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Leaked Memo Says Apple Provides Backdoor To Governments
Voline writes "In a tweet early this morning, cybersecurity researcher Christopher Soghoian pointed to an internal memo of India's Military Intelligence that has been liberated by hackers and posted on the Net. The memo suggests that, "in exchange for the Indian market presence" mobile device manufacturers, including RIM, Nokia, and Apple (collectively defined in the document as "RINOA") have agreed to provide backdoor access on their devices.
The Indian government then "utilized backdoors provided by RINOA" to intercept internal emails of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a U.S. government body with a mandate to monitor, investigate and report to Congress on 'the national security implications of the bilateral trade and economic relationship' between the U.S. and China. Manan Kakkar, an Indian blogger for ZDNet, has also picked up the story and writes that it may be the fruits of an earlier hack of Symantec. If Apple is providing governments with a backdoor to iOS, can we assume that they have also done so with Mac OS X?"
Nobody cares about RIM and Americans don't care about Nokia.
Nothing new here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawful_interception
You may not like that, but that's the way it is. Communications providers can be forced to provide back doors for "legal spying" by governments. All governments know this, and use other methods to protect "sensitive" communications. Any other stuff is, well, who cares?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Unless you've personally verified every single line of code in the OS, you're not really better off.
Even if you do, you're not sure. Your compiler may be compromised. See: Reflections on trusting trust.
I bought the OS. I bought the machine.
Technically, while you bought the hardware, you did not buy the OS.
With the machine, you've got the right to do whatever you please with. (Modify, lease ...) Not so with the OS you believe you purchased.
Typically with proprietary software, you only buy a license to use it as-is, and you are not even entitled to study how it works, or even look for backdoors.
IMHO, this is the major problem with proprietary software, and an outrage that such agreements have any legal stance in a free-market society.
You only get thrown into federal prison for doing illegal things, in america, if your outside america you get drugs, stuck in nappies and an orange jumpsuit, abducted, flown to a foreign state know for torture, held and tortured then released in another country on the side of the road. all for having a name as come as Smith in the arab world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_El-Masri
And that was a citizen of a member of nato.
Hacking stuff you own is perfectly legal.
It is until the government makes it illegal. The number of federal crimes has ballooned from around 3,000 in the 1980s to an estimated 4,500 today. wsj.com The Feds seem to make all kinds of things illegal today, so I wouldn't hang my hat on whether it's illegal or not. Where would one even look? Have you ever seen the United States Code? It's a nightmare. New bills that come up for a vote that amend an existing statute, for instance to add a crime to an existing statute, don't republish the whole statute, the bill shows the changes to the statute, and they show that they add a sub-paragraph here or remove a word there. It's really very difficult to figure out what's going on, even for our legislators.
Make love, not reality television.
the two situations are not exactly the same. Manning is accused of giving information about the national defense to other parties. it would be very hard to argue that apple did that. they just gave instructions to India about how to backdoor their phones.
now the more accurate analogy would not be Bradley Manning, it would be the 'Cambridge Associates' who went under Grand Jury investigation in 2011 regarding their alleged assistance to Wikileaks (and are still under investigation). They are charged with Conspiracy to Commit Espionage. 18 USC 793 g.
now, the other law i think applies here would be the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. why? the Espionage Act only applies to 'national defense information'. but the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act has its own sort of 'mini-espionage-act' inside of it... that applies to not just national defense information, but also "foreign relations" information. This is the only reason Manning could be sued on so many counts of violating the CFAA, for example the Reyjkavic 13 memo about Icelandic Bank Fraud - thats under the CFAA.
what you have here against Apple, could, theoretically, be Conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, section (1) I believe is the Computer Espionage section.
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another analogy would be George Hotz + FailOverflow, who published information about how to jailbreak the playstation 3. They were sued by Sony - but that was in civil court, not in criminal court. the DOJ never went after Hotz.
Sounds like you need a US Code Repository, with bills published as changesets, but retaining the ability to pull a complete version of the legal framework that is actually in use.
I really wonder why this hasn't been done years ago. Some svn+wiki could be hacked easily, with the whole changelog, the name of the senators/governors who voted on it and links to law cases that applied it.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
In this case, Apple was aiding and abetting foreign intelligence services collecting against the US. Thats illegal.
Obama is Dubya V2.0. The folks who thought he was liberal got pwned.
The folks who thought Dubya was conservative got pwned too. Obama wants to sell us out to big government, Dubya was sold us out to big bussiness, somebody else is just as eager to sell up out to big religion; the only thing that stays the same is we get sold out to something big.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
So let's see, in the past three years we've gotten:
*Health care extended to millions of people who wouldn't otherwise have it
*Honesty about how much the War on Terror is costing by putting it in the budget, rather than hiding it as Bush did
*Laws stopping credit card companies from abusing their customers through short notice due date changes and excessive default rates
*Limitations on outrageous fees charged to retailers by the card companies
*A Network Neutrality law (albeit not on mobile networks, but there are good technical reasons why wireless networks can't be as unfettered as wired ones)
*An end to the stop loss program wherein soldiers were forced to stay beyond what they signed up for
*Fixes to the abortion that was No Child Left Behind (e.g. funding it, helping low scoring school instead of punishing them, etc.)
*The Ledbetter Law, pushing back against a conservative SCOTUS ruling that made it virtually impossible for women and minorities to sue over pay discrimination
*An end to torture and extraordinary rendition
*An end to DADT, and no support for DOMA (he can't end it unilaterally, but he's refusing to defend it in court)
*A new START treaty to reduce the number of nukes in the world
Had it not been for Republican filibusters, we also would have gotten:
*EFCA, helping to fight back against the corporate driven destruction of unions
*Cap & Trade, a free market solution to global warming
*Public option health care, allowing people to buy health insurance direct from the government rather than a for-profit company
*The DREAM act, allowing illegal immigrants a path to citizenship through college or military service
That's just what's coming to mind right now. I'm sure there's a bunch of small stuff I've forgotten. Now, how many of those things would be supported by the GOP? Maybe the New START treaty, but I doubt it, and certainly none of the others.
Claiming that Obama is "Dubya 2.0" makes for a nice sound bite, but it is blatantly false. This whole myopic claim that Republicans and Democrats are the same is just an excuse for the lazy who don't want to be bothered trying to make a difference in the world, and prefer to just shrug off the whole system while hoping for a magic solution that will never come.