miopa

Yes, we can't rule that. But we could clearly see that the Diaspora codebase screamed incompetence. Apple, on the other hand, has some very high quality products and decades of experience.

Yes, it is quite possible that this is a simple bug. The other option is also quite possible :)

You should make a difference between plausible conspiracy theory and bullshit conspiracy theory. Conspiracies happen quite often, having no evidence just makes them higher quality.

1. It is certain that NSA has some very smart people playing with the sources of the Apple crypto-modules.

2. If you're a NSA boss, and some of your experts told you that you can break SSL in Apple products with adding one line that could be almost certainly attributed to inconspicuous human error, would you try to make a deal with Apple?

3. If you're an Apple boss, and NSA offers you cache (or other benefits, like competitor intelligence) for adding plausibly deniable bug in your code, would you turn it down?

There is no direct evidence for this case, sure. There is however ample evidence in the Snowden docs that this scenario happens too often for this to be called bullshit conspiracy theory.

It's about time then that few qualified cryptographers make an audit. Kickstarter project maybe.

I'll be the devil's advocate.

Insightful encryption app developer would hide his identity in order not to be bullied into putting backdoors.