Leaker reveals which Pixels are vulnerable to Cellebrite phone hacking

The government has ways of twisting the arms of uncooperative people/organizations into providing all the backdoors they need. Everything from increased tax and regulatory scrutiny to "discovering" CSAM on executives' computers or phones.

The government does what it wants because it's the government. Mere laws generally don't stand in its way for long.

I think this is a very negative idea to promote: that laws should can be subverted. Everyone should believe that laws work and when they don't we should work to fix that, not assume that it can never be fixed.

The government certainly objected when Apple designed an implementation of encrypted cloud backups for iDevices.

That didn't stop Apple from eventually rolling out encrypted cloud backups anyway.

Apple also refused to insert a backdoor into iDevices when James Comey ordered them to do so. They took the FBI to court and forced them to back down.

Google is perfectly capable of fighting too, but their business model puts them at a huge disadvantage.

If you make your money spying on users to make ad sales more profitable, then you have no choice but to hand it over to any Federal, State or local agency that can convince a judge to issue a warrant.

It’s the truth, however. Blinding yourself to it won’t make governments any less inclined to bend (or outright break) any laws they deem necessary to achieve their goals. We should work to fix that, no question about it, but ignorance will not by itself improve the situation in imaginable any way.

I think it's healthy to imagine how authorities might abuse power and under what impetus, in order to head off those abuses. Laws have been subverted in the past, so it's rational to assume that they might be subverted in the future. This is actually a cornerstone of any effort to fix issues.

Well then why hasn’t the government “discovered” CSAM on apple executives’ computers? We know that at least last year iOS users who had reasonably modern hardware and kept up with software updates were very difficult to hack on par with Graphene, and last fall Apple introduced automatic reboots in iOS 18.1 which closed a lot of “wait for AFU exploit” paths off.

It can be fixed, but not through the same protocols and institutions that have been compromised.

This idea is based on empirical evidence.

Arrows impossibility theorem means someone will always be unhappy, and sometimes those people make the laws too.

On the other hand, it can be a grave mistake to confuse how things should be with how things are. Activists and whistleblowers should not act with the blind assumption that laws will protect them and that "minor" hurdles to law enforcement (i.e., the 5th amendment in the US) will be sufficient to protect them either.

I'm also unfortunately not convinced that some of these problems are tractible -- one of the core issues is that the legal systems of the world have adopted the third-party doctrine for warrants and so even if there was a legal right to prevent everyone's devices from being backdoored you would also have to depend on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple to be willing to go to court at great expense to defend your rights. I don't like to think of myself as being cynical, but I just don't believe that would happen. And if the company is happy to comply, law enforcement doesn't even need a warrant. I honestly don't see how anything other than technological solutions are on the table here.

(I am aware of the high-profile stuff with Apple and Google claiming to fight against backdoors in court. In this respect I must admit that I am a cynic -- Cellebrite/NSO/et al claim they can get into iPhones and Android devices and law enforcement agencies happily buy their products, so someone here is lying.)

>The government does what it wants because it's the government. Mere laws generally don't stand in its way for long.

Sounds an awful lot like terrorists.

Security theater for marketing purposes. End users have no way of verifying that their cloud backups are encrypted, and Apple is the same company that complied with the NSA's illegal, unconstitutional conspiracy to conduct warrantless bulk surveillance on American citizens and lie about it to congress: PRISM.

Fortunately, no intelligence officials faced any consequences whatsoever for perjuring themselves to congress, or for engaging in a unconstitutional criminal conspiracy, so we can trust that the system of laws we've developed is working as intended and that this will never happen again.