Apple says it didn't know Trump's DOJ was asking for Democrats' data when it complied with subpoena

[Hugh_Lebowski]

32. Sounds like Apple really didn't give them much

"Consistent with the request, Apple limited the information it provided to account subscriber information and did not provide any content such as emails or pictures."

And I don't have reason to doubt them.

This MIGHT make the whole thing a bit less egregious by everyone involved as IIRC it's already been decided by courts in the past that the bar for this type of information is lower.

I remember going through the whole 'metadata' arguments back in the NSA spying scandal of the Bush era.

The question this does bring up in my mind, however, is ... where did these anonymous identifiers they gave to Apple/MS come from originally?

I think there's a chance that other data, that probably should be more private (my suspicion would be the deviceIDs of phones, which is a random but unique identifier for a handset), was leveraged to get these identifiers, and then basically the DoJ reached out to Apple to confirm who they belonged to.

Which in turn makes me suspicious they either used NSA resources to track calls, or subpoenaed mobile call records from carriers as well because tracking calls and texts by mobile phones would be done via deviceID and IP address and similarly cryptic data points. This would be 'metadata'.

IOW the 'starting point' of all this might've been a massive data-mining operation of mobile and internet usage records.

And THAT might be where some real illegality came into play.