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Nothing in this article is surprising. I mean, honestly, if you don't think the CIA is actively trying to gain access to your devices, WTF do you think they do

Nothing in this article is surprising. I mean, honestly, if you don't think the CIA is actively trying to gain access to your devices, WTF do you think they do all day? I'd be more concerned if the intelligence agencies of the world WEREN'T doing this. It's their purpose. It's what we pay them for with our taxes. Of course we should also always root for tech companies to stay one step ahead. But infosec is an arms race, and I sure hope my own country's intelligence agencies (CSIS and the CSE in Canada) are doing their best to stay ahead of, say, North Korea or Russia. (Please note: I'm not saying violating our privacy is OK, any more than I'm saying it's cool to launch nuclear weapons. But if anyone's going to have the ability to hack my phone or launch a nuke, I want it to be the people on my own team. This seems like basic self-interest and survival strategy.)

whatshisface 8y ago
>WTF do you think they do all day? One would hope that they were trying to gain access to someone else's devices, as opposed to turning the guns towards their own citizens and economy. If a soldier showed up at my door and pointed their gun at me, my reaction wouldn't be "of course you're doing that, your job is to point guns."
- penagwin 8y ago
  Somethings like spying on American phone calls (or just their "metadata") I agree with. But somethings like breaking encryption, exploiting iPhones, etc. while they may be used against Americans can also be used against others. Essentially there's an arms race, and we use our tax money to sponsor our government in this race, with the hopes that they'll side with us. There really isn't another option unless you want to give a private entity this power, or not participate in the race (which I don't advise).
  - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
    > Somethings like spying on American phone calls (or just their "metadata") I agree with. > But somethings like breaking encryption, exploiting iPhones, etc. while they may be used against Americans can also be used against others. Both of these can have a chilling effect on free speech, therefore I'm against the CIA doing this to citizens. The potential threat against citizens nowhere near outweighs the need to uphold our constitution.
    - mywittyname 8y ago
      I think we all agree that they shouldn't do this to American citizens. The problem is we can't isolate their capabilities to just foreign persons.
      - saagarjha 8y ago
        We could make doing this illegal and enforce it…
        village-idiot 8y ago
        Unfortunately, other nation states might not care about US laws. Which returns to the above statement that it’s better for the CIA and Apple to be in a security arms war than it is for Apple and the FSB, at least from the perspective of an American.
      - TremendousJudge 8y ago
        As a "foreign person", I'd rather like for no organization to come and record everything I do just because I wasn't born in a specific place. Ironically though, the average American citizen is probably under more CIA surveillance than the average foreign person such as myself.
        JustSomeNobody 8y ago
        I'd rather we didn't either. If we trust you enough to let you visit, work, whatever, then we should treat you respectfully.
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    > Somethings like spying on American phone calls (or just their "metadata") I agree with. Why keep pretending the CIA is a foreign intelligence service?
    - richardwhiuk 8y ago
      For some of us, it is.
- yorwba 8y ago
  > One would hope that they were trying to gain access to someone else's devices, as opposed to turning the guns towards their own citizens and economy. Apple devices are sold all over the world, so there's no way of gaining access to the enemy's devices without that method also being applicable to everyone else. Actually using them on everyone else is a different matter.
  - cdf2theworld 8y ago
    "the enemy's devices" Which enemy?
    - Despegar 8y ago
      Strategic rivals: Russia and China Regional rivals: North Korea and Iran Authoritarian partners/allies: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, a bunch of other Middle Eastern countries A bunch of countries flirting with authoritarianism: Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Israel
      - Mirioron 8y ago
        Seriously? This kind of stuff is exactly why countries are opposed to free trade and globalism. You listed two countries in the EU there, for example.
        apexalpha 8y ago
        Yeah if Poland and Hungary are 'flirting with authoritarianism' then the US with it's current leader is too. If that sounds dumb to you, you should rethink the statement about Poland and Hungary.
