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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

… if you back up your device to iCloud. (Of course, almost everyone does.)

Apple was apparently going to close this loophole, but decided not to. They probably received negative feedback from the three letter acronym agencies.

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Or, as discussed there, if the person you're talking to backs up iMessage to iCloud. Both parties need to be willing to forego that convenience, and AFAIK, it can not be done on a per-message basis.

There are limitations there though. E.g. if a broad warrant to reconstruct all your messages were issued, Apple would refuse to honor it, if only due to technical infeasibility. It's one thing to execute a warrant for "data of suspect A" and another thing to execute a warrant for "access the iCloud backups of every single person who has it enabled, decrypt their backed up messages, and return any message that was received from or sent to suspect A".

On the other hand the government could certainly find a specific individual they know you've messaged with, and execute a warrant specifically for their conversations with you.

I believe they have metadata indicating who a person has sent messages to, so they wouldn't need to go through all iCloud backups but indeed a warrant for data for "suspect A" does not include data for all people "suspect A" communicated with.

Apple can do anything they want. They can push a silent update to specific iPhones which uploads the data in whichever format they prefer.

Even disabled, if the other party has them enabled Apple still have access to that content.

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