Friday, August 23, 2013

iMessage encryption not secure, never was

The DEA's "Special Operations Division" (SOD) was getting information from various intelligence agencies -- including the NSA, FBI and CIA -- and was using that to alert DEA, IRS and other government officials of investigations they might want to do, without revealing too many details. Those agencies were then told to "launder" (i.e., LIE, which was illegal in Pre-Post-Constitutional America) the information to pretend that they'd discovered any criminal activity through other means.

However, I was recently reminded of a story from just a few months before all of these revelations started coming out -- in which a DEA memo was "leaked," in which the DEA complains that Apple's iMessage encryption had "stymied" DEA agents from being able to spy on conversations. Except, as many people noted, this was clearly not true, because the iMessage encryption is not truly end-to-end. Apple holds the key itself, so the DEA can easily get the decrypted messages via Apple.

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