Always the past tense for these articles. What, they don't do that anymore?
The CIA used to spy on the world, allies and enemies [, install dictators and foment revolts in third world countries]. It still does, but it used to, too.
You’d think there would be some punitive action for the 2000s intel that Iraq had WMDs. This “intel” got us into a war that cost trillions of dollars and thousands of lives.
Nope, instead the CIA just got more money.
Dedollarisation in the Middle-East and the potential death of the petrodollar was the real reason they invaded Iraq
"Iraq: Baghdad Moves To Euro" (2000) - https://www.rferl.org/a/1095057.html
We now have all the data to understand the events of the past
Not Prescott Bush, who allegedly tried overthrowing the democratically elected U. S. Government, the other Bush senior.
No US president in their right mind will ever do anything to reduce the powers of its intelligence agency.
I mention that because the politicians seem determined to break that trend.
Estimates are about half a million, actually. Most of them Iraqis, considered rather unimportant in US media.
The CIA did something much worse. They never noticed that the Soviet Union was in collapse. Instead they had Team B imagine the Soviets were coming up with borderline magical technologies to spread communism everywhere.
In short, I disagree with you unless you have some reasonable proof to back that assertion.
Funny enough, the countries that spend a lot of effort into building their own stack are the ones designated as enemy, Russia/China for example, did they become immune to that strategy?
Even if you personally believe the CIA is still engaging in these types of behaviors, the news isn't going to claim that without evidence.
You are joking, right? Or maybe your definition for "evidence" includes circular references, because that is what you get when "the news" is functionally captured but the government/uniparty.
> It can't improve the security of firmware directly, but it can certainly improve the isolation of it by auditing and improving IOMMU configuration
But I know of no Linux smartphone that would really satisfy either of those conditions properly.
I'm actually curious here as to what we can & can't prove as to being 'secure'.
So that means all bets are off: it's entirely possible to implement a perfect peer reviewed protocol in a client and/or server full of backdoors that entirely bypasses the protocol deliberately?
No, that's not how cryptography works. Signal clients don't trust the servers, and it's entirely possible to review the client protocol and make sure that malicious server can't learn anything about the communication (except the dreaded metadata - who talks to whom). That's the point of E2E encryption.
The protocol does not trust the server. Android has reproducible builds, iOS doesn't.
Before you worry about super expensive hard to remove hardware bugs, you should worry far more about the software running on that hardware. It is much more likely that theres bugs in the software than the hardware.
Maybe I'm just being paranoid. I pay for Mullvad anyway, if my worst suspicions are true then it will still be good enough to hide my petty torrenting from MPAA lawyers (which is beneath the concern of the CIA/etc anyway.) There's no way I'd trust it if I were in Snowden's shoes though. For anything that might plausibly interest the CIA/NSA/FBI, I would not trust these tools (or others) to keep me private.