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Comment by zz1 | Hacker News Reader

Actively perusing their XKeyscore record wouldn't it be to "taks" them?

And using TAO?

Imagine how much information they could get on these engineers, who, as foreign nationals, are free game to warrantless surveillance. Facebook photos, emails, Android phone location history, MasterCard records. It would be easy to find something incriminating such as "You were at a hotel room for 4 hours in the middle of the day, how about you help us or we'll tell your wife?" or "You've got $25,000 in credit card debt and we can make that disappear if you change a few config files."

This isn't crazy movie stuff, this is exactly how people are recruited.

Why just "Android phone location history"? Every phone location history. And pictures from that phone, and audio recordings too.

Because android is a google run product/service and it is possible that our government could force google's hand into using it's presumed ability to compromise the security of an Android device via some custom patched system update or something that normally only google would have control over.

Because our government may not have that same level of access/power over whatever the Chinese version of Android is.

how can the government not do the same to Apple's iOS or blackberry or any other?

Being Canadian, Blackberry isn't on the same level. But yes, clearly iOS is transparent to the NSA.

It's not a flamewar starter, it's using specific examples for a directed point (hence MasterCard and not credit card, Facebook photos rather than photos from any other cloud provider etc...)

Correct, I was just using a narrative technique, not implying any brands are more susceptible than others.

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