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Comment by freehorse | Hacker News Reader

This is a very verbose article that does not really engage with the actual question in the title. I still do not understand why apple (and in general big tech it seems?) reroute users to external forensic services instead of doing the forensics themselves. This only thing the article says about it is "they do not want/it is better this way".

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Apple does extensive forensics itself, and spends more on platform and hardware security than all but perhaps? two other companies in the world. By referring people to nonprofit labs, Apple is encouraging information about spyware systems --- which target multiple platforms --- to be widely disseminated, and allows the OSINT process, which Apple has no comparative advantage in running, to work out targeting and sourcing.

The norm in high-end platform security practices at companies is to keep cards as close to the vest as possible, revealing information largely in the form of feature-style announcements of security improvements. The norm Apple is setting here is better.

This is why I read more comments than articles.

Sorry, I'm dumb. The value here is engaging this NGO to attempt to figure out who is being targeted and why; go public with that; and that's better not coming from Apple?

The value here is that the NGO would then have information about hacking attempts against victims on Android, iOS, Windows, ChromeOS, and macOS, and could put that combined information to more use than if it were limited to just iOS and macOS users.

It said that AccessNow is really good at intake, and it wouldn’t be good for Apple to be in the business of inspecting so much personal data.

My guess is that if Apple did this themselves, it would be firewalled from most of Apple, so like AccessNow, so hopefully they help fund AccessNow.

The engineering requirements to build a branch of a company with the security needs of specialized SOC would be crazy endeavor and to the point that whatever comes of it would probably look as foreign to the main company's function than what currently exists. Having a separate non-profit agency handle these cases would not only allow for the agency's incentives to align, but also the overall security design approach to its facilities and internal networks. It's a win-win for both private and public interest imo.

With regards to US politics, there's campaign funding considerations as to how corporations assist candidates https://defendcampaigns.org/donors

If you are targeted, presumably, they will be attacking you from every angle they can. If you have other tech besides Apple's, then that's just another attack vector. If Apple did this, they'd be Apple focused leaving many vulns. By this group being not Apple specific, they can be up on all the ways like IoT devices, Android, etc.

Based on that, it seems smart for each of the tech players to support the 3rd party solutions

Consider the liabilities, expectations, and political issues if Apple was doing such support work in-house. For the last - Apple has large, profitable operations in a fair number of the countries which might be targeting certain dissidents and journalists. Mr. Cook does not want any "you are aiding our worst enemies..." pushback when he is negotiating with the governments of those places.

It's possible that the vendor has targeted the user as the result of a court order. (Not necessarily by installing a software implant on the device itself, but I suspect often these things are not necessarily as transparent as they should be even if done server-side.) This means there is potential of a conflict of interest here, and deferring to a third party solves that.

it's to maintain the legality of the arms-length ability to do jailbreaky like thinks when a 3 letter agency asks.

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