    - novaleaf 8y ago
      I don't think it's objectionable that any countries Intelligence Service tries to identify threats before it's too late.
    - java-man 8y ago
- everdrive 8y ago
  No one outside of America has ever bought an Apple device, obviously.
  - soraminazuki 8y ago
    People outside of America also have human rights.
    - everdrive 8y ago
      I never said it was moral or ok, just that it doesn't suggest that the purpose is spy on Americans.
      - ilrwbwrkhv 8y ago
        oh trust me... everything is tested at home first...
        ficklepickle 8y ago
        Or on Canadians. Our government has historically been very willing to let the USA experiment on unwitting civilians.
    - rswail 8y ago
      Human rights have never excluded foreign intelligence services from engaging in espionage.
- dictum 8y ago
  I'm yet to see a clear explanation for citizens not being as much of a risk as, say, a random foreigner located far away from your country. If anything, a citizen is more capable of carrying out a terrorist attack, or just doing any action some foreign power wants to perform in that country. The exception for domestic citizens seems to be just a concession for the masses and their representatives, not a pragmatic choice. Edit: a pragmatic reasoning could be compartmentalization — keeping citizens under the watch of a separate entity (e.g. FBI) but it doesn't explain why domestic mass surveillance should be ruled out.
  - wefarrell 8y ago
    Domestic threats are outside of the CIA's scope.
  - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
    The constitution and amendments to it give us certain rights. It really doesn't matter if citizens are a much larger risk or not.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - nickelcitymario 8y ago
    > "...it doesn't explain why domestic mass surveillance should be ruled out." It's a matter of who we have a responsibility towards. The government we elect in our own country is responsible to us, and as a people we widely do not want our government spying on us. (This is true in most if not all countries.) But that same government is NOT responsible to the citizens of other nations. The CIA has no responsibility towards Canadians (like myself) or anyone else who isn't American. I'm not arguing that this is ethically right. I'm just saying it's pragmatic. If you're not a citizen of my country, my country has no legal obligations to you outside of international law. And no country, to my knowledge, has ever tried to introduce the right to privacy into international law. Every country hates spies within its own borders, but seeks to have them inside of everyone else's.
  - marnett 8y ago
- baddox 8y ago
  I think it's pretty fair (although naive, obviously) to expect soldiers and intelligence agencies alike to, you know, actually just keep us safe.
- JohnWilcox 8y ago
  In a world where the citizenship and nationhood has been intentionally shattered to usher in a new globalist aristocratic feudal type system, where foreign threats are intentionally injected and infested and imposed upon “citizens”, you are going to see ever increasing rationalization and justification and threat events to push ever more authoritarianism to turn on their own “citizens”, more accurately described as human capital, that the elite need to shuffle around until they’re no longer needed when AI and automation and robotics takes over.
- DaggerDagger 8y ago
  Let's be real. It wouldn't be that surprising given how the world actually works. Assuming you aren't an oligarch.
- rswail 8y ago
  Well, by law, the CIA aren't allowed to spy on US citizens, that's the FBI's job. However, there's nothing stopping them sharing capabilities with the Five Eyes and asking one of them to spy on a US citizen...
ProAm 8y ago
> WTF do you think they do all day? Look for WMD's in middle eastern countries to justify policy?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- lostlogin 8y ago
  Well, all middle eastern countries bar one.
  - darkpuma 8y ago
    The last US president to take that matter seriously was JFK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_Israel#US_pressure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_Israel#US_...
kurthr 8y ago
The CIA is spying on your phone so that the Russians and Chinese don't have to?? Really, you think CIA OpSec is that good... as in so hard to crack that it's worth spending $100 billions (in Rubles and Yuan) to do it some other way? Maybe some political doofus thinks that, but technically savvy folks should know better. Nope, if you create a weapon you better be prepared for your enemy to use it against you.
- Not_a_pizza 8y ago
  Really you need to think about world governments less like permanent adversaries and more like parents that get annoyed with each other from time to time.
- nickelcitymario 8y ago
