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The NSA Reportedly Has Total Access To The Apple iPhone

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Re: The NSA Reportedly Has Total Access To The Apple iPhone

#211
post #103
post #56

Ha, I wonder what this will do to acceptance of Apple products inside DoD's (well govt in general). Many agencies and military branches love them some new cool toys and have been pushing for their inclusion. Now revealing that Apple security can so seemingly easily be compromised, will they still allow or advise use of Apple products on government's own networks?

I thought the largest take away from all these leaks was that various branches of government, even within the military and intelligence communities, routinely deploy solutions that are known to be insecure?

Well they do try to (at least on the surface) to protect their own sensitive information. NSA's other mission (besides spying) is and advising govt agencies and military on keeping their data safe.

Now this involves a lot of red tape security certifications, hardening 'scripts', monitoring, auditing and so on. They legitimately do not want sensitive information leaking. Projects employ air gaps with CDs being burnt and that is how data is transferred some times.

Re: The NSA Reportedly Has Total Access To The Apple iPhone

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right of course. And even the label 'terrorist' can vary. I think if we ask the people living under the threat of predator-strikes they'd say it's the US thats causing a lot of the terror there.

"Terrorist" does not currently have a well-accepted objective definition. To me a terrorist is a guerrilla fighter who lacks popular support where they are fighting and specifically attacks soft targets for political (rather than military/tactical) goals. Regardless, the casualness with which "collateral" deaths of civilians has been handled for several of the US's recent military activities may be of a different nat…

Kofi Annan's definition seemed reasonable to me:

Any action constitutes terrorism if it is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants with the purpose of intimidating a population or compelling a government or an international organization to do or abstain from doing any act.

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