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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."
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html
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.
Less a yawn, more a "duh, we already knew the NSA is the enemy".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The sad part is that you can take whatever atrocity you would have attributed to the Commies in the 1980 and transplant it to today's "world of the free" without losing any credibility. Take whatever story from back then, replace "Russia" with "USA" and "KGB" with "NSA" and you're good for another headline.
Ok, you could have done that any time. But now it doesn't take a conspiracy nut to consider it credible.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Ken Thompson was a visionary, but he probably didn't envision it'd be his own government doing the compromising:
Reflections on Trusting Trust
If privacy is dead, then let's put up webcams to NSA HQ. Also, the NSA is, in practice, a military organization. That makes it a much larger concern.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
The difference is maybe that the fire department can't yell "witch"... sorry, I mean "terrorist" and have someone arrested that isn't to their liking.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The very act of having an nationalized health care system would put as much personal information in the hands of the US Government any random NSA snoop of Wikipedia or break in on someone's mobile would.
What utter fucking bullshit.
Can my health records determine who I am friends with? Where I go? Where I browse online? Who I communicate with? What investments I have? And 100 other things the gov't could (and have) use as leverage to get information out of me if they wanted.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
I don't think this is a "tried to" at all, just look at the permissions a lot of stuff asks for.
Facebook, a bunch of EA games, Angry Birds, etc all ask for insane permissions ranging from your full contact list, to seeing who you are on a call with to accessing the microphone. It's a spook's wet-dream.
And neither can the NSA. Technically. Unlike the CIA, the NSA is a signals intelligence organization with no enforcement power and no operational branch to speak of. It's threat is simply that it can provide information very efficiently.
In reality, any government organization has the capability to get you arrested, even the fire department, based on either an interesting interpretation of their powers, or their ability to turn over information to someone who can arrest or otherwise harm you.
I'd also point out that in a certain book, the "firemen" were those who entered areas to burn that which threatened the existing order. The parallel is intentional. The government is what its powers are and how they use them. Labeling something as "fire department" or "police" or "signals intelligence" or "health care" is only valid in the sense that the government maintains that separation or can somehow be forced to do so.
The problem with the NSA is *not* that they collect intelligence on US citizens. Your internet provider accidentally does that every day for troubleshooting purposes. It is that we fear that the NSA can turn into an organization bereft of limitations on what they can *use* the information for and who they can share that information with. The ability to get away with that can affect any agency of the Federal government, from DHS to HHS.
For the most part, the fire department doesn't drive around stripping off insulation from electrical wires or drilling little holes in gas pipes under your house. Sure they _theoretically_ could, but the CIA is actually at this very moment doing this exact thing.
The biggest part of this story is a poisoned Xcode, and it's not even mentioned in TFS. WTF?
https://firstlook.org/theinter...
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
I will correct you on one thing. We don't fear the NSA will turn into something evil, we know it will. Power leads to corruption and abuse of authority. 70,000 incidents of NSA operatives spying on their significant others in contravention of the law with NO repercussions to those individuals is proof enough that the NSA will eventually abuse it's authority in a significant and likely very bad way to our democracy.
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.
Actually, no. With Google, I can still opt in or out. With gov backed NSA back-dooring every ISP effectively in the world.... I can't opt out without cutting all internet connectivity. See the admittedly minor difference?
The cesspool just got a check and balance.