Friday, April 23, 2010

Apple Gestapo: How Apple Hunts Down Leaks - Apple Worldwide Loyalty Team - Gizmodo:

Of course, all this is voluntary. Management recommends that you relinquish your phones. If you don't do it they will fire you, or they will investigate why you didn't want to give them your cellphone. Simultaneously, everyone is asked to sign NDA's during the investigations, even though they already signed Apple NDAs to work there.

"I was at several events. When they find what they are looking for—which they usually do—the person is asked to stay until the end of the business day. Then he is asked to leave the premises quietly, escorted by security," Tom says. While he's there, the special forces hang around, watching. "There is a lot that goes behind doors that I don't really know about. I do know, however, that they really interrogate people that are serious suspects, intimidating them by threatening to sue."

There is no way to know how often this happens, however, as everything is handled very quietly. The same Worldwide Loyalty Team does many other things to keep everyone in check, from searching out the email history of every employee—which is also a normal practice in other corporations and government agencies—to seeding fake images to catch potential leaks and diffuse the hype about some product introductions.

As Tom was describing all this, my mind was getting back to all I've read about Steve Jobs and Apple, back when he was El Capitán of the brave group of free pirates who created the Macintosh. The Mac was a secret project too, but there was no secret police making sure there were no leaks. After a hard day of work, all the Mac team sometimes played on the beaches of California, careless and happy, confident that this new revolutionary computer would change the world, one desktop at a time. All of them shared information, there were no seeeecrets, and that's why they came up with an "insanely great" computer, as Steve Jobs himself used to refer to it.