What's Missing from Apple's Latest Lobbying Disclosure Form

MacRumors has a piece out today noting that Apple has raised its lobbying game in Washington over the last six months, spending $3.6 million on a team of lobbyists who’ve visited House and Senate offices on issues ranging from “general patent reform” to “green technology” to “issues related to implementation of Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act.” What’s missing from the lobbying disclosure form is any mention of federal government surveillance practices, whether it be Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act or that nasty encryption-related battle Apple had with the FBI in the wake of the San Bernardino shooting in 2015. 

As Reuters noted earlier this month, the tech industry generally has been rather quiet about FISA reform, though members of the Reform Government Surveillance consortium (of which Apple is a member) like to point to a letter they sent to key Congressional committees earlier this year as evidence of their committment to getting NSA and the FBI to clean up their acts on domestic surveillance. But as the old saying goes, talk is cheap.

Apple, as the richest and most successful tech company in human history, certainly has the resources to make it’s lobbying campaign–or even a surveillance reform-focused PAC–far more robust and politically threatening to pro-Surveillance State House and Senate members. That it has declined to do so to date is telling. Until Apple and the other members of the RSG make it clear to House and Senate members that there will be a steep political price to pay for failing to rein in NSA and the FBI, don’t expect significant domestic surveillance reforms to make it into law.