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Tim Cook: NSA 'Would Have to Cart Us Out in a Box' for Access to Servers

Pakaku said:
Am I not important enough to keep my personal data private because I want it to stay that way?
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The government, banks, retailers, airlines, telecommunication companies, ISP's, etc. all collect your personal data. The fear that the "government" is using it for some malicious intent is where people are thinking they're more important than they are.

If the government was really all powerful and all knowing, sucking our data and using it for some purposes we don't realize, then why are there any criminals or dead-beat dads that seem to escape prosecution for years or forever?

To have a society function, people have to participate, including at times giving up some of their individual rights for the betterment of the society as a whole. I agree that the government, which has grown far bigger than it should or needs to be, has more power than it should or needs to have, but worrying that your phone calls and emails are being read by some government hack, so that they can then come get you for being a miscreant since you said or wrote something bad, is just paranoia driven by hollywood portrayal of how the government is controlling us.
 
jmgregory1 said:
The government, banks, retailers, airlines, telecommunication companies, ISP's, etc. all collect your personal data. The fear that the "government" is using it for some malicious intent is where people are thinking they're more important than they are.

If the government was really all powerful and all knowing, sucking our data and using it for some purposes we don't realize, then why are there any criminals or dead-beat dads that seem to escape prosecution for years or forever?

To have a society function, people have to participate, including at times giving up some of their individual rights for the betterment of the society as a whole. I agree that the government, which has grown far bigger than it should or needs to be, has more power than it should or needs to have, but worrying that your phone calls and emails are being read by some government hack, so that they can then come get you for being a miscreant since you said or wrote something bad, is just paranoia driven by hollywood portrayal of how the government is controlling us.
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Why worry about restricting government at all, let's all just sit up webcams in every room with full government control, we don't have anything to hide.
 
Peace said:
DAVID MUIR: "Do you think Americans, Tim, would be more at ease if you could tell them more?"

TIM COOK: "I do."


That says it all.
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That's the difference between the NSA and Apple. The NSA wants to keep secrets for ever. Apple on the other hand tell us everything but at the right times.
 
Yes right, the NSA who wiretaps foreign heads of state who are also allies will do whatever it wants including accessing apple servers.
 
The NSA does not need to access any companies servers per se. They have their splitter HW at ALL the major Telecom fiber optic hubs, hence the name "PRIZM" (think what a prism does). A copy of ALL data (calls, emails, data backups/downloads, tweets, web searches/results, etc.) that pass thru the major telecom hubs goes right to the new NSA "vacuum cleaner" mega-facility in Utah.

The one thing they don't have absolute control over is your personal removable HD data. Enter the big push for "the cloud". Eventually everything will be REQUIRED to be stored in "the cloud". This will result in all I/O ports and personal hard drives seen as no longer necessary and the holdouts will be forced to use the cloud. At that point the NSA' s agenda will be 100% complete.

So TechCom CEOs can rant and rave all they want and tell the public that THEY WILL NOT ALLOW IT ON THEIR SERVERS. Meanwhile, the NSA just keeps vacuuming at the major data collection points in the network.

The net result of all of this is that after the vague promises by Obama and Google/Apple/MS (all claiming NSA does not have access to their servers), the furor will subside, the sheep will go back to grazing, and the vacuuming of EVERYTHING will continue.
 
SeattleMoose said:
The one thing they don't have absolute control over is your personal removable HD data. Enter the big push for "the cloud". Eventually everything will be REQUIRED to be stored in "the cloud".
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I don't see this playing out as a requirement, rather using the cloud will be pushed as so convenient that eventually consumers will transition.
 
jmgregory1 said:
The government, banks, retailers, airlines, telecommunication companies, ISP's, etc. all collect your personal data. The fear that the "government" is using it for some malicious intent is where people are thinking they're more important than they are.

If the government was really all powerful and all knowing, sucking our data and using it for some purposes we don't realize, then why are there any criminals or dead-beat dads that seem to escape prosecution for years or forever?

To have a society function, people have to participate, including at times giving up some of their individual rights for the betterment of the society as a whole. I agree that the government, which has grown far bigger than it should or needs to be, has more power than it should or needs to have, but worrying that your phone calls and emails are being read by some government hack, so that they can then come get you for being a miscreant since you said or wrote something bad, is just paranoia driven by hollywood portrayal of how the government is controlling us.
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Not really, because seemingly innocuous but insidious things like this have happened in the past which been used as a stepping stone by governments to not only reduce privacy and individual freedoms but almost eliminate them all together.

