Re: Apple’s “lost” 4G prototype iPhone, and Gizmodo’s subsequent acquisition:
To sum up: (stolen from here)
March 18, 2010: Apple engineer Gray Powell makes a nighttime visit to The Gourment Haus Stadt, in Redwood City, California, according to Gizmodo. Powell was carrying with him an iPhone prototype–purportedly the next-generation iPhone device–made to look like an iPhone 3GS. At the Haus Stadt, about a 24-minute drive from Apple’s headquarters, Powell had a few drinks, updated his Facebook status using the supposed iPhone 4G and left the establishment.
March 18, 2010-March 19, 2010: Unbeknownst to Powell, he left behind his iPhone test unit at the beer garden in Redwood City, where it was eventually picked up by an anonymous stranger. [skennedy: … I’m sure it was all a happy accident. o_O] The stranger believed he had found a regular iPhone 3GS, and after playing with it for a while opened the Facebook application that suggested Powell as the owner of the device. The anonymous stranger waited for Powell to return and claim the device, but Powell never returned.
March 19, 2010: The next morning, the anonymous stranger, aware that Powell was the owner of the phone, tried turning on what he still believed to be an iPhone 3GS. But the phone had already been bricked by remote wipe, rendering the device inoperable. After careful examination of the device, the stranger realized it was not a normal iPhone. Eventually, he was able to remove the iPhone’s phony 3GS exterior, and discovered the iPhone prototype inside.
Aware he had made a significant discovery, Gizmodo says the stranger attempted to contact Apple with the intention of returning the device, but was ignored by Apple representatives. [skennedy: *coughbullshitcough*] At this point, the anonymous stranger started shopping the device around to gadget blogs.
Around April 12, 2010: Gizmodo acquires the purported iPhone 4G from the anonymous stranger. The gadget blog’s parent company, Gawker Media, paid $5,000 to acquire the device, according to the Associated Press.
April 17, 2010: Engadget posts photographs of the purported iPhone 4G. Speculation runs wild in the tech blogosphere. Engadget did not elaborate on how the photos came into its possession. It judges the photos as a hoax, but leaves open the possibility that this device is the real deal.
After this, Gizmodo leaks the name of the developer and exactly what happened according to the anonymous source, potentially ruining the career prospects of the poor dude who had one too many german beers.
Since then, Apple requested the phone back. And a criminal probe was started, wherein the police execute a warrant on the lead blogger for Gizmodo and take his computers.
Gizmodo’s parent company, Gawker, exercises the right of a journalist to keep his sources anonymous.
The entire web comes out to defend Gizmodo’s rights, for the most part completely glossing over the shitty number they pulled on the developer they stole the phone from, and the money they spent on buying stolen property (Under a California law dating back to 1872, any person who finds lost property and knows who the owner is likely to be but “appropriates such property to his own use” is guilty of theft).
The prosecuting attorney has confirmed that law enforcement has identified the person who allegedly found the iPhone in a bar and then began shopping it around to news organizations, including Gizmodo, Wired.com, and Engadget.
What do you think about the whole thing? Is this a case of the police circumventing the law to acquire legit protected newsgathering materials, or of a blog defending illegal/unethical behavior behind the shield of journalism? Or both?
I think what Gizmodo did was wrong. But I also think the law against confiscating journalists’ computers applies, so the raid was wrong.
I guess I wonder what their motivation was – if they’re determining whether Gizmodo is an accomplice to theft, is that different from if they want the computers to confirm the identity of the person who took it in the first place?
In other words, if the newsgathering was tertiary to an actual crime AND the police had pre-existing knowledge of their source, would the computers still be covered by the shield law?
I think it was rather shitty for them to publish the guy’s name like that.
I think taking a couple snapshots of the phone right there, at the bar, if they had realized it was a new phone, wouldn’t have been too out of line. So long as it was done right after it was found, and right before handing it over to a manager to hold in the bar’s “Lost and Found”, for the owner to pickup later.
