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this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone at this point. that in itself should be alarming

Compromised software development environments where "special" software libraries placed in the link path is an old Company trick. A lot of this came to surface in, of all places, Tom Clancy and other spy novels over the last few decades.

Supposedly, IBM had "special builds" in their foreign shipped mainframes where the myth of an IBM technician installing software for five minutes and drinking coffee for an hour before leaving came about. The reality was that the "drinking coffee" time was a lot of NSA activity collecting transaction data for review at Ft. Mead.

Next up, a third party Xcode tool to inspect all the frameworks libraries to see if they match the public release. Makes for a good system integrity plug-in.

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Apple had no part in this and the moon is made of cheese.

Many Apple executives have intelligence community connections. Keep in mind that while Steve Jobs was running NeXT, one of their biggest volume sales of NextStations was to the CIA.
 
So the implication here seems to be the CIA/NSA etc. (had someone on the Apple Dev team?) modify the Xcode source to include whatever it is they're talking about (with regards to Xcode). Afterwards its distributed to everyone whenever someone uses Xcode to create an OS X / iOS application.

Apple should take this extremely seriously (once you have a back door in the compiler's logic/output, its game over and extremely hard to detect).

Apple should have a team with duplicate oversight go back through Xcode changes to the early 2000's looking for anything suspicious. Frankly, this is alarming since this is the only compiler for Apple operating systems.

This.

Whether Apple will or not depends on what kind of conversations they've been having.
 
I wonder who the leakier was..... :D As if we didn't know.

Be-trail, blackmail..... it all comes down to.... not really care if they were an ex-employee at Apple, doesn't give someone the right to share the Apple code with anyone..

Just goes to show if u can't trust people, who can u trust ? Definitely not the NSA.
 
I am sick of this

I am tired of our PUBLIC SERVANTS behaving this way. They are no different than any other malicious hackers, the only difference is that they have shady lawyers who (wink wink) determine that their activities are legal.

I have nothing to hide, but I should not have to hide anything either. I worry as much about the threat of my government as any other threat. Look at history, you should fear your government. And I do not believe that thier activities keep us any safer than we would be without them.
 
True, we should have not have anything to hide, but if our governments didn't act fishy in the first place, then maybe we WOULD trust them.
 
Again...what do you think transparency is in terms or running any organization?

You aren't defining what you would consider transparent. I didn't see anyone from the government preventing this news from being made public.

Do you believe Obama has run a more transparent administration than the one preceding him?
 
Doing their job

If there's thought that this Xcode stuff is in general circulation, I'm against it. But if it's to make an infected copy of Mail for someone with contact with ISIS, so we get the whole distribution list, unencrypted, I'm for it.

The thing about the Snowden leaks is they're so indiscriminate.

Putin's spies are far more intrusive, and his police are fascists and he kills or imprisons men who could challenge his authority.

He's leaking only US secrets, and making no distinction between programs that are genuinely concerning, and ones that are just what we ask them to do.

Hey, cryptographers busy decoding the Japanese naval code, please stop. Yamimoto has civil rights, and it's rude to read his mail. Oh, and, Enigma shouldn't have been decrypted for the same reasons.
 
Yes, and the person you quoted was only talking about America. Nowhere did he suggest he was talking about the rest of the world. Do you want him to research and compile a thesis discussing government hacking in all 195 UN-recognized countries?

196. I just declared my yard and house to be a new independent nation. ;)

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Do you believe Obama has run a more transparent administration than the one preceding him?

I believe the only transparency is that his words are meaningless. The double speak and rambling. This is a man who knows how to speak for an hour and make it sound like he's promising a lot and then when you actually think about his words you come to realize that he really didn't say anything.

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I wonder who the leakier was..... :D As if we didn't know.

Be-trail, blackmail..... it all comes down to.... not really care if they were an ex-employee at Apple, doesn't give someone the right to share the Apple code with anyone..

Just goes to show if u can't trust people, who can u trust ? Definitely not the NSA.

It was Michelle that leaked it lol. She's operating deep undercover.
 
I'm merely going to post about the absurdity, in a thread devoted to national issues, of allowing a coterie of 100-post types to hog the thread.
 
If the CIA have done anything sneaky to Xcode, I don't understand why they would announce it to anyone at a "jamboree". I'd have thought it the sort of thing that would be strictly confidential.
No surprise that they're working on something. The good news is we have no evidence that they were able to successfully implement it into other developers' apps.
No evidence that they've done something is not the same thing as evidence that they've not done something.
 
