On Thursday we reported Apple's Manager of User Privacy would be called to testify during Tuesday's hearing. The Apple Manager had sent a Supplemental Declaration to the Court stating that "There would also be a burden on the Apple employees responsible for designing and implementing GovtOS. Those employees, if identified, could themselves become targets of retaliation, coercion, or similar threats by bad actors seeking to obtain and use GovtOS for nefarious purposes." While that was being written, Apple was in the process of bringing in George Stathakopoulos, formerly vice president of information security at Amazon.com and before that Microsoft's general manager of product security, to be vice president of corporate information security reporting directly to Apple's CEO Tim Cook.

It appears that Apple's CEO has decided to go from DEFCON 5 to at least DEFCON 3 as it prepares to take their security and privacy case all the way to the Supreme Court.

Beyond advising Cook on security issues in their ongoing case with the government, the new position will reportedly be responsible for protecting corporate assets such as the computers used to design products and develop software, as well as data about customers while department heads of hardware and software will remain in charge of protecting users of Apple's products. For more on this, read the full Fortune/Reuters report here.

In 2014, Jony Ive told Time magazine that "We are at the beginning of a remarkable time, when a remarkable number of products will be developed." Obviously Cook is determined to keep their 'remarkable number of products' as secret as possible and away from all preying eyes including those in government, any government.  

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