July 21, 2017 1:26PM # What’s Missing from Apple’s Latest Lobbying Disclosure Form By [Patrick G. Eddington](https://www.cato.org/people/patrick-g-eddington) --- SHARE *MacRumors* has a [piece](https://www.macrumors.com/2017/07/21/apple-record-2m-lobbying-trump-gov/) 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](http://disclosures.house.gov/ld/ldxmlrelease/2017/Q2/300897564.xml) is any mention of federal government surveillance practices, whether it be [Section 702](http://origin-nyi.thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/homeland-security/339883-government-is-playing-a-dangerous-game-with-mass) of the FISA Amendments Act or that nasty encryption-related [battle](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/15/apple-fbi-file-encryption-wwdc) Apple had with the FBI in the wake of the San Bernardino shooting in 2015. As Reuters [noted](https://in.reuters.com/article/usa-intelligence-idINKBN1A32AX) earlier this month, the tech industry generally has been rather quiet about FISA reform, though members of the [Reform Government Surveillance](https://www.reformgovernmentsurveillance.com/index.html) consortium (of which Apple is a member) like to point to a [letter](https://reformgs.tumblr.com/post/157838097962/reform-government-surveillance-letter-to-house-and) 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. ##### Related Tags [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics), [Constitutional Law](https://www.cato.org/constitutional-law), [Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies](https://www.cato.org/robert-levy-center-constitutional-studies) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).