What might one do when a Citroen 2CV appears in the rear view mirror, particularly on a rather steep incline? A beautiful example: white and purple.

Related: The End of French Cars by Stephen Bayley.

I accelerated.

Ritchie King and David Yanofsky:

The revelation that major US technology companies are participating in a National Security Administration surveillance program was shocking enough. And that was before we saw the top-secret slides used by the government to describe the spying operation. They are, to put it mildly, heinously ugly…

A. Does the information that I place in iCloud servers ever leave Apple’s infrastructure?

B. Under what circumstances can my iCloud information be accessed by Apple and/or non Apple humans or systems?

C. Does Apple share iOS, OS X & Cloud/Software user data in any way? With whom and under what circumstances?

D. How do Apple’s current user data and privacy practices differ from those when Steve Jobs was CEO?

E. Is there a relationship between government iOS, OSX and cloud software system purchases and Apple’s user data access practices?

F. Do Apple’s policies still support it’s long ago “computer for the rest of us” vision?

G. Will Apple create and promote user experiences and services related to true data privacy control? Apple is in a great position to do this, but it will mean “saying no” [2] to a number of special interests such as governments, telco, insurance and financial firms.

I write as a citizen, long time Apple shareholder and customer.

[1] With apologies to Horace Dediu: http://www.asymco.com/2013/05/24/my-questions-for-tim-cook/

[2] http://zurb.com/article/744/steve-jobs-innovation-is-saying-no-to-1-0

A great point on the global implications for Silicon Valley.

The US Government concerns about Huawei will likely be repeated by others with respect to US tech firms.

Jack Shafer:

Bank records, credit history, travel records, credit card records, EZPass data, GPS phone data, license-plate reader databases, Social Security and Internal Revenue Service records, facial-recognition databases at the Department of Motor Vehicles and elsewhere, even 7-Eleven surveillance videos comprise information lodes that are of equal or greater value to the national security establishment than phone and Web files. It doesn’t sound paranoid to conclude that the government has reused, or will reuse, the interpretation of the Patriot Act it presented to the secret FISA court in its phone record and Prism data requests to grab these other data troves.

Lest I sound like a Fourth Amendment hysteric, I understand there’s nothing automatically sacrosanct about any of the digital trails we leave behind. Lawful subpoenas can liberate all sorts records about you, electronic or otherwise.

What’s breathtaking about these two government surveillance programs that the Guardian and the Washington Post have revealed is that they’re vast collections of data about hundreds of millions of people suspected of no wrongdoing and not part of any civil action. Defending the phone-record cull, National Intelligence Director James R. Clapper explained this week that smaller sets of information aren’t very useful in screening for and identifying “terrorism-related communications,” hence all must collected.

Besides, as the government and its supporters insist, phone-record metadata does not include the names of individuals or organizations connected to the phone numbers (and government eavesdropping isn’t part of the operation).