  Not that I think anything I say will convince you to my thinking, but I didn't say "the CIA is spying on your phone so that the Russians and Chinese don't have to". I'm not sure how you got that from what I wrote. In an ideal world, no one can hack my phone. This is why I support Apple and Google and Microsoft and all the others doing their very best to keep my devices as secure as possible. In the worst-possible world, enemy nations have hacked my phone. Because if they've hacked my phone, they've also hacked those of my politicians and military. In the real world, the only way for my country to be able to defend against enemies is to be as-good-as or better than those enemies at hacking my phone. That's why I support it. Because I have a sneaking suspicion that truly awful people are working hard to hack every device out there, and the best infosec defense is a good infosec offense. I don't disagree with you that "if you create a weapon you better be prepared for your enemy to use it against you". But a worse scenario than that is for my enemy to beat me to the punch and I'm standing here with sticks and stones. The thing about an arms race is that once it starts, it's pretty much impossible to get out of. I didn't start the infosec arms race. It would be nice if the race didn't exist at all. But it does. Only a "political doofus" would prefer to pretend otherwise.
  - kurthr 8y ago
    If I thought CIA/NSA hacking was truly white-hat to increase the security of Apple devices, then I would agree. However, 3DES seems to be one of the last times that actual info-sec as opposed to spying (on local citizens) with questionable legal standing (in the US) was the purpose. Sadly, the omniscient and incorruptable rep of the NSA/CIA and associated TLA have been significantly tarnished by Snowden and the current external political interference. This is a crisis, because there are likely people in powerful positions of those orgamizations who do not have their countries interests at heart. Whatever ideology (white nationalist or communist) or external subversion they are not being adequately policed in the current situation. I would prefer they spend their efforts spying externally rather than internally and keeping everyone's private information safe. For example focus on vulns in Huawei 5G base stations or foreign anti-virus installations instead. I think that's safer for us tax payers. Heck, use the social credit system for your own ends, as they did with Tindr.
0xdeadbeefbabe 8y ago
Well yes, and I also hope we don't know what they do all day. Another point worth making is that the government can't really be on your team, as they tend to hog the ball/puck.
- nickelcitymario 8y ago
  > "the government can't really be on your team" That's kind of the root problem of democracy, isn't it? If a government truly is "of the people, by the people, for the people", then they are by definition on their people's team, and their people should trust them. But, if they can't in fact be on your team, and if you can't trust them, then you can't really have a democracy, can you? You end up with something else, something that looks like democracy but really isn't.
leggomylibro 8y ago
Aren't domestic investigations the FBI's job, though? Why does the CIA have jurisdiction to steal the intellectual property of an American company?
- java-man 8y ago
  Why do they hack computers of congressional staffers? Why do they explicitly violate the law (re: Iran/Contras)? Why...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- Kalium 8y ago
  For operations, you're completely correct! Research, which is what this article appears to be primarily about, the CIA is permitted to conduct domestically.
marssaxman 8y ago
I think you all must have a different relationship with your government in Canada than US citizens do. None of these agencies are "on my own team". They are all adversaries. I feel far more threatened by US government hacking precisely because I live inside US jurisdiction. If we were to have a difference of opinions, and they were to snoop around in my data and decide they didn't like what they found, well, I'm sitting right here; they could easily ruin my life. What are the Koreans or the Russians or anyone else going to do to me? They're an ocean away and I pose no conceivable threat to them. Harassing me would be expensive and pointless; they're not going to bother.
- megous 8y ago
  Poison you?
  - marssaxman 8y ago
    How much does a clandestine international assassination cost? Why would anyone bother?
    - Godel_unicode 8y ago
      I suspect you're being downvoted because of the below. Spoiler alert: dictators don't follow the same value calculus as normal people for when they should "bother". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvi... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Skripal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Skripal
