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.
In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw
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.