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The NSA Reportedly Has Total Access To The Apple iPhone

forbes.com

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

#161

Post by hershel »

x0054 wrote: post #126
hershel wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stalin is a bad example. By forcing industrialization on the ussr, he has increased average life span of the population by something like 15 years ( measures in 1958) and enabled the ussr to defend itself against the Germany which saved countless lives, and increased living standards, education, female equality greatly. In his case, and the case of Chinese communism, it somewhat debatable whether a strong government…

As someone borne in the USSR, I am sad that Stalin lived to an old age and died without suffering. If there is hell, I hope he is in it right now. I would further never trust any statistics from the old USSR. For instance, the communists were able to dramatically "reduce" infant mortality by simply not recording births until the first birthday, when the child became one. If you think Stalin was good for USSR you are…

I didn't mean no disrespect to the great pain that stalin inflicted.

And my view is based upon this thread in reddit /r/askhistorians which is managed by professional historians and is generally a reliable source for historical analysis :

http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1sxp7k/russia...

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

#162

Post by JunkDNA »

enkephalin wrote: post #144
JunkDNA wrote: post #142

I know this headline generates traffic by being about the iPhone, but this is a minor point. The big message from Jacob's talk and the original articles in Der Spiegel is that the NSA can intercept anything. Period. Full stop. People have suspected such far reaching capabilities for some time. This talk and the articles demonstrate that it exists. I'm personally a little uncomfortable with this kind of disclosure. On…

> Did people expect them to be a spy organization that was incompetent? i'm guessing most people thought that spying of US agencies was an activity that was carried out abroad, and aimed at real threats.

Indeed. But nothing in these slides suggests that this stuff wasn't used that way. In contrast to PRISM a lot of the techniques Jacob presented seem like they would only be useful for targeted work. The crucial question of where those targets are located and how many there actually are is left open. That is what makes me uncomfortable about this sort of presentation. I'm concerned that it does real harm to legitimate intelligence programs by conflating them with unrelated mass internet surveillance programs.

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

#163

Post by skc »

They cynic in me assumes that even tech savvy people would much rather rationalize away NSA access to their Apple products than give them up.

The easiest rebuttal is simply that every smartphone is equally at risk.

A last resort will be to simply say "meh, don't care"

That's how good/sticky Apple products are

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

#164

Post by leephillips »

mgkimsal wrote: post #152
salient wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First off, I don't think anyone except "tinfoil hats" really imagined the scale of NSA spying. Who really thought the NSA would try to subvert the cryptographic standards they pretend to create to "secure systems"? Who really thought they'd go to US service and hardware companies and ask them to implement backdoors for them? Also, there's a big difference between letting NSA protect US against Real Threats - real nat…

"Going by how fast they passed the bill, and how few details were offered, you can't really blame most people for "not knowing"." True, but perhaps someday we can learn to not advocate the passage of bills in such a short amount of time that representatives themselves do not have a chance to read or digest them, much less have debate about the specific contents. I say perhaps because I suspect we'll continue to see m…

This sounds great in principle, but it would turn the way congress does business upside down (maybe not a bad thing). I've heard stories about hundreds or thousands of pages being added to bills by staff just minutes before a vote. I suspect the way it works is that the legislators tell their staffs what they want the bills to do, rely on them, and have no interest in actually reading the result (and who can blame them - ever read legislation?).

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

#165

Post by epmatsw »

mrich wrote: post #110
RyanZAG wrote: post #82

Aren't we missing a critical point here?? > "The initial release of DROPOUTJEEP will focus on installing the implant via closed access methods." [2007] OK, we knew this much already. I remember seeing a number of stories on how law enforcement can pull data off an iPhone, etc. Not really much new here. > "A remote installation capability will be pursued for a future release" Here is the interesting bit. You don't put…

> "Obviously with iOS devices having ports closed and being behind NAT, the NSA can't exploit them remotely." This is a pretty limited view of remote exploits. It could easily be a browser-based exploit for example, with the payload as part of an image served by an ad, thus not requiring any open ports. I cannot imagine the NSA waited for iCloud to get access to iPhones.

Back on iOS 2 (or 1 or 3 maybe), there was a browser-based jailbreak that exploited a flaw in the iOS PDF viewer, so there's definitely precedent for such a thing.

http://www.jailbreakme.com/#

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

#166

Post by [deleted] »

Touche wrote: post #154
sigzero wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the article didn't imply that. "Here’s a problem: I don’t really believe that Apple didn’t help them." That is a bullshit statement. It is pure speculation without a SHRED of facts to back it up.

> No, the article didn't imply that. There's a whole paragraph about that. You quoted part of it. It's not a minor point of the article. There's no smoking gun but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be discussed.

[deleted]

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

#167

Post by marveller »

swampboy wrote: post #16
electic wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the phones are exploited. I doubt it matters.

Perhaps, but with a feature phone there's much less for the eavesdroppers to see.

Yes, hence the feature phone :), no GPS, no email, no browsing records, etc.

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

#168

Post by wisty »

enkephalin wrote: post #144
JunkDNA wrote: post #142

I know this headline generates traffic by being about the iPhone, but this is a minor point. The big message from Jacob's talk and the original articles in Der Spiegel is that the NSA can intercept anything. Period. Full stop. People have suspected such far reaching capabilities for some time. This talk and the articles demonstrate that it exists. I'm personally a little uncomfortable with this kind of disclosure. On…

> Did people expect them to be a spy organization that was incompetent? i'm guessing most people thought that spying of US agencies was an activity that was carried out abroad, and aimed at real threats.

When terrorism in the big concern, droid strikes are used against real threats. General espionage is used to figure out what the real threats are.

I guess they'd still be hoovering up everything they could, just in case, if it weren't for the threat of terrorism. Public opinion is strategically important (if a foreign power starts a war, how will their people react?), but it wouldn't be so important.

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

#169

Post by infruset »

netcan wrote: post #123
forgottenpaswrd wrote: post #101

"one question has been paramount for privacy advocates: How do we, as a society, balance the need for security against the rights to privacy and freedom? " I hear this fallacy question again an again. It implies that giving total power to gobertment is "security". It is not. Giving total control to Stalin meant hundred of millions of Russians got murdered in terror, giving total power to Hitler or Mussolini from demo…

I don't even think you need to go that far, with extreme examples of totalitarianism. I'm not American, so obviously I'm less emotionally involved. My view on it is that the US is not under any meaningful threat of terrorism. 9/11 was big, but on the scale of decades it is still far down the likelihood list of violent ways an American may be harmed. Murder, Rape and other assaults are a reality too, a far more likely…

Even better: use all that money and intelligence, not to hunt down and kill people, not to invade countries, but to help make the world a better place. Then less people might dedicate their lives to killing American civilians.
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