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Experts at the CIA have been working for almost 10 years now to tap Apple’s security system on phones and tablets, The Intercept wrote this week based on reports acquired from NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden. However, the documents do not clearly say whether CIA was successful in it security breach efforts. The aforementioned files cover a period from 2006 to 2013.
The news site refers to top- secret U.S. records hinting that the federal experts had designed variant of XCode, Apple’s product application development tool, to gain indirect access to software available on Apple’s App Store.
The Intercept has already o history of releasing various reports from records discharged by Snowden. Among the site’s editors is Glenn Greenwald, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reports covering Snowden’s disclosures.
Research to break into Apple items by federal security analysts began in 2006, a year prior to Apple rollout of its first iPhone and went on until the dispatch of the iPad in 2010 and even past that. Furthermore, the effort of tapping into Apple security was aided by British intelligence specialists with the aim of to hacking secure communications items, both foreign and American and including Google Android telephones, the news site noted.
Meanwhile, Silicon Valley tech giants have been trying to restore trust among purchasers worldwide that their items have not turned into instruments for mass government tracking of users.
Last autumn, Apple reinforced encryption systems for data stored on iPhones, mentioning the tweaks implied the company no longer had any means to take out client information on the gadgets, even if a federal court order would have been released asking them to do so.
Shortly after that, Google also expressed its intentions to expand the utilization of stronger encryption methods. Both organizations said the shift was for ensuring the protection of clients’ privacy and that this was also a reaction to wide scale U.S. government snooping on Internet users uncovered by Snowden in 2013.
President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron have stated their worries that turning such security- enhancing tools into mass market options could impede governments from following criminals planning assaults.
An Apple representative refused to comment ton the recent news and pointed to public declarations of Chief Executive Tim Cook on data protection. Last year Cook firmly stated that Apple has never collaborated with any intelligence agency across the globe in terms of indirect access to their products, services and servers.
Image Source: Daily Star
