To society as a whole, yes. To the company itself, there is definitely competitive advantage to protect trade secrets so harshly. It’s hard to argue it doesn’t have some value for Apple. I think it’s a little extreme and disagree with the degree to which they enforce it on all of their teams, even knew where it clearly has minimal competitive advantage.
I agree. Apple doesn't (nor do many other corporates). And so they make you sign lot of contracts and non-disclosure agreements to shut you up. So you shut up to put food on your table.
I don't have many friends, but of the ones I do there are still two whole people I would be comfortable sharing privileged info with peace of mind that they will keep it to themselves. The same goes the other way, I have no problem keeping confidential things confidential.
The CIA is very quick to 'leak' of its successes to the national press via 'anonymous government officials'. It's just I don't consider staging coups and arming extremist 'rebels' to be part of protecting national security[1].
How can you tell that all successes are leaked and that all the things leaked are actually true? If they prevent 100 terrorist plots but 95 of those were through various means that they wish to keep secret, they would simply only leak the ones for which they don't care that their sources are exposed. In fact, it would be extremely difficult to verify if the stories about arming rebels are even true, or maybe a side plot to play down their competence and lull the actual adversaries into a false sense of security.
It is in the very nature of a spy agency that the general public does not know what they are up to.
If they intentionally leaked nothing, this would be perhaps a reasonable approach.
The fact that they leak positive stuff sometimes, and coupled along with the fact that they run a global network of torture sites (and hacked the computers of their own congresspeople who are their oversight, then lied about doing so) means that they probably aren't as do-good and trustworthy as you seem to think they should be assumed to be.
Of course they're not do-gooders. It's a spy agency, shady stuff is their very raison d'etre.
I was questioning the original point made by AsyncAwait, which was that "CIA does very little guarding national security as far as I can tell." The "as far as I can tell" part of that comment makes the rest just silly, since making sure you can't tell is 90% of spy work.
I've put the "as far as I can tell" part in there precisely BECAUSE from what we CAN tell i.e. has been declassified or leaked, it pretty much all terrible shit that has nothing to do with protecting national security.
Of course there's a lot we can't tell, but given the stories we can tell the ratio of good/bad is way out of whack in favor of the bad, especially given CIA's tendency to selectively leak good stories about itself and its extensive declassified historical record, the amount of 'good' should be a lot higher than it is.
Destroying torture records for example shows that it is way more concerned with illegally concealing bad behavior than avoiding it in the first place.
All the secrecy at spy agencies has been shown time and time again to be primarily to coverup their ineffectiveness and incompetence, not to mention the crimes against humanity.
I had both, Amazon and as a defense contractor. Nothing ever would have prohibited me from talking about how work was, what I worked on was for obvious reasons easier at Amazon. But even in the contractor job it was no problem saying I worked on Integrated Logistics Support on aircraft. This was a far cry from being CIA, so.
That being said, I told people the comment thing more than once. Always to people I know and people that know me well enough to get the meaning. In other cases I just said I won't answer certain questions. Much different than the bo comment trope.
It's sometimes funny how those things worth with the government. I was talking to an acquaintance who worked at a company that built satellites for NRO/NSA & Friends. He could tell me things like "we had a great test of the cryocoolers last week and some of our design tweaks really improved the performance. On the other hand he wouldn't tell me what the satellite was for or even its name.
A coworker of mine went to a foreign country once on a business trip. When he asked what he could tell his wife about his trip, the guidance he got was "You can tell her either where you're traveling or why you're traveling. Not both."
Loyalty to institutions that don't care about you is the most foolish idea. I would never worry about keeping state or company secrets because they would never keep mine. It's a one-sided exercise in self-flagellation. The more we learn about our government the more we learn about it's inhumanity. Giving your life to it is akin to throwing it away. Perhaps worse than that because of the damage one can cause.
It's perfectly reasonable for people to say 'I work on iOS' or I work on 'new hardware but I can't say much more than that', or 'I work in production for Apple TV'.
Most people at most companies are not allowed to talk about the details of what they do.
That. I was contractor once, we obviously were allowed to say what we did to various degrees. Like working on picture analysis or analyzing operational data and so on. But not about the actual details. Even the projects and so on were usually only refered to indirectly. After that, it usually just took 5 minutes on Google to find out what it was. Say supporting a new military aircraft program for the German armed forces, that left you with two options. Again, we never talked about the details, say prices, data and so on. And I won't. Nor will I talk about concrete data from my days at Amazon.
But, yeah, I very much talk about what I did. Would be quite difficult to pass interviews and get projects, wouldn't it?
Same goes for the real secret stuff. Saying you worked abroad for the CIA is much different from saying you served as a CIA operative in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2004. Unless, of course, you get an official legend fot your life after.
My father was in the CIA, in the late '40s thru '60s.
We didn't find out until the late '90s.
One of his brothers was almost certainly a Company Man, too, but that has never been confirmed; even though he’s been dead for decades.
Apple's OPSEC is probably tighter than the CIA's.