      - marssaxman 8y ago
        Sure, I'm aware of those cases - but I am not a former Russian military intelligence officer, and I'll wager that nobody else participating in this thread is, either. There is no conceivable reason that any dictator, anywhere in the world, should care enough about any of us to bother spending the enormous amount of money and presumably political capital that would be involved in executing such an attack, so why should we worry about it?
dcolkitt 8y ago
Considering that Apple is a US company, and that millions of US citizens use Apple products, US intelligence agencies should be securing these devices. Not compromising them. The US has such an overwhelming military advantage over North Korea or Russia that it doesn't have to gain a leg up in infosec. All it has to do is level the playing field by making sure that everyone's running as securely as possible. I'll rely on the one dozen Naval Carrier Strike Groups to keep me safe. Really doubt that reading Kim Jong Un's email is going to make a difference.
- Kalium 8y ago
  > Considering that Apple is a US company, and that millions of US citizens use Apple products, US intelligence agencies should be securing these devices. Not compromising them. You're absolutely right! It's unquestionably the job of the US intelligence apparatus to help secure American interests. With that said, Apple is a multi-national company, with millions of units used by people of all nationalities. And a vast amount of American military superiority is based on superior technical intelligence. A carrier group can solve, at great expense in blood and treasure, a problem that intelligence can often solve more quickly and at an earlier point in time. With that in mind, it seems reckless to not take seriously the value of intelligence. Again, you're completely correct in every way. Apple is an American company! It's just perhaps possible that there could be a bit of subtlety to this.
  - cdf2theworld 8y ago
    So for the sake of possibly needing to break into a non-US citizen's iPhone, they do research to create exploits that put EVERY US citizen who uses an iPhone at risk? And they really don't have a great track record of keeping these exploits safe [1] 1: https://www.vadesecure.com/en/nsa-malware-malware-protection/ https://www.vadesecure.com/en/nsa-malware-malware-protection...
    - Kalium 8y ago
      If there was a way to have exploits that only affected non-citizens, I would expect them to explore that enthusiastically. I suspect there is no such thing, but I would absolutely love to be enlightened as to how completely wrong I am! With that in mind, do you think it would be wise for an intelligence agency to refuse to consider searching for exploitable holes in a platform that is known for a fact to occasionally used by adversaries? Bear in mind that, of course, there are plenty of other groups and agencies doing the same thing. Do you think this choice would better serve to advance American interests? If so, why? Would the weaknesses the CIA could find cease to be if the CIA was not looking for them? Perhaps you imagine a scenario in which the CIA finds every exploit first, and in doing so causes them to get fixed rapidly. Would you be comfortable with an intelligence agency working hand-in-glove with a major American company selling supposedly-secure consumer goods? Would you trust such an arrangement to protect you?
tylersmith 8y ago
Most people don't pay taxes so the CIA can spy on them. They pay taxes so they don't end up in prison. If they're going to take our money I'd actually prefer they just used it to buy themselves luxuries over spying on us.
munk-a 8y ago
I am generally positive on the side of TLA efforts to compromise existing software, more so if they share the vulnerabilities with those companies (basically, security testing is hard, having a government agency that tries to break software could be seen as a very useful public service)... when they hoard those exploits to use themselves I'm a bit less sympathetic and grow less and less the longer they hold off on disclosing them. The thing I'm 100% not okay with is when TLAs use social pressure, legal pressure or traditional espionage to insure there are exploits they can exploit - this has never ended well and is always a concession in security that increases our vulnerability to bad actors. I have a modicum of trust for TLAs in the traditional espionage realms, but they have entirely burned my opinion of them when it comes to tech at this point... The NSA compromising ECC `Dual_EC_DRBG` is just a level of stupidity that demonstrates a clear lack of responsibility to civilians.
danielscrubs 8y ago
Which is exactly why there are so few countries that you can trust. Here is a good article about it: https://protonvpn.com/blog/best-vpn-country-comparison/ https://protonvpn.com/blog/best-vpn-country-comparison/

