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Comment by foobarqux | Hacker News Reader

I am pretty sure you can retrieve data on multiple devices and also restore without the phone.

All of which is moot since Apple can simply be ordered to write software to leak or capture passwords and decryption keys.

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Actually within US law and case law, even the horrible Patriot act, that is not true. The government cannot require you to design your photo service (for example) to allow eavesdropping. They almost made that a law back in the 90s but enough tech companies freaked that it got shitcanned.

Similarly, you cannot be ordered to lie and say the NSA has not been given access to your servers, you can only be ordered not to discuss it if it has happened.

They do for certain technologies (see CALEA) but even for others they would be required to take reasonable effort to comply with court orders. Intercepting passwords isn't particularly difficult, assuming they don't have them already. Lavabit was required to do something like this.

That is not true. Remember Lavabit.

Hmm, yes. That makes sense. Being able to retrieve from a different device would blow the 'by device' idea apart. And you're also able to reset your password and have access to all of your stored information, which I think just further enforces the concept that nothing you're storing is unreadable by Apple(Or any requesting agency...).

I'm not sure how anything could be safely stored on their cloud(or any cloud), given these features.

And Apple can say "Nope" and make it all very public and take it all to the SCOTUS.

Besides the fact that they can't (as we have seen with NSLs) admitting that the outcome is contingent on policy means the (technical) security is broken.

Yeah, just like Lavabit and Yahoo, oh wait...

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