What is Apple Inc.'s role in task force investigating iPhone case?
The California criminal investigation into the case of the errant Apple G4 iPhone that Gizmodo.com unveiled before legions of curious Internet readers last week is noteworthy in its potential to make new media law. But it's also striking for another reason: The raid that San Mateo area cops conducted last week on the house ofGizmodo editor Jason Chen came at the behest of a special multi-agency task force that was commissioned to work with the computer industry to tackle high-tech crimes. And Apple Inc. sits on the task force's steering committee.
On Friday, members of the Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team (REACT) Task Force entered Chen's home and seized four computers and two servers as evidence in a felony investigation. REACT is a partnership of 17 local, state, and federal law-enforcement agencies headquartered in Santa Clara County, founded in 1997 to address "new types of crime directly tied to [California's] increasingly computer-oriented economy and widespread use of the Internet," according to the task force's website.
The idea was to bring a variety of business interests and police agencies together to help combat identity theft, computer fraud, and the like. The team's website explains that "high tech companies ... provide specialized training, liaison personnel and internal support for task force investigations."
What's curious is that one of those high-tech companies providing training, personnel, and support to the task force is Apple Inc., the alleged victim in the Gizmodo case. According to this May 2009 story from the San Jose Business Journal, Apple is one of the 25 companies that sit on REACT's "steering committee." Which raises the question as to whether Apple, which was outraged enough about Gizmodo's $5,000 purchase of the lost iPhone for CEO Steve Jobs to reportedly call Gawker Media owner Nick Denton to demand its return, sicked its high-tech cops on Chen.
Gizmodo says it paid $5,000 for the prototype 4G iPhone from someone who found it sitting untended on a bar stool in a Silicon Valley beer garden. Stephen Wagstaffe, the chief deputy district attorney in the San Mateo District Attorney's office, told Yahoo! News that the search warrant on Chen's home was executed by members of the REACT Task Force in the course of investigating a "possible theft," but he didn't say whether the target was Gizmodo or the anonymous tipster who found the phone. In either case, it's hard to imagine — even if you grant that a theft may have occurred under California law, which requires people who come across lost items to make a good-faith effort to return them to their owner — how the loss of a single phone in a bar merits the involvement of an elite task force of local, state, and federal authorities devoted to "reducing the incidence of high technology crime through the apprehension of the professional organizers of large-scalecriminal activities," as the REACT website motto characterizes its mission.
"It depends," Wagstaffe says. "If there's something unusual about the phone, then yes, REACT would get involved. It deals with anything that's high-tech. So if it's hard to put a value on it — for instance, if it's not just any cell phone — then a local police force might have trouble assessing its value, and the task force would have the expertise to do that." By calling its steering committee member Apple, perhaps?
"That's a good question," Wagstaffe says. "I don't know if Apple is on the steering committee."
He referred us to another REACT spokeswoman. We asked her to confirm Apple's presence on the committee and to explain what, precisely, the committee does and how it relates to the task force's law enforcement efforts. She hasn't gotten back to us.
According to the San Jose Business Journal, other steering committee members include Cisco Systems, Microsoft, and Adobe. This isn't the first criminal investigation REACT has conducted in which a steering-committee member was a victim: In 2006, REACT broke up a counterfeiting ring that was selling pirated copies of Norton Antivirus, which is produced by steering-committee member Symantec. REACT has also launched piracy investigations in response to requests from Microsoft and Adobe.
Apple did not return phone calls seeking comment.
— John Cook is a senior national reporter/blogger for Yahoo! News.
NOTE: John Cook was perviously a blogger at Gawker.com, which is owned by the same company that owns Gizmodo.com.
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