whatshisface 8y ago

>WTF do you think they do all day? One would hope that they were trying to gain access to someone else's devices, as opposed to turning the guns towards their own citizens and economy. If a soldier showed up at my door and pointed their gun at me, my reaction wouldn't be "of course you're doing that, your job is to point guns."

penagwin 8y ago
Somethings like spying on American phone calls (or just their "metadata") I agree with. But somethings like breaking encryption, exploiting iPhones, etc. while they may be used against Americans can also be used against others. Essentially there's an arms race, and we use our tax money to sponsor our government in this race, with the hopes that they'll side with us. There really isn't another option unless you want to give a private entity this power, or not participate in the race (which I don't advise).
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  > Somethings like spying on American phone calls (or just their "metadata") I agree with. > But somethings like breaking encryption, exploiting iPhones, etc. while they may be used against Americans can also be used against others. Both of these can have a chilling effect on free speech, therefore I'm against the CIA doing this to citizens. The potential threat against citizens nowhere near outweighs the need to uphold our constitution.
  - mywittyname 8y ago
    I think we all agree that they shouldn't do this to American citizens. The problem is we can't isolate their capabilities to just foreign persons.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      We could make doing this illegal and enforce it…
      - village-idiot 8y ago
        Unfortunately, other nation states might not care about US laws. Which returns to the above statement that it’s better for the CIA and Apple to be in a security arms war than it is for Apple and the FSB, at least from the perspective of an American.
    - TremendousJudge 8y ago
      As a "foreign person", I'd rather like for no organization to come and record everything I do just because I wasn't born in a specific place. Ironically though, the average American citizen is probably under more CIA surveillance than the average foreign person such as myself.
      - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
        I'd rather we didn't either. If we trust you enough to let you visit, work, whatever, then we should treat you respectfully.
- blattimwind 8y ago
  > Somethings like spying on American phone calls (or just their "metadata") I agree with. Why keep pretending the CIA is a foreign intelligence service?
  - richardwhiuk 8y ago
    For some of us, it is.
yorwba 8y ago
> One would hope that they were trying to gain access to someone else's devices, as opposed to turning the guns towards their own citizens and economy. Apple devices are sold all over the world, so there's no way of gaining access to the enemy's devices without that method also being applicable to everyone else. Actually using them on everyone else is a different matter.
- cdf2theworld 8y ago
  "the enemy's devices" Which enemy?
  - Despegar 8y ago
    Strategic rivals: Russia and China Regional rivals: North Korea and Iran Authoritarian partners/allies: Turkey, Saudi Arabia, a bunch of other Middle Eastern countries A bunch of countries flirting with authoritarianism: Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Israel
    - Mirioron 8y ago
      Seriously? This kind of stuff is exactly why countries are opposed to free trade and globalism. You listed two countries in the EU there, for example.
      - apexalpha 8y ago
        Yeah if Poland and Hungary are 'flirting with authoritarianism' then the US with it's current leader is too. If that sounds dumb to you, you should rethink the statement about Poland and Hungary.
  - novaleaf 8y ago
    I don't think it's objectionable that any countries Intelligence Service tries to identify threats before it's too late.
  - java-man 8y ago
everdrive 8y ago
No one outside of America has ever bought an Apple device, obviously.
- soraminazuki 8y ago
  People outside of America also have human rights.
  - everdrive 8y ago
    I never said it was moral or ok, just that it doesn't suggest that the purpose is spy on Americans.
    - ilrwbwrkhv 8y ago
      oh trust me... everything is tested at home first...
      - ficklepickle 8y ago
        Or on Canadians. Our government has historically been very willing to let the USA experiment on unwitting civilians.
  - rswail 8y ago
    Human rights have never excluded foreign intelligence services from engaging in espionage.
dictum 8y ago
I'm yet to see a clear explanation for citizens not being as much of a risk as, say, a random foreigner located far away from your country. If anything, a citizen is more capable of carrying out a terrorist attack, or just doing any action some foreign power wants to perform in that country. The exception for domestic citizens seems to be just a concession for the masses and their representatives, not a pragmatic choice. Edit: a pragmatic reasoning could be compartmentalization — keeping citizens under the watch of a separate entity (e.g. FBI) but it doesn't explain why domestic mass surveillance should be ruled out.
- wefarrell 8y ago
  Domestic threats are outside of the CIA's scope.
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  The constitution and amendments to it give us certain rights. It really doesn't matter if citizens are a much larger risk or not.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- nickelcitymario 8y ago
  > "...it doesn't explain why domestic mass surveillance should be ruled out." It's a matter of who we have a responsibility towards. The government we elect in our own country is responsible to us, and as a people we widely do not want our government spying on us. (This is true in most if not all countries.) But that same government is NOT responsible to the citizens of other nations. The CIA has no responsibility towards Canadians (like myself) or anyone else who isn't American. I'm not arguing that this is ethically right. I'm just saying it's pragmatic. If you're not a citizen of my country, my country has no legal obligations to you outside of international law. And no country, to my knowledge, has ever tried to introduce the right to privacy into international law. Every country hates spies within its own borders, but seeks to have them inside of everyone else's.
- marnett 8y ago
baddox 8y ago
I think it's pretty fair (although naive, obviously) to expect soldiers and intelligence agencies alike to, you know, actually just keep us safe.
JohnWilcox 8y ago
In a world where the citizenship and nationhood has been intentionally shattered to usher in a new globalist aristocratic feudal type system, where foreign threats are intentionally injected and infested and imposed upon “citizens”, you are going to see ever increasing rationalization and justification and threat events to push ever more authoritarianism to turn on their own “citizens”, more accurately described as human capital, that the elite need to shuffle around until they’re no longer needed when AI and automation and robotics takes over.
DaggerDagger 8y ago
Let's be real. It wouldn't be that surprising given how the world actually works. Assuming you aren't an oligarch.
rswail 8y ago
Well, by law, the CIA aren't allowed to spy on US citizens, that's the FBI's job. However, there's nothing stopping them sharing capabilities with the Five Eyes and asking one of them to spy on a US citizen...

