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Comment by benevol | Hacker News Reader

That's really funny, because a couple of years ago, Snowden demonstrated very clearly that American tech companies are all infested by NSA mass surveillance tools or dominated by mass surveillance activities, constantly profiling pretty much all citizens.

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In that sense, it might actually be "safer" for an individual American to use a Chinese phone. It may be backdoored, but at least the PLA isn't going to share your vacation pics with the DEA, but the NSA might.

Exactly why I use Russian services like Yandex mail. Russia can read it all they want but they'll never give it to the U.S.

That’s naive. When great powers have common goals, they cooperate just fine:

https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/boston-bombing-anniversary...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-usa-intelligence/u...

If you're an American and you use services outside of the US, you are in fact enabling - entirely legally - the NSA to do dramatically more aggressive things to target your information / data / email.

But... they were already doing it.. And no signs of stopping..

As far as I’m aware he didn’t demonstrate that (say) Apple was infested by NSA mass surveillance tools. And those options that could be used to profile users can be switched off. What am I missing?

> What am I missing?

Quite a lot, I'm afraid. Please do read the Snowden leaks, it's extremely important historical data. For starters, all major US tech companies are PRISM partners.

Based on said leaks and a fact sheet from DNI Clapper himself, PRISM is simply an efficient warrant processing system based upon legal authority, nothing more. While troubling and worthy of debate, particularly regarding its 702 legal authority and targeting of Americans, it does not involve malware, surreptitious access to any of the involved tech companies, or an infestation of NSA tooling. The author of the PRISM slides was not careful to make this clear, which meant without context, everyone seemed to assume PRISM was a Room 641A situation. It's become clear that to be a 'partner' in PRISM simply means that the entity is capable of responding to warrants using the system, and citing PRISM as an example of compromise in the same vein as this Huawei announcement is disingenuous at best. Some companies built systems on their side to help (like Facebook), while Google delivered their PRISM data via SSH, for example; Twitter, interestingly, did not play ball.

Having responded to warrants before, I can tell you that it's a drawn out, paperwork-intensive process. Something like PRISM is actually net good for both parties, since governmental relationships are extremely human intensive on both sides at the scale of the large tech players. I can actually understand and sympathize with the USG designing a system to make it more efficient, though the leaks tell us it was flagrantly misused (primarily via NSLs, back door searches, and so on).

What do you think PRISM actually accomplished, on a budget of ~$200,000 USD/year?

Hint: It wasn't a firehose of compromised user data gathered by 'mass suriveliance tools'. It's budget is missing a few zeroes for that.

It was, however, a firehose for serving legal documents.

Rex, the Qualcomm baseband os, is a binary blob that’s really annoying to reverse engineer and it shares a bus with the top-level os.

I guess that's a +1 for why new iPhones are changing over to Intel LTE chips

Isn't this still a problem with the new Intel chips? Is the baseband processor actually separate?

No, that's not in fact how basebands work; the baseband is connected to the AP via HSIC, which is an internal USB bus. "Shares a bus with the top-level OS", by the way, is a sequence of words that doesn't really make sense.

I checked and you're right! I misunderstood a series of articles from 5 years ago on this subject. Please excuse my confusion :(.

Edit: Also Rex is the kernel and RtOS is the OS.

http://www.osnews.com/story/27416/The_second_operating_syste...

What about talk of being able to turn on any phone microphone etc

What about talk of unicorns?

https://leaksource.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/nsa-ant-dropo...

Also:

https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/02/apple-vpn-restrictions-c...

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2017/08/02/apple_and...

http://fortune.com/2017/08/01/apple-ceo-cook-china-vpn-apps/

> “We would obviously rather not remove the apps, but like we do in other countries, we follow the law wherever we do business,” Cook said on a call with analysts to discuss quarterly financial results.

If Apple wants to remain competitive globally from a market share perspective, they need to compete in China (http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/all/china). If the only way to do that is remove apps from the app store, they'll do it.

In fact, the app store is probably the most noticeable change. There could be others that haven't been widely publicized.

Came here to say this. Do these 3-letter "agencies" still have any credibility left since they're now known to have repeatedly cheated "their people" (citizens, uhum tax payers, that to some extend keep these agencies in existence)?

Maybe Huawei devices are harder for them to "bug", and that's why they say this. I have no reason to believe they are not lying, after all the lies and cover ups that have been exposed.

It's a double-whammy: Not only do the Chinese get all that precioussss data, also the Americans don't! Unless, maybe, they manage to buy or trade for it. Facing that kind of loss, I would be concerned, too!

Makes sense - They're just worried about losing marketshare.

I guess I'd rather be spied on by the NSA than foreign states, if that was a choice and I couldn't choose "none of the above."

And all while profiting from their users (and non-users) behind their back.

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