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> Apple did not respond to a request for comment. “We have never built a back door or master key to any of our products, and we never will,” Apple said in Febru
by jjani 1y ago
> Apple did not respond to a request for comment. “We have never built a back door or master key to any of our products, and we never will,” Apple said in February.
This must be some "technically correct" weasel words bullcrap, as without at least equivalent access there is no chance Apple would be operating in China.
- benreesman 1y agoAKA "fuckin...england fucking chill, don't blow this. You're FVEY mate, why you go scaring everyone when you know I got this. Just relax, you really think TAO don't got this? The Equation Group? We got this, in there like swimwear."
- phendrenad2 1y agoMost likely the spokesperson just forgot about China. They're still a US country, after all, and US-centric thinking is the default.
- GoblinSlayer 1y agoThis. Just have a demented spokesperson.
- floam 1y agoIn China they outsource that version of the iCloud services to a Chinese company hosted in China. The rest of the world is on Apple’s.
- kingkawn 1y agoThey may not have built it, but it doesn’t mean they didn’t implement something built for them.
- mzajc 1y ago> This must be some "technically correct" weasel words bullcrap Is that even necessary? A gag order means they can't reveal backdoors, and their entire stack is so locked down that discovering them is hard and unlikely.
- deepsun 1y agoGag order cannot force them to lie. A lie like that can be illegal even. If there's a gag order, then companies say "we have a gag order". Like Google and Twitter did back in the day when asked. And then immediately started releasing Transparency Report to show how many of the gag orders they receive, so gov't couldn't say "we don't request anything". https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview
- gleenn 1y agoI don't think this is true. There was the whole fiasco around the EULA canary that a company had that, if it was removed, was supposed to indicate that the company had received a gag order. I don't believe it had been actually tested in court. I believe it had to do with the FISA court system. I can't find a link but there are definitely cases of gray area where courts have required entities to lie. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary
- GoblinSlayer 1y agoMaybe it's a different type of a gag order? Subpoena prohibits to say "we have a gag order".
- alt227 1y ago> Gag order cannot force them to lie. Yes it can, thats the whole point.
- deepsun 1y agoNo, where did you get that? They can "No comments" all the way, but there's no way to legally forcing a commercial company to lie. The company can lie, of course, but it's their choice, not an order.
- samus 1y agoThis is absolutely a thing. For comparison, banking regulation basically makes banks extensions of the intelligence services and forces them to tell off law enforcement in case "suspicious" account activities are detected. Usually banks will also close the account, but the regulations ensure the customer will never find out why because the bank will stonewall them to ensure they don't accidentally tattle. https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunking/ https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki... Even if no formal regulation to that effect exists for social media companies, intelligence agencies presumably have sufficient leverage to ensure similar access.
- ok123456 1y ago"We have never built." ok, so then who built it?
- EasyMark 1y agoIs it a big deal though? Context matters. Everyone knows you don't do business in China without bending a knee to the government in all things. If you don't you are shut down completely if you're lucky, imprisoned if not. Of course CCP has access to every device in China approaching very close to 100%
- xwolfi 1y agoWhat are you saying, I'm in China it's completely false. There is very lax enforcement, and if there is enforcement, there's always an opportunity to bribe. The communist party doesn't have "access" to a billion phones: what would they even do with all that garbage. They can ask Wechat what you send your friends, sure, and that's enough to police most crimes. We don't have the budget or organizational acumen of the NSA.
- EasyMark 1y agoAccess != "saving it all, all the time" . If they determine you are an anti-CCP agent then they will get access to everything in your life, no warrants or requests involved.
- SamuelAdams 1y agoWell, allegedly Apple could have designed, advised and tested the solution, and if a contractor builds it, then the statement is technically correct. Apple (and many other organizations) contracts work out for liability reasons, this is not the first instance of it. Also note the language - specifically a “back door” or “master key”. If you call it something else, literally anything else, the statement holds up.
- Hilift 1y agoGo further: "We have never built a back door or master key" The feature is not named "back door" or "master key". It's a feature of iMessage with various names such as "zero click". Also note they have created features before that provides law enforcement access to data at different stages of a pipeline. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMessage#Security_and_privacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMessage#Security_and_privacy
- bhelkey 1y agoApple stores Chinese users' iCloud data and encryption keys to that data in China in a datacenter run by a state owned firm [1]. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/apple-moves-to-store-icloud-keys-in-china-raising-human-rights-fears-idUSKCN1G805Z/ https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/apple-moves-to-st...
- rs186 1y agoBasically, there is no backdoor. The front door is wide open, the government just needs to ask. Or not even that -- just take whatever they need themselves.
- theturtletalks 1y agoEven in the US, even if Apple doesn’t have a backdoor, isn’t NSA linked up into the telecom companies already?
- simondotau 1y agoWhat are the chances that the NSA has a useful zero-day on the TLS encryption standard?
- deepsun 1y agoIf there's a properly implemented end-to-end encryption, then NSA cannot see anything, even having full access to telco-s.
- dvtkrlbs 1y agoI mean they just disabled advanced data protection which allowed normal law enforcement requests to access the data since they are not e2e encrypted if you don't use advanced data protection. I really don't think they needed to implement a new backdoor. They would just need implement a procedure that would fast track UK requests.
- gdwatson 1y agoThat didn’t placate the UK government, because it didn’t just want access to British users’ data – it wanted access to any Apple user’s data from anywhere in the world. I suspect that disabling advanced data protection in the UK was meant to let Apple say it was complying as far as it could while fighting the main order.
- alt227 1y agoYou still dont know who was lobbying the UK government to ask for this.
- Aloisius 1y agoApple didn't disable advanced data protection for those who had enabled it. Rather they removed the ability for new users to turn it on in the first place. A future update was going to ask users themselves to disable it in order to continue backing up their phones to iCloud.