ProAm 8y ago

> WTF do you think they do all day? Look for WMD's in middle eastern countries to justify policy?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
lostlogin 8y ago
Well, all middle eastern countries bar one.
- darkpuma 8y ago
  The last US president to take that matter seriously was JFK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_Israel#US_pressure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_Israel#US_...

kurthr 8y ago

The CIA is spying on your phone so that the Russians and Chinese don't have to?? Really, you think CIA OpSec is that good... as in so hard to crack that it's worth spending $100 billions (in Rubles and Yuan) to do it some other way? Maybe some political doofus thinks that, but technically savvy folks should know better. Nope, if you create a weapon you better be prepared for your enemy to use it against you.

Not_a_pizza 8y ago
Really you need to think about world governments less like permanent adversaries and more like parents that get annoyed with each other from time to time.
nickelcitymario 8y ago
Not that I think anything I say will convince you to my thinking, but I didn't say "the CIA is spying on your phone so that the Russians and Chinese don't have to". I'm not sure how you got that from what I wrote. In an ideal world, no one can hack my phone. This is why I support Apple and Google and Microsoft and all the others doing their very best to keep my devices as secure as possible. In the worst-possible world, enemy nations have hacked my phone. Because if they've hacked my phone, they've also hacked those of my politicians and military. In the real world, the only way for my country to be able to defend against enemies is to be as-good-as or better than those enemies at hacking my phone. That's why I support it. Because I have a sneaking suspicion that truly awful people are working hard to hack every device out there, and the best infosec defense is a good infosec offense. I don't disagree with you that "if you create a weapon you better be prepared for your enemy to use it against you". But a worse scenario than that is for my enemy to beat me to the punch and I'm standing here with sticks and stones. The thing about an arms race is that once it starts, it's pretty much impossible to get out of. I didn't start the infosec arms race. It would be nice if the race didn't exist at all. But it does. Only a "political doofus" would prefer to pretend otherwise.
- kurthr 8y ago
  If I thought CIA/NSA hacking was truly white-hat to increase the security of Apple devices, then I would agree. However, 3DES seems to be one of the last times that actual info-sec as opposed to spying (on local citizens) with questionable legal standing (in the US) was the purpose. Sadly, the omniscient and incorruptable rep of the NSA/CIA and associated TLA have been significantly tarnished by Snowden and the current external political interference. This is a crisis, because there are likely people in powerful positions of those orgamizations who do not have their countries interests at heart. Whatever ideology (white nationalist or communist) or external subversion they are not being adequately policed in the current situation. I would prefer they spend their efforts spying externally rather than internally and keeping everyone's private information safe. For example focus on vulns in Huawei 5G base stations or foreign anti-virus installations instead. I think that's safer for us tax payers. Heck, use the social credit system for your own ends, as they did with Tindr.

0xdeadbeefbabe 8y ago

Well yes, and I also hope we don't know what they do all day. Another point worth making is that the government can't really be on your team, as they tend to hog the ball/puck.

nickelcitymario 8y ago
> "the government can't really be on your team" That's kind of the root problem of democracy, isn't it? If a government truly is "of the people, by the people, for the people", then they are by definition on their people's team, and their people should trust them. But, if they can't in fact be on your team, and if you can't trust them, then you can't really have a democracy, can you? You end up with something else, something that looks like democracy but really isn't.

leggomylibro 8y ago

Aren't domestic investigations the FBI's job, though? Why does the CIA have jurisdiction to steal the intellectual property of an American company?

java-man 8y ago
Why do they hack computers of congressional staffers? Why do they explicitly violate the law (re: Iran/Contras)? Why...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
Kalium 8y ago
For operations, you're completely correct! Research, which is what this article appears to be primarily about, the CIA is permitted to conduct domestically.

marssaxman 8y ago

I think you all must have a different relationship with your government in Canada than US citizens do. None of these agencies are "on my own team". They are all adversaries. I feel far more threatened by US government hacking precisely because I live inside US jurisdiction. If we were to have a difference of opinions, and they were to snoop around in my data and decide they didn't like what they found, well, I'm sitting right here; they could easily ruin my life. What are the Koreans or the Russians or anyone else going to do to me? They're an ocean away and I pose no conceivable threat to them. Harassing me would be expensive and pointless; they're not going to bother.

