant.
Maybe but then again what’s another secret when at a high level these firms are already very secretive.
It’s not apple but I think a lot about how Eric Schmidt of google was directly meeting with US military officials and talking about how important US defense was.
You can end up with a situation where the chip designer and some higher up both know what is happening and the higher up is there as a check to provide cover in case the chip designer is caught up in suspicion. (“No we asked for this for the manufacturing team.” Kind of thing.)
Of course this is all conjecture with no evidence and I understand why we don’t want to spend much energy on discussions we can’t confirm, but at the same time it is frustrating when the default assumption is that apple had no knowledge about this. The truth is that we don’t know and likely will never know.
There are different levels of secret. I would never leak a normal company secret. But a national security secret is a different story.
I do wonder if the people earning millions of dollars a year think the same way however. Considering how compartmentalized Apple is it would not take many people to be in on this.
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There are different levels of secret. I would never leak a normal company secret. But a national security secret is a different story.