>> "It's entirely possible that the NSA has hacked Apple, or that an Apple employee has been subverted by the NSA and inserted a back door into the encryption s

>> "It's entirely possible that the NSA has hacked Apple, or that an Apple employee has been subverted by the NSA and inserted a back door into the encryption system." "Entirely possible" is the understatement of the year. I think you mean "absolutely guaranteed." This is the raison d'etre of signals intelligence agencies. The alphabet agencies would be utterly failing at what they see as their job if they didn't have many, many plants inside Apple/Google/AT&T/large communication organizations. And Tim Cook isn't stupid; he knows this. His claims might be technically true in a strictly literal sense, in that he doesn't have the key, but the claims are certainly misleading to the nontechnical public. He knows full well that iMessage is uber-compromised, probably in several different ways (legal wiretaps, technical intrusions, HumInt, etc).