megous 8y ago
Poison you?
- marssaxman 8y ago
  How much does a clandestine international assassination cost? Why would anyone bother?
  - Godel_unicode 8y ago
    I suspect you're being downvoted because of the below. Spoiler alert: dictators don't follow the same value calculus as normal people for when they should "bother". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvinenko https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_of_Alexander_Litvi... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Skripal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Skripal
    - marssaxman 8y ago
      Sure, I'm aware of those cases - but I am not a former Russian military intelligence officer, and I'll wager that nobody else participating in this thread is, either. There is no conceivable reason that any dictator, anywhere in the world, should care enough about any of us to bother spending the enormous amount of money and presumably political capital that would be involved in executing such an attack, so why should we worry about it?

dcolkitt 8y ago

Considering that Apple is a US company, and that millions of US citizens use Apple products, US intelligence agencies should be securing these devices. Not compromising them. The US has such an overwhelming military advantage over North Korea or Russia that it doesn't have to gain a leg up in infosec. All it has to do is level the playing field by making sure that everyone's running as securely as possible. I'll rely on the one dozen Naval Carrier Strike Groups to keep me safe. Really doubt that reading Kim Jong Un's email is going to make a difference.

Kalium 8y ago
> Considering that Apple is a US company, and that millions of US citizens use Apple products, US intelligence agencies should be securing these devices. Not compromising them. You're absolutely right! It's unquestionably the job of the US intelligence apparatus to help secure American interests. With that said, Apple is a multi-national company, with millions of units used by people of all nationalities. And a vast amount of American military superiority is based on superior technical intelligence. A carrier group can solve, at great expense in blood and treasure, a problem that intelligence can often solve more quickly and at an earlier point in time. With that in mind, it seems reckless to not take seriously the value of intelligence. Again, you're completely correct in every way. Apple is an American company! It's just perhaps possible that there could be a bit of subtlety to this.
- cdf2theworld 8y ago
  So for the sake of possibly needing to break into a non-US citizen's iPhone, they do research to create exploits that put EVERY US citizen who uses an iPhone at risk? And they really don't have a great track record of keeping these exploits safe [1] 1: https://www.vadesecure.com/en/nsa-malware-malware-protection/ https://www.vadesecure.com/en/nsa-malware-malware-protection...
  - Kalium 8y ago
    If there was a way to have exploits that only affected non-citizens, I would expect them to explore that enthusiastically. I suspect there is no such thing, but I would absolutely love to be enlightened as to how completely wrong I am! With that in mind, do you think it would be wise for an intelligence agency to refuse to consider searching for exploitable holes in a platform that is known for a fact to occasionally used by adversaries? Bear in mind that, of course, there are plenty of other groups and agencies doing the same thing. Do you think this choice would better serve to advance American interests? If so, why? Would the weaknesses the CIA could find cease to be if the CIA was not looking for them? Perhaps you imagine a scenario in which the CIA finds every exploit first, and in doing so causes them to get fixed rapidly. Would you be comfortable with an intelligence agency working hand-in-glove with a major American company selling supposedly-secure consumer goods? Would you trust such an arrangement to protect you?

tylersmith 8y ago

Most people don't pay taxes so the CIA can spy on them. They pay taxes so they don't end up in prison. If they're going to take our money I'd actually prefer they just used it to buy themselves luxuries over spying on us.

munk-a 8y ago

I am generally positive on the side of TLA efforts to compromise existing software, more so if they share the vulnerabilities with those companies (basically, security testing is hard, having a government agency that tries to break software could be seen as a very useful public service)... when they hoard those exploits to use themselves I'm a bit less sympathetic and grow less and less the longer they hold off on disclosing them. The thing I'm 100% not okay with is when TLAs use social pressure, legal pressure or traditional espionage to insure there are exploits they can exploit - this has never ended well and is always a concession in security that increases our vulnerability to bad actors. I have a modicum of trust for TLAs in the traditional espionage realms, but they have entirely burned my opinion of them when it comes to tech at this point... The NSA compromising ECC `Dual_EC_DRBG` is just a level of stupidity that demonstrates a clear lack of responsibility to civilians.

danielscrubs 8y ago

Which is exactly why there are so few countries that you can trust. Here is a good article about it: https://protonvpn.com/blog/best-vpn-country-comparison/ https://protonvpn.com/blog/best-vpn-country-comparison/