People said exactly the same thing as you in 1930's Germany, 1920's Russia and many other places during the 20th century. It's unlikely that sort of thing would happen under the current socio-political environment in the US today, but your statements are predicated on the notion that the US is immune to revolution.

Interesting viewing from 2007.
http://video.pbs.org/video/2365024142/
 
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if you can think of ten ways to steal data - the NSA have thought of 13 and they are

"if you can think of ten ways to steal data - the NSA have thought of 13 and they are actually using them all" said TOR developer Jacob Applebaum at 2013 CCC.

I'm aware that for a while, the Apple iTunes update blob was being used for malware injection to specific users' computers, at least in Europe. This was probably/possibly a reasonable use of spying malware - as it was using targeted Remote Access Technology(*). The day that this was revealed - by some security researchers noticing the insecure way that iTunes updates were sent OTA - interesting things happened with news items on the RAT subject.

(*) I suppose the biggest problem with RAT access to a computer is that all the major RATs studied so-far (Gamma/BundesTrojan etc) have full write access to the compromised computer - therefore undermining the concept of digital forensic evidence, the Mac or PC that has evidence - might just have had the evidence planted! - and is that proportional?

But in this thread context, would Apple have deliberately kept iTunes (etc) updates unsigned and un-secure upon government requests, if so, was this backhole abused by criminals?
 
We feel that — strongly about it.
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Wow! I had no idea that the NSA had penetrated Apple's "backyard" that deep already :eek:

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mdelvecchio said:
because Craig Federighi knows the code and reports directly to Cook?
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Because both of them are under a gag order, so who cares who reports to whom anyway within Apple?! :eek:
 
HiRez said:
Anyway, how does Tim Cook know there is no "back door"? We've already seen how the NSA and other similar agencies can gain access to data without being detected. And as noted in a comment above, now they are intercepting iPhones before they even get to customers, that's about as big of a door as you could imagine.
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You have been misreading things or you are intentionally misquoting.
There is no indication that the NSA could do anything by intercepting an iPhone made in 2014 before it is shipped to a customer. There were reports about the year 2008. That was before iOS encrypted the Flash drive.

Can the NSA gain access to Apple servers without being detected? We have evidence that Apple can detect attacks and doesn't care if they have to close down access to all developers for two weeks to clean up and do whatever needs to be done to secure their servers. Of course there is the possibility that the NSA employs undetectable hacking fairies instead of humans. But I don't think so.

HiRez said:
And we now know that the NSA paid off the people who made RSA encryption to insert a back door so they can break that encryption at will. And if you think that's the only thing of that type they have going, you are very naive.
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That is again misunderstanding or misrepresenting. They paid RSA to include a flawed random number generation algorithm containing. It is indeed quite likely (not proven) that this algorithm contained a back door. However, very shortly afterwards cryptographers figured out that this algorithm _could_ contain a backdoor: There are many algorithms where nobody knows a method to introduce a backdoor, but with this algorithm, it was shown how to produce a backdoor, with no possibility to decide if there was indeed a backdoor or not - and with that state of affairs, known in about 2005, nobody actually used that random number algorithm. So the purpose was "to break that encryption at will", but it was a failure. Nobody uses this algorithm, so it doesn't help the NSA breaking anything.
 
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mabhatter said:
I would guess the NSA approach is more "drive by" than asking permission. iOS isn't that hard to hack if encryption is turned on. I'd grease that if an Apple Beta suddenly plugged a hole the NSA was using Tim (or Legal) might get an National Security Letter to quash the patch. But stuff like that is going to go thru legal directly and those come with a gag order.. So Legal cannot even tell the CEO they recieved such a letter.. The manager just pulls the patch as ordered and nobody knows.
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You really don't know what you are talking about. There hasn't been any iOS exploit without having the device in your hand for several years. You should maybe read up on Apple's publicly available documentation.

And you really overestimate the legal power of the NSA. They can order Apple to keep quiet about something. They cannot tell order Apple to lie, or to do anything.
 
This means absolutely nothing. NSA captures all of the data from outside the datacenter.

From there it's a simple matter of obtaining the SSL key via a National Security Letter.
 
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