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Apple Logs Your iMessage Contacts - And May Share Them With Police: The Intercept
The Intercept is reporting that despite what Apple claims, it does keep a log of people you are receiving messages from and shares this and other potentially sensitive metadata with law enforcement when compelled by court order. Apple insists that iMessage conversations are safe and out of reach from anyone other than you and your friends. From the report:This log also includes the date and time when you entered a number, along with your IP address -- which could, contrary to a 2013 Apple claim that "we do not store data related to customers' location," identify a customer's location. Apple is compelled to turn over such information via court orders for systems known as "pen registers" or "tap and trace devices," orders that are not particularly onerous to obtain, requiring only that government lawyers represent they are "likely" to obtain information whose "use is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation." Apple confirmed to The Intercept that it only retains these logs for a period of 30 days, though court orders of this kind can typically be extended in additional 30-day periods, meaning a series of monthlong log snapshots from Apple could be strung together by police to create a longer list of whose numbers someone has been entering.
Even the turn-on dialog for Siri on the Mac says it will go through your Contacts list so Siri can 'know more about you'. Not good.
You know, back in the Soviet Union you at least only got locked up and shot if your father was a crook, but in the free world it's already enough to know one.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The message contents are encrypted & "zero knowledge", but I'm not aware of a method to route messages between user devices with "zero knowledge".
Tor makes it more difficult to trace, but it's not impossible when you have the NSA's resources.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Since you need that to route using the internet protocol. And, yes, it is possible to attach a location to an ip address. Which may not necessarily match your real location.
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This is hardly new news. Envelope information is available on many platforms.
Apple cooperates fully with the law. The parts that make the news are when they correctly construct some part of their system such that they don't have the key to it, and refuse to do their best to crack it.
The fact that Apple logs their own queries to route messages (each one can be delivered over their network, or over SMS) is unsurprising. The fact that they deliver a log should be completely unsurprising. iMessage is end to end encrypted, but that doesn't mean it magically loses the need to be routed. When you send an iMessage, your destination address is a PHONE NUMBER. The fallback delivery message is SMS. Of course it needs to have some method of figuring out who gets an iMessage and who gets an SMS.