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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Including Apple. If it's that easy, how long do we really expect Advanced Data Protection to be free from government backdooring?

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>If it's that easy, how long do we really expect Advanced Data Protection to be free from government backdooring?

Taking down an app is hardly unprecedented. Forcing companies to add backdoors in secret is, so it's a stretch to think that ADP is compromised.

> Forcing companies to add backdoors in secret is

We have precedent: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...

  Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government “prohibited” the company “from sharing any information,”

"secretly sharing notification data" (ie. asking for records kept in the usual course of business[1]) is not the same as "forcing companies to add backdoors in secret"

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/28/1732

Thinking something is "unprecedented" is not an argument against it happening. Apple has surprised us before, I see no reason to expect ADP is any different.

>Apple has surprised us before

It really isn't. The reason I used the specific wording for "records kept in the usual course of business" is that's the legal standard for subpoenable information. It shouldn't be surprising to any legal expert that it was fair game for the government to request. The only thing surprising is that we didn't know it specifically happened before, so it's only as "surprising" as chatgpt logs being subpoenaed. Yes, it's "surprising" for the people using chatgpt as their therapist and think it should have been protected, but ask any lawyer and they'll all agree it's fair game. On the other hand forcing apple to specifically insert a backdoor runs into all sorts of constitution/due process issues.

I think it's safe to assume that there's a Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) at every major US company that deals in communications. That said, there's no reason to think that ICE or local law enforcement get access to the data being collected. iCloud may be completely backdoored either way, but there's a big difference between the NSA and ICE in terms of what they care about going after and what capabilities they want publicly confirmed.

To be fair, most apps are guarding against this now by having the push notifications contain just a wake-up signal, the app then wakes up and retrieves the real content.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

Literal back door, in secret. I doubt things have gotten better since this.

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

The company couldn't say, even if they wanted to.

Forcing companies to add backdoors in secret has been precedented for nearly a decade now.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/09/australia-thr...

> Technical Capability Notices (TCNs): TCNs are orders that require a company to build new capabilities that assist law enforcement agencies in accessing encrypted data. The Attorney-General must approve a TCN by confirming it is reasonable, proportionate, practical, and technically feasible.

They recently started requiring you to set a safety person instead of just giving you a code to write down... Smells

Was it ever?

The British Government believes it to be secure. That’s why they were asking for a back door.

Another way to interpret it is they think it's secure against the British Government, and were asking for the same back door the US has.

It's just that the British Government doesn't have access to the backdoor whereas the American Government does have it. It's in no way secure.

Brits: can we have access to the backdoor?

Apple: sure, but only if you pretend you didn't get access

Brits: jolly good

That only means that the UK government doesn’t have access to the backdoor.

according to the snowden documents it is quite obvious that if the US government had a backdoor then the UK government would have one through five eyes

It’s possible that the back door already exists, and they already have it. So if they had conducted unlawful surveillance using these methods, then they may have to come up with some plausible explanation as to how they got that information legally. You could imagine a scenario where there is no plausible explanation for how the information could have been legally obtained. If they codify the use of the back door into law, then there is no need for all this theater.

One of my favorite conspiracy theories is that this is what the CIA Stargate program was. You don’t leak the existence of informants or satellites because you just got the information from “a psychic“.

Exactly they built one for the Chinese government. It's not if they have a back door it's who gets to use it

While they did did get a backdoor they did get Apple to withdraw the product from the UK so it no longer impedes mass suveillance.

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