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Jacob Appelbaum’s extraordinarily disingenuous claims about NSA penetration of Apple iPhones

“Jacob Appelbaum has yet another revelation from the Edward Snowden trove of documents: that the NSA has a backdoor into all of Apple’s iPhones,” Tim Worstall writes for Forbes. And I have no doubt at all that the NSA does indeed have the capability to crack an iPhone if it so wishes. But it’s what Appelbaum then goes on to say that is what I would call misinformation. At the very least it’s a disingenuous suggestion.”

Worstall writes, “The problem with the larger claim that Appelbaum is making is that it’s not actually backed up by the information in Snowden’s documents. Which includes this very important point: ‘According to leaked documents, the NSA claims a 100 percent success rate when it comes to implanting iOS devices with spyware. The documents suggest that the NSA needs physical access to a device to install the spyware…’ You can hack anything at all if you’ve got physical access to the hardware that you want to hack.”

“This latest from Appelbaum… make[s] me much less willing to trust his statements on this or any other matter,” Worstall writes. “He knows, as a security expert, that there are no secure systems if those who desire access gain physical access to the hardware. Yet even though he knows this point he goes on to claim a general backdoor and casts all sorts of aspersions about the motives that led to this. That’s just not credible, knowing what he already does about that physical access requirement. And those two things together make Appelbaum not credible to me I’m afraid.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: Visit the Apple-backed reformgovernmentsurveillance.com today.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Arline M.” for the heads up.]

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