I’ve spotted at least two.

“This sentence has nothing whatsoever to do with any (questionably) legal requests from a government agency.”

This “questionably” — that’s untrue. Any information that iTunes compiles on you through you buying products is public enough that a government agency can certainly make legal requests for it. This is the same as you going to a store and buying something; the government can get any information you gave the clerk, and any information off your credit card from your company. So, right there, you’re wrong; there’s nothing questionable about their rights there.

“This sentence — in essence — warns that Apple may actively or passively monitor you and should you do something which seems suspicious to Apple, they’ll call up DHS, FBI, and anyone else they feel like and tell ‘em all about you.”

Right here, when you say “they will call up”, it does not say that at all. It simply says that they might. Now, it should be prima facie obvious that no human being is monitoring the downloads at Apple, because that would be impossible and unneccessarily complicated. So, reasonably, any monitoring being done is via computer, searching for patterns. And we already know that Apple is doing that, looking for patterns, monitoring patterns. The better their software gets at identifying patterns, the more profitable their system will be. So their goal, in theory, should be 100% accuracy, right? Now, they can’t acheive 100%, but they can already, even without 100%, get pretty freakily accurate about a person if they have enough data…

Basically, what that clause *actually* says is that, if Apple computers flag you based on the patterns of music that you listen to, it’s possible that your information will be passed along. It’s not like a confession booth; if you download a thousand songs by Prussian Blue, then I believe Apple should forward your name to get put on an appropriate white supremacist list, just as quickly as if you bought a thousand subscriptions to some sort of white supremacist literature.

Given that there is certain music which is known to appeal exclusively to white supremacist groups — various forms of metal specifically about white supremacy, I mean — is it unreasonable to think that there is Arab music which is specifically no-bones-about-it pro-terrorist?

Since we all know that the government keeps lists on people with certain beliefs, and given that the reason for keeping these lists is that the general violent nature of the people with those beliefs, I don’t personally have a problem with the idea that Apple would do that. Evidence like that could be the thing that helps get somebody sent away longer after beating a black guy to death, the thing that proves that the crime was racially motivated.

I’d actually love to see more businesses do things like this. “WARNING: It is ILLEGAL to use this service to … Per 18 USC 123456, we are LEGALLY REQUIRED to report such activity to the federal government and cooperate with any investigations.”

Then you wouldn’t read stories about people getting arrested because they posted a call to violence on a forum, or their computer repairman stumbled into their illegal porn collection, or whatever.