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Comment by fouc | Hacker News Reader

> unknown supply chain attacks.

Is that the case given that iPhones are manufactured in China?

My tinfoil hat theory is that they find it harder to hack iPhones to monitor their government officials.

The hardware is made in China but not the software. So it probably depends on how much oversight of the software the CCP has, and this decision implies not enough for their comfort.

Is it impossible for an adversary in China to modify an iPhone during manufacture in a way that Apple can't detect?

Opinions like this are largely from new cold war propaganda, but also projection. The US spys on everyone everywhere. PRISM for example. Pegasus being another.

Pegasus isn’t American.

Also, China has the capability to spy on everyone and their government is morally worse so of course they are. Social credit, concentration camps, etc

Strongly disagree. It's Israeli, but minor difference. The US has PRISM and newer operations that are just as if not more advanced. Can you show anything China has done. That's remotely close to what the US has done in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Indonesia, Panama, Grenada, Philippines, Japan, Yugoslavia, Laos, Cambodia, Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and the thousands of regime change operations the US has conducted? The US also incarcerates more people than any other country in the history of the world. We also have more murders by police than nearly any other country and far more than China. I can go on.

That makes no sense. The Chinese don't need to hack their people, let alone their own government workers, to find out what they are saying. It what world does govt compliance worker A need to literally hack govt busybee 1 to figure out if busybee 1 is work on their govt machine?!

> My tinfoil hat theory is that they find it harder to hack iPhones to monitor their government officials.

It is a fact that certain US agencies required Blackberry or Android, rather than iOS on iPhone, for this reason.

I believe this is no longer true. iOS devices are allowed in the DoD, for example.

I think it depends on whether the use is classified or not. I'm not aware of iPhone supporting red/black separation, not to mention a model without cameras for use in secure environments.

I'm not aware of any consumer phone that would follow a pure red/black architecture.

There are a bunch that are CNSSP-11 compliant, though: https://www.nsa.gov/Resources/Commercial-Solutions-for-Class...

I was careful to use past tense, as it was a fact, but I don't know now.

iPhones can be supervised and/or enrolled in MDM that allows for very high-granularity control of settings and logging etc

Source?

They hack iPhones without Apple knowing? I really don't think that's possible.

Maybe they do but one could just as well apply this logic to bans on Huawei telecom equipment.

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