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by avn2109 4283 days ago
Technically, this sounds about right (am mostly a n00b though) but the comments on this thread seem to me terrifyingly naive for a post-Snowden world. Apple has semi-convincingly denied the presence of a few, very specific attack vectors, and the article is speculating about the details of those denials, which is all well and good.

But it is an absolute certainty that communications technologies built and operated by major American industry are wholly compromised. To believe otherwise is to grossly misunderestimate the nature of State intelligence actors. The historical record is clear that big telecom + hardware providers have always been in bed with State power, both in America and elsewhere, and the Snowden docs pretty clearly show that's still true today.

Maybe Apple's announcement means that the county sheriff can't read your teenage son's weed-dealing text messages. But if bin Laden had an iPhone, the men in the windowless buildings would beyond a shadow of a doubt be reading his communications, probably via seven or eight independent attack vectors (not counting the compromised publicly switched telephone network, over-the-air signals, etc.)

If you have secrets, keep them off of communication technologies run by large companies. Especially when those technologies are 100% closed source and the companies in question have openly admitted including backdoors in previous versions of the tech you're currently using.

1 comments

Yes, the NSA has boasted of having a surveillance "partnership" with U.S. companies, but those would be telecommunications carriers -- AT&T, Verizon, etc., not Silicon Valley firms: http://www.cnet.com/news/surveillance-partnership-between-ns...

Also look at the sworn affidavit that EFF obtained from local SF bay area whistleblower Mark Klein -- an AT&T technician who revealed the existence of the NSA's fiber taps at the 2nd & Folsom Street SF facility.

There is no such entity as "major American industry." There are different companies with different incentives and different willingnesses to protect their users. Some companies do the right thing; others don't.