The fact that Apple and Amazon are willing to go on the record adamantly denying it is more than just a gag order. That’s a serious breach of both SEC rules and public trust if it turns out they’re lying.
Then again, I'm not convinced that these companies needed to be as specific as they were when denying bloomberg's story if they must comply with some court order.
That's not to mention the lack of evidence of an operation of this scale. Keeping that amount of people quiet for this long is something more newsworthy to me than spy chips.
If the possibility of creating an international armed conflict could be on the table (i.e. infiltration of military infrastructure being seen as a premise for war), at what point would these institutions no longer "care" about what SEC rules are breached?
I mean, what would happen if this was seen as an act of war by the President's office? Surely there would be some above-and-beyond damage control measures.
Does freedom of speech guarantee that they can't be coerced into punlic denial? Does a national security letter / other forms of government oversight override this?
(It absolutely shouldn't in a democracy, but there are plenty of things that shouldn't happen in democracies that have been happening lately)
An NSL can compel you to not speak, it can not compel you to say something that is factually a lie in the manner they did. Look up the case law on “compelled speech” to back this up.