Poking around to see who the phone belonged to, in order to return it.. not a huge deal. Poking around to find details of the phone.. grey area (I probably wouldn’t have been happy if someone did that much to my phone).
Selling the phone later.. not good. Buying stolen property.. also not good.
Giz could have garnered some good faith with apple, and totally gone about it differently. But they snatched up the story, since stories sell, and acted accordingly.
Yeah, I pretty much agree – taking it home was stupid, and selling it was totally lame. And frankly, that part of the story just sounds totally fabricated, and makes me more suspicious that the guy next to the developer didn’t just see an opportunity to lift it from him.
Yea.. I was pretty twitchy at the idea that
a)someone let Jr. engineer joe-schlub’s take the prototype out for walkies.
b)the whole “I found it and tried to return it”, up to a point, I can believe it. But why not leave it at the bar for it to be claimed? Why take it home? Why OPEN the Case? Who does that to try and return a phone?
c)I “found it” now I’m sellling it? sha-right! You F-ing STOLE it.. and now you’re selling a hot phone.
As for the search warrant. I understand the whole protecting ones sources. I’m not sure how that applies to “I’m hiding someone who broke the law” and “I broke the law you can’t touch me” ie. buying stolen property.
I’m in favor of protecting a source, I’m not in favor of hiding behind a journalists tag to cover a crime. My problem is, I don’t know where to draw the line between these two extremes.
Well, the thing is, newsgatherers frequently report on people who break the law, and I believe that newsgathering act is protected, and is what organizations like the EFF fight to keep alive.
Ont the other hand, if the behavior of the company is, itself, criminal, I don’t think that should be, or is, protected.
By purchasing the object, IMO, they opened themselves up to liability.
The police had no right to seize the computers of the journalists. Period, end of sentence. Sorry, Apple, you lose.
This sort of thing happens around Detroit *all the time*, or did back in the 1990s and prior when they actually did automotive development here. They didn’t call it “AutoLeak” (instead of AutoWeek) for nothing. Reporters would sneak into the proving grounds, the tech centers, etc. (They would have killed for a camera the size of the ones they have now.)
GM, Ford, etc., couldn’t touch them. Apple shouldn’t be able to touch these guys. They shouldn’t be prosecuted. They are journalists who are doing their jobs. If journalists can be intimidated like this, we’ll never get to the bottom of, say, the banking industry’s shenanigans, let alone anything serious like what sort of relationship exists between defense contractors and members of Congress.
Well, look, I don’t disagree that both anonymous sources and media protection are important. It could be argued that even with those rights, our media are still abandoning their responsibility for sensationalism and the “cheap story” right now.
What I am asking is where this immunity stops. There is a difference between photographing through the fence onto private property and theft (grand theft, depending on the value of a prototype iPhone).
I also agree that when it comes to the reporting of the details of the phone, Apple has no recourse and should STFU about it. As I see it, though, having immunity from prosecution over the details of the iPhone is very different from having immunity from being accessory to theft.
And if that is not the case, where does it stop? Can a journalist take out a hit from their work computer, and be immune so long as they do the reporting on it afterward? If the line is not the difference between reporting on a crime and committing a crime, where is it?
Journalists are specifically protected, because they need to be able to ferret out things that are on the margins of legality.
In the most notorious example, Woodward and Bernstein were given access to classified documents, by their source, Deep Throat. They used that access to great effect (although I suspect that the long-term effect has been to make our government secretive on a level that the Gestapo and Stalin would have envied). Republican apologists insist that the wrong people were prosecuted in Watergate, that it should have been the journalists who were arrested, and they should have been forced to reveal their sources.
If we want a free and open society, and I do, this sort of reportage has to take place.
Meanwhile, cellphones are stolen and resold every day. Very few people are arrested for it, and even fewer do jail time. (Why this is even possible, since the cellphone companies know which serial number belongs to which human, is incomprehensible, but there it is.) It would be a misdemeanor in most states. It has taken the involvement of Apple executives to raise the profile to where it stands now.
IMO, corporations don’t get to pressure public police forces on who to arrest and who to prosecute. That’s a slippery slope we don’t want to go down.