Comment by TaylorAlexander
2 years ago
Yeah people keep talking about reverse engineering but it’s just as real a possibility that this was simply engineered to be there. Apple and the government made a big public show about the San Bernardino iPhone situation[1] but that could have easily been a cover to convince people the government can’t get in to iPhones - because eventually the government dropped the court case, got in anyway, and the whole thing was quickly forgotten.
We can imagine that the government either has ideological capture of apple - that the management of apple agree to install hard to exploit vulnerabilities tailored for US government use - or legal capture through FISA rulings.
I’d be curious if anyone can summarize the latest understanding of FISA court actions in this realm.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/28/apple-fbi...
"the government" isn't really a single entity. domestic LE and foreign intelligence have different laws and processes enforced by the constitution (thankfully). Its certainly reasonable that domestic LE really can't force Apple to handover US citizens data, while foreign intelligence services can effect supply chain attacks, back-dooring and other methods not permitted for US citizens..
> that could have easily been a cover
The problem with conspiracies is everyone involved knows it’s a secret. If you’re the CIA, it’s much less risky to compromise a chip design engineer than have everyone from the CEO down at Apple in on the plant.
Maybe but then again what’s another secret when at a high level these firms are already very secretive.
It’s not apple but I think a lot about how Eric Schmidt of google was directly meeting with US military officials and talking about how important US defense was.
You can end up with a situation where the chip designer and some higher up both know what is happening and the higher up is there as a check to provide cover in case the chip designer is caught up in suspicion. (“No we asked for this for the manufacturing team.” Kind of thing.)
Of course this is all conjecture with no evidence and I understand why we don’t want to spend much energy on discussions we can’t confirm, but at the same time it is frustrating when the default assumption is that apple had no knowledge about this. The truth is that we don’t know and likely will never know.
There are different levels of secret. I would never leak a normal company secret. But a national security secret is a different story.
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There are different levels of secret. I would never leak a normal company secret. But a national security secret is a different story.