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Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

The US, through the Intel ME software, already got a backdoor in most laptop. Using PRISM, it also had one on most big Saas, and now that it's over, it probably has a similar one we don't know about given Snowden's revelations about xkeyscore and how it works.

It's very likely they also have a backdoor in Apple phone with a gag order, given Apple was part of PRISM and we can't check their proprietary system.

We also know China has backdoors to any software or hardware product you want to sell there.

So it is a problem that the UK is asking for this for us, but from their perspective, they are just catching up with the current horrible state of things.

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> very likely they also have a backdoor in Apple phone with a gag order, given Apple was part of PRISM

People keep repeating this as if PRISM was a voluntary, or even secretly cooperative, program.

PRISM was no such thing. PRISM was the US govt snarfing up whatever data they could (under questionable legal authority), but no one has ever alleged that the data they were snarfing was provided willingly or knowingly by Google, Apple, etc.

These companies are also victims of PRISM, not participants.

All have explicitly refuted claims of any backdoor into their systems. There is no evidence that they are lying, or being forced to lie.

> People keep repeating this as if PRISM was a voluntary, or even secretly cooperative, program. PRISM was no such thing.

Wheres the evidence to say they had no idea about it and it was purely an external hacking effort?

> All have explicitly refuted claims of any backdoor into their systems. There is no evidence that they are lying, or being forced to lie.

Except all the previous times they have lied because the government asked them to. Like the time they willingly gave all users push notifications to the US government and then lied and said they didn't, until it leaked and they admitted they did and then openly spoke about how the government had forced them to keep quiet about it.

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/12/06/apple-governments-surve...

Wikipedia clearly states:

PRISM collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies such as Google LLC and Apple under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

They were actively providing the data on request.

Sorry, I should have been more explicit. Of course all US companies comply with US court orders.

The controversial new revelation re: PRISM, via Snowden, was that NSA was also snarfing everything they could including unencrypted comms over frame relay/etc networks comprising, e.g., Google's internal inter-site networks.

To which all mentioned companies said "we were not aware of this, we never authorized a backdoor for LE at any level, this is a breach of trust and probably not legal, and now we'll encrypt everything between our internal systems too".

1 + 1 = 2

If they can ask whatever they want (they had secret courts that could provide any legal request), they have a massive data acquisition apparatus, they had many backdoors they actively used, and big companies complied while being silenced by a gag order, assuming they have direct backdoors provided officially today that we don't know about, and that companies with proprietary systems we can't check can't talk about, is just common sense at this point.

Why would you give them the benefit of the doubt when the 2 last decades of track record have given you all the reason not to, and that the next step is the logical conclusion?

Lions kill gazelles. But not this specific gazelle because I like this one?

But anyway, the point is moot, they don't even need to for this particular debate. They already have a lot. The UK therefor not matching them exactly is just them using a slightly parallel road for the same result.

It's a terrible thing either way for us. But I get the logic for them.

Oh, I don't trust any of the actors. But I trust the encryption math.

If the argument is that the encryption is compromised by weak factors or key escrow etc, then that is a really interesting conversation, on which I'd like to hear more informed opinions.

But if all we can do is speculate, my trust remains in the mathematics.

https://xkcd.com/538/

This applies to corps as well.

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