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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

#181

Post by unethical_ban »

jokoon wrote: post #155

One thing is true: whatever your phone is, the more complex, the more features, the more risks there are. I really don't see the advantages of having a handsized computer, really. The performance/battery/usability/cost compromises are not really making it worth it. Most people do a lot of text messaging, usual smartphones are not designed for it. Old school, classic cellphone do it pretty well. Why would you need the…

"You know all those things you like having in a smartphone? You could do without them, you know."

I agree with your point that more software = more surface area, but your examples of alternatives aren't very viable for most people, in my opinion.

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

#182

Post by Ntrails »

x0054 wrote: post #133
darkbot wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While this might be true, as a European I'm eternally thankful for USSR saving us from the claws of nazi tyranny.

Soviet people laid down their lives to win WWII, then, after WWII a lot more Soviet people lost their lives due to the tyrannical rule of a completely insane and evil man. I don't even want to dive into the pros and cons of communism. The only point I am making is that Stalin was an utterly evil fuck head.

> Stalin was an utterly evil fuck head.

...as many important historians have said

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

#183

Post by InclinedPlane »

digitalengineer wrote: post #176
InclinedPlane wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful, you're treading into muddy waters, and it's not necessary for your argument. Consider a few problems with your statistics. First, 20k of those gun deaths in the US are suicides, which distorts the statistics into pretending to show a certain level of gun violence that's not actually evident. Second, dying in terrorist attacks is not the same thing as dying at the hands of terrorists or terrorist organizat…

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 nature but not necessarily on a higher moral standing. This is probably most true of the US's participation in the Yemeni civil war over the last several years, but there is much else worthy of approbation. The theory of arming surveillance drones was always that it would enable attacks on extremely high value targets of opportunity using precision guided munitions that would limit collateral damage. In practice it has resulted in an unprecedented expansion in the extent of the currently active battlefield and a weapon system which appears to be on the same moral level as the car bomb in the degree to which it causes deaths of innocent civilians.

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

#184

Post by leephillips »

el-mapache wrote: post #174
leephillips wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Who really thought the NSA would try to subvert the cryptographic standards they pretend to create" I first encountered speculation that this was the case in a textbook from 1986, in a chapter discussing encryption algorithms in wide use that were contributed to by the NSA. "Who really thought they'd go to US service and hardware companies and ask them to implement backdoors" The fascinating book The Puzzle Palace ,…

None of this is surprising to an extremely small subset of the global population, those who have had the means to study computer science and cryptography, and the history(ies) of government sanctioned spy agencies for a long enough period to be able to glean insights into the future behaviour of said agencies. Since not everyone who reads this site meets those criteria, I suspect that it is even a not-insignificant s…

Clearly you're right, in the sense that, as a simple statement of fact, the NSA revelations are surprising to a great many people, maybe most people who learn of them. But there is a sense in which, when people say "this is not surprising", it implies "to people who know some things about the subject". I guess this expression, used this way, might come off as elitist or haughty, but I think it's a pretty common usage. Another reason I'm surprised at all the surprise is that I never studied cryptography, computer science, or the history of spy agencies systematically. The Puzzle Palace was a popular book, widely read, and I learned about NSA involvement in academic cryptography research by accident while studying up on numerical algorithms for physics simulations.

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

#185

Post by [deleted] »

el-mapache wrote: post #174
leephillips wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Who really thought the NSA would try to subvert the cryptographic standards they pretend to create" I first encountered speculation that this was the case in a textbook from 1986, in a chapter discussing encryption algorithms in wide use that were contributed to by the NSA. "Who really thought they'd go to US service and hardware companies and ask them to implement backdoors" The fascinating book The Puzzle Palace ,…

None of this is surprising to an extremely small subset of the global population, those who have had the means to study computer science and cryptography, and the history(ies) of government sanctioned spy agencies for a long enough period to be able to glean insights into the future behaviour of said agencies. Since not everyone who reads this site meets those criteria, I suspect that it is even a not-insignificant s…

[deleted]

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

#186

Post by cle »

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…

I think the risk assessment should take into account more than just casualties.

