Oddbean

Really really liked this comment on your article: “Fatesrider Fatesrider Ars Legatus Legionis 11y 19,951 Subscriptor quamquam quid loquor said: Sounds incredibly plausible that this was the NSA at work. I doubt Apple is working actively with the NSA, but who knows what they could have been legally compelled to do. My bet is China. Apple doesn't manufacture iPhones in the U.S. They're made in China and Vietnam (a close ally of China). There are some parts made in the U.S., but they're shipped to the manufacturing centers overseas. Access to the devices involved is probably fairly simple. And analysis of the components of those devices is probably equally simple - and probably quite covert. Russian and China have a much longer history of adversarial exchanges than cooperative ones in the past, with only some of the 20th century showing any signs of thawing. They each think of the other as less than human, but if mutual interests demand cooperaiton, they're often pragmatic enough to do that. Doing that provides both sides, more with China lately than with Russia, to slip in spies and other means of data gathering. Without any direct proof, I've felt that Kaspersky has primarily been a convenient way to engender trust with the West by "outing" obsolete spywear/malware/etc. as a "favor" once a better variant has been created and deployed. In short, it's mostly a propaganda arm of the Russian government. But they'd also know what exploits are out there that the Russians have made and deployed that they DON'T tell the world about until the Kremlin gives them the green light to do so, which would make their employees a very tempting target for bugging their phones. Since the Chinese government doesn't trust Russia any more than Russia trusts the Chinese government, and would want to know what Russia is doing to them before Kaspersky reveals it in some press statement, and having the ready access to the components of iPhones to reverse-engineer to exploit for spying purposes, I'd be far less inclined to say this was the NSA's doing. It smells a LOT more like what the Chinese have been doing for 40 years.”