Mark Milian

Mike Daisey, the monologist behind “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” created a “reality-distortion field” of his own.

But it didn’t fool Rob Schmitz.

The China bureau chief for American Public Media’s Marketplace publication uncovered that Daisey had fabricated several details in his accounts of Chinese factory labor at Foxconn Technology Group, which manufactures products for Apple and other electronics makers.

In January, an excerpt from Daisey’s monologue, which he said was based on many interviews during a stay in Shenzhen, China, was broadcasted on the public radio show, “This American Life.” Shenzhen is where Foxconn’s largest factory is located.

When Schmitz listened to the podcast, he was immediately skeptical, he said by phone from Shanghai early Saturday morning.

“There were quite a few things in the piece that struck me as a little unusual, and one of them was the beginning of the piece,” Schmitz said. He’s referring to Daisey’s claim that every electronics product is made in Shenzhen. “If you know anything about the manufacturing sector in China, you know that that’s just not true.”

As Daisey’s tale went on, other details stuck out to Schmitz. For example, Daisey had said that he saw security guards around the Foxconn perimeter holding guns. Schmitz knew that that couldn’t be true, he said, because only military and police officials are legally allowed to carry firearms.

“He evokes this image of a very sort of totalitarian state, and there is some broader truth to the things that he puts in his monologue,” Schmitz said, “but from what we found, there are many things that don’t just check out.”

After listening to that episode of “This American Life,” Schmitz’s most promising clue was found in a Google search.

In Daisey’s monologue, he refers to the translator who accompanied him only by her first name, Cathy. So Schmitz said he punched into Google: Cathy translator Shenzhen.

“I called the first number that popped up,” he said.

The woman on the other end of the line was Cathy Lee, who happened to be Daisey’s translator on his trip to China. Schmitz said he and Lee later met in front of Foxconn’s gates, where parts of Daisey’s story are set.

Schmitz asked Lee whether she and Daisey had actually witnessed the things that Daisey recounted. The guards with guns? The man whose hand had become deformed from the repetition of assembling iPads? The young workers aged 14, 13, 12? The factory-line crew that said they had been poisoned by a toxic cleaning substance?

Lee’s answer to each question: No.

Read the rest here.

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Rob Schmitz

Apple got a lot of attention recently over conditions in the Chinese factories that make its iPhones and iPads. The public radio show “This American Life” aired an electrifying account of one man’s visit to several factories. The man was Mike Daisey, a storyteller who is widely credited with making people think differently about how their Apple products are made.

It’s Daisey’s story about visiting a Foxconn factory in China where Apple manufactures iPhones and other products. With the help of a Chinese translator, Daisey finds underage workers, poisoned workers, maimed workers, and dismal factory conditions for those who make iPhones and iPads.

“I’m telling you that in my first two hours at my first day at that gate I met workers who were 14 years old…13 years old…12,” Daisey recounted. “Do you really think Apple doesn’t know?”

Daisey told This American Life and numerous other news outlets that his account was all true.

But it wasn’t.

Read the rest here.

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Kim Zetter

Sometime earlier this year, a provider of communication services in the United States – perhaps a phone company, perhaps Twitter – got a letter from the FBI demanding it turn over information on one, or possibly even hundreds, of its customers. The letter instructed the company to never disclose the existence of the demand to anyone – in particular, the target of the investigation.

This sort of letter is not uncommon post-9/11 and with the passage of the U.S. Patriot Act, which gave the FBI increased authority to issue so-called National Security Letters (NSLs). In 2010, the FBI sent more than 24,000 NSLs to ISPs and other companies, seeking information on more than 14,000 individuals in the U.S.

The public heard about none of these letters.

But this time, the company that received the request pushed back. It told the agency that it wanted to tell its customer that he or she was being targeted, which would give the customer a chance to fight the request in court, as a group of Twitter users did last year when the Justice Department sought their records under a different kind of request. The minor defiance in this latest case was enough to land the NSL request in a federal court docket last Friday, where the government filed a request for a court order to force the company to adhere to the gag order.

In its petition, the government asserted that disclosure of the fact or contents of its NSL “may endanger the national security of the United States” and urged the court to issue an order binding the company to the nondisclosure provision, or be in violation of federal law and face contempt charges.

Although documents in the case are redacted to hide the identity of the company and the target of the investigation, they shed a little light on how NSLs are working these days, after a few reforms.

 

National security letters are written demands from the FBI that compel internet service providers, credit companies, financial institutions and others to hand over confidential records about their customers, such as subscriber information, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, websites visited and more. NSLs have been used since the 1980s, but the Patriot Act expanded the kinds of records that could be obtained with them. They do not require court approval, and they come with a built-in gag order.

The public has become aware of only a handful of some 300,000 NSLs handed out over the last decade, and those became public only after the recipients launched legal battles opposing them. As a result of these battles, courts have chipped away at the gag order requirement as a violation of the First Amendment, and internal watchdogs have uncovered some abuses of the FBI’s NSL authority. But the letters are still one of the FBI’s most powerful tools; a tool that is rarely discussed inside or outside Congress these days.

According to documents filed in the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia, last Friday, the FBI appears to have served the unknown company with an NSL (.pdf) sometime around the end of January seeking information about a customer or customers.

Read the rest here.

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Brian Caulfield

The gadget teardown artists at iFixit got their hands on the new iPad a day before the rest of the world, thanks to an airline ticket to Australia.

What they found, after prying off the front panel and display with the help of a heat gun, guitar picks, and heavy duty suction cups:  a device packed with  parts from Samsung, Texas Instruments, Broadcom, Elpida, Fairchild, Qualcomm, Toshiba, Triquint, and Avago.

While few of the parts from these companies cost more than a few dollars, everything counts in large amounts, and Apple has sold more than 55 million iPads so far. Some highlights:

Read the rest here.

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