Apple's Tim Cook Likes Big Brother Government. Steve Jobs famously disdained D.C. Tim Cook’s quietly taking it on.

Politico reports:

As Apple chief Tim Cook quietly slipped out of a public meeting at the White House for a private lunch with Eric Holder in December 2013, the attorney general braced himself for a rough encounter. His Justice Department had sued Apple more than a year earlier, after all, for the way that the company priced its e-books, touching off a bruising legal war between the two. And this time Apple seemed even more apoplectic. It was seething over a flurry of reports that the NSA had quietly cracked its servers and gained access to untold millions of its customers’ personal communications.

Cook and Holder hotly debated security and privacy during their first-ever meeting on that freezing December day, but the attorney general said he sat across a much different leader than he had expected. “We found we had a mutual Alabama connection,” Holder recently explained in an interview. The sister of Holder’s wife had helped desegregate the University of Alabama, and Cook, a gay man born and raised in the South, knew firsthand the impact of discrimination.

Is Apple entering the rent-seeking era of their business? It appears so.