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CIA Tried To Crack Security of Apple Devices
According to a story at The Guardian passed on by an anonymous reader, The CIA led sophisticated intelligence agency efforts to undermine the encryption used in Apple phones, as well as insert secret surveillance back doors into apps, top-secret documents published by the Intercept online news site have revealed. he newly disclosed documents from the National Security Agency's internal systems show surveillance methods were presented at its secret annual conference, known as the "jamboree."
Through their hard work, numerous exploits have been discovered, which has led to Apple patching them, which in the end keeps us all more secure.
Ken Thompson was a visionary, but he probably didn't envision it'd be his own government doing the compromising:
Reflections on Trusting Trust
Although I am not as certain as you are, I agree that the NSA could use that power nefariously. I just think the outrage is missing the point. We're piling our dislike on one agency, while calmly ignoring the threat of the whole.
I'm not defending the NSA. Far from it. I just want to clarify that I feel that the NSA is merely on the bleeding edge of that sort of abuse. We could throw every NSA staffer in jail and shut down all its functions, and all we've done is put a finger in an increasingly unstable dyke because we're not addressing the actual problem, just the symptom.
The problem is simply that all of that information is there, whether it is the NSA or the FSB or Google that has it. The NSA isn't some shadowy organization using alien technology hundreds of years ahead of us, it's just slightly ahead of the curve. Until you address that, you're just going to play whack-a-mole with whatever agency decides to overstep its bounds next Tuesday.