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Comment by Traubenfuchs | Hacker News Reader

You must accept that 3 letter agencies have full root access to any Tim Apple or Google device and will use it if they already went far enough to do an FBI raid on a reporter.

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I don’t have to accept any assertion in the absence of evidence directly supporting it.

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

I don't think that PRISM involved root access to any devices and this link does not claim that it did.

I was expecting this link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...

still doesn’t really prove much

It actually proves that they _don't_ (or didn't) have that kind of access because they first publicly asked for the access and then rescinded that request when they, not officially but widely accepted, acquired access through some kind of hack/bug/exploit given to them by, probably, the IDF or an Israeli private company.

Counterpoint - if they have full root access to any phone, why did they need to do the raid?

To intimidate other reporters

So they don't burn their 0day

The same reason federal agents wear GoPros. Security theater, and to send the message that journalists should not pursue stories like this that put the federal government in a less-than-favorable light.

This isn't hyperbole. They literally went to the king with gold in hands. There's no WAY they didn't open up their platforms to him.

Appeasing a moron with a shiny, valuable object is low effort. Covering up and adding a backdoor to Apple's widely used iOS is not in the same ballpark.

They don't need a backdoor. They can push whatever update to the OS they want. They have a front door.

> They literally went to the king with gold in hands.

Exactly what I was thinking about when I was writing my comment.

I can understand that big corpos are not our friends and are purely money driven, but publicly bribing the president with gold is on a level no one ever expected. Right in line with the Fifa peace price.

IDK, the FIFA world peace prize was completely unsurprising to me. It’s a massively corrupt institution and has been for decades. It’s out of the norm in a US context, for sure, but that kind of thing is penny ante for an organization whose Wikipedia article has multiple subsections on corruption

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIFA?wprov=sfti1#Corruption

And don't forget the $400 million airplane that is probably filled with listening devices that will feed info to all of our enemies.

What is especially insane is people STILL praise Apple for championing "privacy" - after Snowden, after China, after Trump ... the well-engineered sunk-cost fallacy is just too potent to resist, I guess.

Magical end to end protection in Meta and Apple (chat) software to protect you from… whom exactly?

MAYBE non US governments? They probably have deals with all the big governments allowing them to spy on their own people at least.

"End to end" protection/encryption has lost all functional meaning when the masses accepted corporations as the arbiters of "ends". No one can even respond to the argument based on technical merit, because all that remains is hollow marketing bullshit.

I'm afraid Snowden was so long time ago, that the most vocal people don't even seemingly know about it, so yet again, we're in a period of time where assuming Apple/Google has full access to anything you do on your device, is seen as conspiracy theories. People seem to forget the past so damn quick, it's a wonder we humans manage to accomplish anything at all at this point.

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