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Comment by Jerry2 | Hacker News Reader

>Does this mean they are capable of intercepting iMessage?

You know what the best way is to see who cooperates with law enforcement and to what level? Court documents!

I've been trawling court documents for the past few months (I'm writing a blog article on this) and I'm yet to find iMessage being used in court (unless the access to the conversation was given by one of the parties). iMessage really does seem secure from legal system point of view.

For a comparison, I've found dozens of court documents from Google, Facebook, Microsoft handing over chat logs from Hangouts, Whatsapp/FBMessenger, Skype.

Anyway, if you want to see the level of cooperation and want to double-check privacy policies, actual court documents are the best way.

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“Parallel construction is a law enforcement process of building a parallel - or separate - evidentiary basis for a criminal investigation in order to conceal how the investigation actually began.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction

Police use parallel construction when they don't want to reveal their methods. I seriously doubt law enforcement would engage in parallel construction if it had access to iMessage but Apple asked it to.

> I seriously doubt law enforcement would engage in parallel construction if it had access to iMessage but Apple asked it to.

Why? They've been using parallel construction to avoid violating NDAs and giving up their capabilities for years. http://www.wired.com/2014/03/harris-stingray-nda/

That's exactly the case I was thinking about with my comment

1) Police don't care that APPLE doesn't want to reveal its methods, and 2) Unlike the Stingray, it wouldn't be illegal for them to use iMessage evidence in court if Apple provided it to them (especially with the use of a warrant!)

I think it's more about the police not wanting the public to know that iMessage is owned; having trusted-but-broken communication services is a serious advantage for them.

I'm also looking forward to your post. Whatsapp is supposed to be end-to-end encrypted with messages only stored on the phone, at least it has reportedly been like that since end of 2014. It would be extremely interesting and a big scandal if you found documents with Whatsapp messages in them dating from 2015.

Only from android to android. Other platforms don't have it implemented yet.

Sounds very interesting! I will be waiting for the blog post :)

May I have a link to your blog?

Secret courts.

Ok... So, why would Apple receive the benefit of only exposing iMessage data in secret courts when Google, Facebook, and Microsoft all have to do it in open court documents?

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