Apple's iMessage encryption trips up feds' surveillance
Bottom line: if you really don't want the Feds to be able to intercept it, both the sender and the receiver must be using iMessage and be using Apple products.
The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?
Comments
Thanks for the post, Steve. This is good to know!
Today's unbreakable cipher will be tomorrow's Enigma.
The government cheats. If confronted by a crypto-system such as this one that they cannot easily defeat by technological means, they will simply notify Apple (or any other vendor) that if they wish to remain in business, they must backdoor the system and allow the government to easily recover the plaintext of any message, and they will further forbid Apple from revealing that fact to anyone.
in the long run, you could get far more real security by designing an Android App that used Twitter & Bit.ly as an internet dead-drop for messages coded using the text of some pre-agreed website that changes daily as a One-Time Pad. That way they not only couldn't read your messages, they wouldn't even be able to determine who was receiving them.