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Comment by imaginenore | Hacker News Reader

All it takes is one secret court order to force them to leak the key to NSA.

They control the OS, they DO have access to everything.

Not if they designed it properly. That's like saying that all makers of encryption software can, if they really want to, access all data encrypted with their software.

Of course they can. All you have to do is leak passwords/private keys.

An OS is actually much more powerful, it controls everything, it has direct access to memory. If a user can see his photo, the OS can.

> Not if they designed it properly.

You can (and always should) design encryption code without having a single root key. Entirely open sourcing that code should not make any difference to the security of the encrypted data.

And then NSA forces Apple I to issue the OS update that breaks all your efforts.

That sort of order is out of scope of anything a US court can order, and I believe that an Apple employee would leak it before they complied with such an order.

> That sort of order is out of scope of anything a US court can order

How do you know that? Secret court orders are secret. "National security" trumps everything these days.

LavaBit chose to shut down rather to insert a backdoor that was forced on them. I doubt Apple will shut down over that.

And thanks to Snowden we know Apple's products have been backdoored already.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/catalog-reveals-ns...

http://www.infoworld.com/article/2609310/hacking/apple--cisc...

They don't need to create a special backdoor for the government, Apple has it's own backdoor that it can share with the government if needed... (they have full control of your device already when you are online)

But the laws that makes them legal are not secret.

The laws? I'm pretty sure mass surveillance is unconstitutional, that didn't stop them.

Are you saying it's outside of scope for NSA to forcefully install a backdoor or request encryption keys?

How do you explain LavaBit?

How do explain NSA's hardware in data centers?

How do you explain NSA's hardware in cell phone providers centers?

How do you explain NSA's backdoors in Microsoft's products?

How is that out of scope? Haven't they been doing exactly this for at least five years? Miscrosoft backdoors et al?

And I think an Apple employee is that last person that would leak anything. They work for Apple after all, starting to work there surely takes some abandonment of principle.

In the end, why would anybody feel assured by what someone believes someone else would do?

Edit: Why is imaginenore downvoted so heavily? His concerns seem rather rudimentary.

not quite, on the platform I am on you cannot extract passwords at all, they simply are not stored. encryption at the hardware level may have a backdoor but os level is similar.

lets be honest, if they want your data your the weakest link. if you want to be paranoid enough to go the route your thinking its far cheaper for them to take you to a back room and employ a hammer to you.

Doesn't matter if they are stored or not. If a user can access his files, so can the OS he is using.

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