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Heck, or they even have cooperation from Apple. Apple claims they dont have a backdoor, and the FBI moans that they can't hack current iPhones. But honestly, who can ensure to me that there is no national security letter (or other mechanism I don't know about) forcing Apple to cooperate, with a gag order forcing them to keep silent? Who can ensure me that the NSA et al have are not bribing, blackmailing, or using court orders on the three or four vocal security experts I can name (like Bruce Schneier, tptacek, Moxie Marlinspike, ...). Everything they say on this topic might be manipulated, who knows. There could be backdoors everywhere, in apps, hardware, routers, lamps, whatever. Occam's razor suggests that this is crazy, but then people found spam sending wifi chips in clothes irons, so I guess nothing is too far fetched. If you suspect "they" might be out to get you, the only thing you can really do is to stay under the radar, and hope they don't notice you and target you individually. |
Apple deserves some recognition for their attempts. At some point they were fighting several lawsuits seeking to protect their users, and were under massive attack by some politicians because one of the cases was a terrorist. That's quite risky – with the current political climate, being associated with one of the parties has the potential to cut your revenue in half.
The FBI may have ultimately gotten the data after buying a zero-day exploit, which is unfortunate. But Apple seemed to be winning in court at that time and the gov may have been quite happy to find a way to drop the lawsuits without losing face.
Apple also uses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary, which may or may not be useful.