Apple and other famous technology companies and their millions of customers don’t have blood on their hands. Well, maybe.

After reading a piece by Nick Kristof in the Times last year – “Death by Gadget” – an Apple fan fired off an email to Steve Jobs asking how Apple ensures that its materials aren’t coming from a conflict hot zone, much like the “blood diamonds” that became infamous in recent decades. About an hour later, a reply showed up in his inbox:

Yes. We require all of our suppliers to certify in writing that they use conflict few [free] materials. But honestly there is no way for them to be sure. Until someone invents a way to chemically trace minerals from the source mine, it’s a very difficult problem.

Sent from my iPhone

As Suroosh Alvi and Jason Mojica reported in their trip to the Democratic Republic of Congo earlier this year for Vice / Motherboard (article here, and the video is at the bottom of this post), the source of the materials used to make these pretty things – materials like tungsten, tantalum, tin, and gold – aren’t pretty. For decades, they’ve helped to fund a terrible, now smoldering, civil war.

Can We Have Gadgets That Are Not Made of Blood | Motherboard

From the Shareable archives: Demanding Ethical Gadgets