I'm merely going to post about the absurdity, in a thread devoted to national issues, of allowing a coterie of 100-post types to hog the thread.

It probably has something to do with the excessive trollish behavior that exists in an emotionally charged, anonymous environment where you're dealing with political issues.
 
If the CIA have done anything sneaky to Xcode, I don't understand why they would announce it to anyone at a "jamboree". I'd have thought it the sort of thing that would be strictly confidential.

Jamboree is apparently a secret gathering among intelligence types doing this type of work according to the Intercept, not a public event.
 
Seriously, what's wrong with US governments and their spying obsessions ? Do they really think than turning the entire world into a controlled dictatorship will make it a better place ?

I think some time ago in a biggest lie contest this came in 2nd:

I'm from the government, I'm here to help!
 
Remember, this was from Feburary 2012

Remember this was from the Feburary 2012 Jamboree.. That was three years ago. Your guess is as good as mine as to what they have achieved in the last three years.

Also, I was disappointed that when I followed the link to the Intercept article, and then the document they referenced, I was only was able to read the first few paragraphs in the leaked document (could be an iPad issue not allowing me to scroll) and there was no mention of Xcode in what I read.

If anyone has a link to the full document please post the link because I like to verify information like this whenever possible. Especially when it's released three years after the fact.

Thanks,

Jon...
 
You know, the world is bigger than 'merika!

Yes, I realize the world is bigger than 'Merica. But, I dont care if we spy on some Frenchman in his home. A Frenchman in France, or some arab in the middle east arent protected by the US Constitution. 'Mericans are.
 
Yes, I realize the world is bigger than 'Merica. But, I dont care if we spy on some Frenchman in his home. A Frenchman in France, or some arab in the middle east arent protected by the US Constitution. 'Mericans are.

So the US could spy on the French. And the French could spy on the Americans and swap data? Sounds AOK by your argument.
 
So the US could spy on the French. And the French could spy on the Americans and swap data? Sounds AOK by your argument.

Haha, unfortunately, that may be alright. I would hope our government would step up efforts to keep foreign govts from violating privacy of Americans.

The part of the whole thing that makes me angry, is the American govt spends massive amounts of time, effort, and resources spying on Americans under the guise of Foreign Intelligence.
 
Yes, I realize the world is bigger than 'Merica. But, I dont care if we spy on some Frenchman in his home. A Frenchman in France, or some arab in the middle east arent protected by the US Constitution. 'Mericans are.

I would think that ideally the Constitution is an expression of how you want all people to be treated. Of corse it doesn't provide protection for citizens living in other countries. However, if the U.S. is going to claim that it values the ideas within it, it's questionable to cast it aside simply because someone lives in a foreign land. If the U.S. is supposed to be an example for freedom and liberty, then it should be doing what it can to promote and extend them across the globe.
 
Please, please tell me this was sarcasm.

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The CIA ARE the bad guys.

LOL at this post!

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I'd call ******** on that.
The CIA and other US organisations have funded terrorists around the world, have supplied weapons and training.
http://www.dcclothesline.com/2014/08/22/realize-u-s-funded-trained-isis-right/

The CIA et al is doing enormous harm, the rest of the world now views the US in such the same way as China, ultimately untrustworthy.

Internally the USA is failing, in Health, education, welfare, housing,freedom of speech, freedom of the press, democracy, corruption, racism,infrastructure, all these are failing

Ahh the same thing people have been crying about for years and yet somehow the Country manages to keep on ticking without the awful Dictatorship some would have you believe is just around the corner coming to be. Funny that!

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If this wasn't sarcasm... american idiocy at it's finest.

Suppose it turns out you're the idiot? What do we do then?

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If there's thought that this Xcode stuff is in general circulation, I'm against it. But if it's to make an infected copy of Mail for someone with contact with ISIS, so we get the whole distribution list, unencrypted, I'm for it.

The thing about the Snowden leaks is they're so indiscriminate.

Putin's spies are far more intrusive, and his police are fascists and he kills or imprisons men who could challenge his authority.

He's leaking only US secrets, and making no distinction between programs that are genuinely concerning, and ones that are just what we ask them to do.

Hey, cryptographers busy decoding the Japanese naval code, please stop. Yamimoto has civil rights, and it's rude to read his mail. Oh, and, Enigma shouldn't have been decrypted for the same reasons.

Rationality! Thank you!
 
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