Didn’t Edward reveal Apple provides direct access to the NSA for mass surveillance?
> allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats
> The program facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US.
> It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online.
That seemed to be puffery about a database used to store subpoena requests. You have "direct access" to a service if it has a webpage you can submit subpoenas to.
Didn’t Apple famously refuse the FBI’s request to unlock the San Bernardino’s attacker’s iPhone. FBI ended up hiring an Australian company which used a Mozilla bug that allows unlimited password guesses without the phone wiping.
If the NSA had that info, why go through the trouble?
As I recall (because I was paying very close attention at the time), the FBI dropped the case on the morning before the first court session. They'd either cracked it last minute or had the info earlier and hoped to set a precedent but veered at the last minute because their case was weak enough not to take a chance. I was extremely angry at the FBI at the time and ranting to anyone who would listen about the privacy implications, so I remember this well.
> If the NSA had that info, why go through the trouble?
To defend the optics of a backdoor that they actively rely on?
If Apple and the NSA are in kahoots, it's not hard to imagine them anticipating this kind of event and leveraging it for plausible deniability. I'm not saying this is necessarily what happened, but we'd need more evidence than just the first-party admission of two parties that stand to gain from privacy theater.
> allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats
> The program facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the US, or those Americans whose communications include people outside the US.
> It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants...