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>The story I hear is that Cellebrite hires ex-Apple engineers and moves them to countries where Apple can't prosecute them under the DMCA or its equivalents. C

• 908087 9y ago
  1984: CIA smuggles cocaine into the US 2018: FBI smuggles Apple engineers out of the US
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• guelo 9y ago
  So Israel is like a high tech Guantanamo where our government goes when those pesky laws get in the way.
  • Bitcoin_McPonzi 9y ago
    Cellebrite is a Japanese company, a subsidiary of Japan Sun Corporation.
    • programmarchy 9y ago
      None of the executive team is Japanese (the CEO is Israeli), and most of the positions they are hiring for are located in Israel...
      • Bitcoin_McPonzi 9y ago
        Ok then. I guess Apple's a Chinese company or an Irish Company or a Singaporean company because they have subsidiaries--each with a local CEO--in each of those countries: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/05/21/business/apples-international-structure.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/05/21/business/apple...
        • khedoros1 9y ago
          Cellebrite itself is an Israeli company, despite being a subsidiary of a Japanese one. Apple is an American company, but they have foreign subsidiaries like Shazam Entertainment, which is a British company. If Apple Singapore is a full subsidiary, then sure, that's a Singaporean company, but Apple Inc wouldn't be.
      • walrus01 9y ago
        Relative to the size of its population, Israel has a highly developed electronics engineering related industry. Part of it related to their state support of domestic defense contractors like IAI and their avionics/radar/C4I equipment. Aside from Cellbrite, companies like Ceragon, Alvarion, Radwin, ECI, Telrad, Elbit. Second hand knowledge: Within international organizations that have worked extensively in the Israel-Lebanon border area it is well known that Israel has pwned most of the Lebanese telecoms and ISPs quite thoroughly. To the extent that Hezbollah started laying its own fiber optic cables. https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=hezbollah+fiber+optic+cables&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=hez...
        • forapurpose 9y ago
          > Relative to the size of its population, Israel has a highly developed electronics engineering related industry. Part of it related to their state support of domestic defense contractors ... It's not due only to Israeli resources. Much of Israel's defense budget comes from the U.S., plus there is much more support, including technology transfer, that isn't provided in cash.
          • dogma1138 9y ago
            About 10% of the defense budget or 1% of GDP is US military aid that can be spent only on US military hardware.
            • QGmLe 9y ago
              Err, Facts can't be made up.
              • dogma1138 9y ago
                ? Israel defense budget is about 20 billion these days the military aid to Israel is about 2.5 billion without special congressional allowances. Israel’s GDP is ~320 or so billion. And if you wondering about the reason for discrepancies from the article above it's because that one is from 2012 the budget is larger and the US dollar devaluation against the Israeli Shekel by 15% since then, in fact fluctuations of the US Foreign Military Financing (FMF) as portion of the Israeli Defense budget are often due to currency exchange as much of the Israeli budget allocated in local currency is spent locally while the FMF is spent over in the US in dollars. It's also important to note that the Israeli allocation of the budget does not include FMF or any other aid so when Israel allocates say 18 billion USD equivalent in local currency in the budget that is the amount to which the government will fund the defense ministry, beyond that the defense ministry has it's own internal budget which is funded via the Israeli government budget, FMF as well as any additional revenue streams of defense ministry such as rent, dividends from it's share of now privatized national defense contractors like IWI (form Israeli Military Industries) and IAI etc.
  • walrus01 9y ago
    Within ten seconds of searching my memory I can think of at least three Israeli companies that are known for researching/hoarding secret zero days and making use of them for large sums of money. Cellebrite, NSO, and Elbit. https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2016/08/25/everything-we-know-about-nso-group-the-professional-spies-who-hacked-iphones-with-a-single-text/#3e78a8653997 https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2016/08/25/every... Elbit is a big defense contractor and basically wants to simultaneously be a competitor of General Dynamics and Palantir.
  • dogma1138 9y ago
    The DMCA is applicable in Israel via the bilateral trade agreement with the US.
    • DaiPlusPlus 9y ago
      The DMCA is not concerned with the security of Apple’s devices or “Secure Enclave” as Apple never said they existed for the sake of protecting copyright - that’s iTMS’s DRM which is entirely unrelated.
      • dogma1138 9y ago
        I didn’t said it was applicable in this case however US copyright laws are enforced over most of the world in one way or another via the trade agreements basically any deal that the US signs has a clause about respecting US copyright and a mechanism through which to seek grievances.
  • uptown 9y ago
    Exactly: https://youtu.be/oYNXVgYhPOc https://youtu.be/oYNXVgYhPOc Listen carefully to the choice and emphasis on words.
  • qrbLPHiKpiux 9y ago
    James Mickens said, “YOU’RE STILL GONNA BE MOSSAD’ED UPON”
    • zbentley 9y ago
      https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf
  • rayiner 9y ago
    No? The law doesn’t prevent the government from searching your property in a wide range of circumstances: e.g. with a warrant, pursuant to a valid arrest, etc. That’s the whole idea of warrants: so there is a controlled way to search private property. The government goes to Israel to defeat technological roadblocks to doing what it’s allowed to do under the law. This technology isn’t being used to break into phones at surprise checkpoints, it’s being used to search phones of people who have been arrested.
    • wu-ikkyu 9y ago
      How do you know what it's being used for?
      • rayiner 9y ago
        The iPhone hacks by their nature require having custody of the physical cell phone for an extended period of time. As far as I know, the government isn’t stealing peoples iPhones to search them.
        • veidr 9y ago
          > As far as I know, the government isn’t stealing peoples iPhones to search them. Well, OK, now you know: The US government seizes phones and laptops, "without showing reasonable suspicion of a crime or getting a judge’s approval", on a regular basis, and has done so for a number of years. https://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/laptop-seizure-border-096516 https://www.politico.com/story/2013/09/laptop-seizure-border... https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/16/canadian_privacy_commissioner_to_investigate_border_phone_seizures/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/16/canadian_privacy_co... https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/technology/aclu-border-patrol-lawsuit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/technology/aclu-border-pa... http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25458533 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25458533 (et fuckin' cetera...)
          • rayiner 9y ago
            The government is permitted to search anything that crosses the U.S. border. It's a power inherent to nations, which are entities defined by their borders. The founding generation provided for such searches and seizures in the very first session of Congress. You might not like it, but border searches aren't illegal, and the government doesn't need to go to Israel to do them.
• justonepost 9y ago
  Sounds like some bizarre William Gibson novel, but then most things do nowadays.
• lawnchair_larry 9y ago
  It’s absolutely untrue that ex-Apple employees are helping them break in. Apple employees do not have an advantage in creating this type of thing.
  • IshKebab 9y ago
    Sure they do, they're familiar with the design. Unless it is completely open source or has been totally reverse engineer (which I doubt) then that is an advantage.
    • lawnchair_larry 9y ago
      It’s not an advantage, in practice. Writing exploits against iOS is a very scarce skill, and the people who can do this might be slightly more productive if aided by the source, but the reverse isn’t true. Having the source doesn’t teach you anything about finding and exploiting these bugs. It might seem logical to those unfamiliar with how these hacks work, but consider that such hacks do not depend on the secrecy of the design. Also consider that Apple hires regular software and hardware engineers, who do their best to design a system, and Apple then hires hackers (both internally, as well as external consultants) to find weaknesses in their designs. These weaknesses are then fixed before the product ships, meaning even those who were paid to break it no longer know how. This alone should tell you that people who know the system intimately are not the ones who understand how to break it. Put another way, if I need to make this product, and there are two candidates I can hire, one person who wrote the software and one who knows nothing about the software but is demonstrably skilled at finding exploits in similar systems, I’ll take the latter in a heartbeat.
  • squarefoot 9y ago
    I don't know if that's true, but if I had the same power as a government agency, which would allow way higher salaries than Apple's or any other hi tech corporation, that's the first thing I'd attempt to do: find ex/unhappy/disgruntled engineers and offer them 5x pay plus a luxury home and lab in some tropical island. Also don't forget the hardware. Like with most/all other phone vendors, iPhone chips aren't made in the US; most of the design maybe is, but the chips themselves are not, and finding a Chinese hardware engineer happy to help would be even easier because all he should implement is a covert channel to tunnel sensitive data (passwords?) to a known place. If you have access to the hardware that should be trivial to do: just implement a small undocumented flash memory space anywhere, then when the user taps a password an also undocumented firmware routine (that's hundreds of bytes, very easy to conceal) would add the password in that small memory that can be read only in certain conditions (say connecting power+tapping a bossa rhythm while with the phone screen is facing down+disconnecting power - that seems crazy but you get the idea: every sensor is a switch and any switch can be used to enter a code). A few spare kilobytes of memory here and there would allow this and other spying mechanisms, so I would't be surprised at all if some big agency would attack the hardware/firmware rather than the software.