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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?"
Everyone has done something illegal. They might not know it and it might not have been immoral. As long as you can monitor everything they do you can find a reason to send them to jail if they start to express 'undesirable' opinions.
I can be more specific. All programmers violate patent law every time they code, whether they release their code or not.
question:
How is it we've accepted a set of laws that guarantee we'll be lawbreakers subject to enormous civil fines and seizure and what can we do?
answer: publicly funded elections.
puzzler: explain the answer
Question: We've given way too much power to the government and we are about to be trapped in a dystopian police state. What can we do to stop it before tos too late?
Answer: Give the government control over campaign finance as well.
Puzzler: Why do I have a bad feeling about this?
2 weeks after my wife and I bought our house in 2001, I was laid off. After 3 months of searching 9/11 happened, and the shit really hit the fan. Silicon Valley for a time looked like a ghost town. Moving trucks were moving east (getting the fuck out of dodge so to speak)
A year later I wound up getting a crappy job at a bar. 10 years later I'm still here, working on my own software that runs certain aspects of the bar (very profitably I might add) When we bought our house in 2001 interest rates were sky high, and the wife and I thought our futures in tech were pretty secured. I think we were at 10% interest. We refinanced twice over the 10 years trying to keep payments down so we could stay in our house.
In the last 2 years the ARM on our loan got so high we were paying over $1600@mo for the new interest charges alone. We were virtually on the brink of losing our house. Then the "Obama Affordable home" plan was passed. Bank of America didn't make it easy. My wife had to call them every single day for a year. (like calling your AT&T subcontractor when your T1 goes down) At one point they denied us because "We couldn't verify your identity" (one of the loan modders wrote my social security number down wrong)
Despite what you might think of Obama.. He's just doing the best he can. He's no Bill Clinton, but having to clean up after GWB can't be easy. He stopped the banks from bending over hardworking people. Osama was killed during his term. Troops are withdrawing from Iraq.
A smart backdoor would look like a bug and could easily be explained away as such...
Tee hee. A while ago, one of the hacker sites had a competition to see who could hide a "backdoor" -- the idea was to take an image in a script compatible form (all the numbers were in text, rather than in binaries), black out a certain region (think redaction), and still have some way to have the redacted area be recoverable when the right inputs were given.
The catch? The code would be given a peer review, so you had to come up with something that would pass most attempts at oversight.
A lot of people tried to hide stuff in "error detection" routines.
The winning code had no bugs of any kind. It did perfect redaction of the specified area. No flaws, no errors, nothing to be spotted in code review.
Except for one oddball usage of fetching and writing individual characters -- getc() and putc(). The author explained that as an attempt to make sure that no matter what was in the input data, no matter how messed up the graphics were in an attempt to break the code, it would not have any overruns, no undefined behavior, etc.
Result? The "black" would be written out as "0", "00", or "000", depending on the light level of the source. For all three color channels.
Absolutely unnoticeable when viewed on a viewer. There was no hidden alpha channel, no slight alternation between black-0 and black-1, etc.
Yet you could still recover readable text, almost perfect pictures, etc.
Security hole back door? Very doable.