The risk of terrorism that scares governments is not necessarily the casualties (though that undoubtedly is a factor), but longer-term consequences. For example, repeated terrorist attacks on U.S. soil may deteriorate the confidence of citizens in their government, increase the audacity of terrorists, make the U.S. appear weak, etc.

I don't agree with the U.S.'s response to terrorism, but I'm also not convinced that tallying casualties provides an accurate risk assessment. The political risk of terrorism is much higher than, say, automobile fatalities (or firearms, as digitalengineer pointed out in a sibling reply).

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

#187

Post by allochthon »

Nursie wrote: post #139
allochthon wrote: post #12

Honestly, I don't really care. The NSA can read whatever they want of mine. I've heard the arguments about how you should care, even if you don't have anything to hide. And I find them persuasive on one level and simultaneously unengaging on another. By contrast, the parallels to fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and living in a turnkey fascist state are most unpersuasive. The one argument against what I've written that…

So you're not concerned about the government themselves having a bad security record and leaking all the data they gather on you, either? (government leaks data all the time) Or someone in government deciding to stalk you? (this has happened, within the NSA I believe, but certainly in other places) Or someone deciding they dislike you and using your information to pursue frivolous legal action? (You never broke any l…

You make a great point about data leaking out.

My position isn't that I don't care about privacy. It's that in the modern age, with so much information kept about people in corporate and government databases, we're necessarily talking about mitigation rather than a pure ideal of full privacy. I assume the NSA can access my records with the IRS or my bank anytime they wish, even if they were prevented by law from tapping my iPhone. This has been the case for decades no doubt. At this point in time, beyond that, they can break into an advertising agency database if they wish and find out about all of my click behavior and location information. In the battles I choose to take on, rolling back an NSA iPhone compromise is an interesting idea, but it is less a priority than other battles, such as protecting dissidents in oppressive countries (which is also a relevant contrast to the point I first made, as has been mentioned elsewhere), and, yes, preventing terrorist attacks.

I think anyone is allowed the prerogative to prioritize their battles. I also do not think the world would be a safer or better place without intelligence gathering. If I permit that much, now we're talking about degrees rather than absolutes, and we're arguing about where to draw the line.

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

#188

Post by mirkules »

JunkDNA wrote: post #156
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…

But my issue is that very little in the slides released by Der Spiegel talks about the actual targets where devices were employed. There is the Internet dragnet stuff which is rightly worrisome, but the vast majority of the slides are similar to the one about the iPhone and detail targeted exploits: specific phones, specific servers, specific routers. Targeted spying on real threats requires those capabilities. Unfor…

To me it seems that the underlying issue in these talks isn't that these methods exist or that they can be employed on a large scale. The issue is that these powers are complety secretive and unchecked. I do agree that they could have been more clear on this.

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

#189

Post by netcan »

cle wrote: post #186
netcan wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think the risk assessment should take into account more than just casualties. The risk of terrorism that scares governments is not necessarily the casualties (though that undoubtedly is a factor), but longer-term consequences. For example, repeated terrorist attacks on U.S. soil may deteriorate the confidence of citizens in their government, increase the audacity of terrorists, make the U.S. appear weak, etc. I don…

I don't think we disagree much. But the tally of affected people (not just mortalities) is a scale of sorts, even if it must be weighted. 9/11 was significant also becasue it happened in a dense, crowded city and many were affected. But even considering heavily weighted scales terrorism is less of a threat than violent rape by a stranger (itself far less common but more impactful on the public psyche than rape by a non-stranger).

People will not lose confidence in the government unless their lives are constantly affected, just like other crimes.

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

#190

Post by tonyb »

salient wrote: post #149
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…

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…

"Who really thought they'd go to US service and hardware companies and ask them to implement backdoors"

To this point has there been any evidence that a company has add in a "backdoor" at the request of the NSA?

The media keeps using the term "backdoor" when they talk about covert access but that doesn't mean that some company added a "NSA Access" feature to their product. It is possible (I would even say probable) that the NSA has exploited unknown vulnerabilities rather than used built in backdoors.

Covert access is only effective if it remains covert. If companies are building in these features then a lot more people know about it and it reduces the likely hood of staying covert.

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