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Read Apple’s letter to Congress denying spy chip report

Read Apple’s letter to Congress denying spy chip report

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The letter is penned to some of Congress’s top tech watchdogs following the explosive Bloomberg report last week

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Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Apple has come out swinging at last week’s Bloomberg spy chip report today with a new letter to some of the biggest tech watchdogs in Congress, flatly denying that any of the company’s servers were compromised through the use of microchips implanted by Chinese spies.

The letter, which was previously reported but recently made publicly available, assumes the same tough stance on the Bloomberg report that the company took on when it came out with its first press release last week. “Apple has never found malicious chips, ‘hardware manipulations’ or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any server,” wrote Apple’s vice president of information security George Stathakopoulos to the Senate Commerce and House Energy and Commerce Committees. “We never alerted the FBI to any security concerns like those described in the article, nor has the FBI ever contacted us about such an investigation.”

Congress has been relatively quiet following the release of the report. Only a few have stepped up to make generalized statements condemning the potential threat of Chinese hardware to US national security. The Department of Homeland Security put out a statement Saturday evening backing both Apple and Amazon saying, “We have no reason to doubt the statements from the companies named in the story.” The UK’s top cyber security agency, the GCHQ, voiced the same sentiments on Friday.

Stathakopoulos said that he would make himself available for a briefing with the committee later this week. “If any of the reported details ... were true, we would have every interest—economic, regulatory, and ethical—to be forthcoming about it,” he wrote.

The whole letter can be found below:

Letter by on Scribd