Yet more Apple for the day

Courtney Subramanian has a Time article about Apple giving it up for the gummint:

Apple was asked by the government to share information on two to three thousand of its users in the first half of 2013, according to the company’s first transparency report, which outlines the type of information requested between 1 January and 30 June of 2013, which was mostly for device information, including when a user reports a lost device. A small fraction of the data request pertained to personal data, including account information for iTunes, iCloud, or Game Center. Apple said it submitted data in up to a thousand cases.
“We consider these requests very carefully and only provide account content in extremely limited circumstances,” the company said in the report.
The report adds Apple to the long list of tech companies tapped to provide data for surveillance. Companies that publish numbers about government security requests for user data are required to do so in ranges of a thousand, Business Insider reports. That means the actual number of requests granted could be significantly fewer.
Apple also vowed to join the fight for more transparency in government surveillance, and said it filed an amicus brief in support of the lawsuit filed by Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, and LinkedIn against the government at the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Last week Apple joined the aforementioned companies in a campaign for the USA Freedom Act, which would restrict the National Security Agency’s surveillance powers.
The report also mentioned that Apple has never received requests to collect phone records, which is outlined under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act.

Rico says he's sure it galled the folks at Apple to do that, given the generally anti-government attitudes of its employees...