All my phone has is on it is an absolutely embarrassing amount of memes and pictures of my cat. There aren’t even any nudes on it, although maybe I should take some to traumatize any government agent who goes digging through it. Would serve them right.

The only way to be safe from your computer being wiretapped is to not use a computer.

When I served on jury duty duty, we heard how the cops used some type of software to try to get the messages off two phones but there was a speacial way that they needed to turn on the phone to prevent it from booting the OS. Someone screwed that part up with one of the phones, and the messages got wiped when it turned on.

Given the motivated, well-funded, well-staffed nature of many nations’ intelligence gathering divisions, it’s safe to assume anything you do on a computer with any kind of internet connection is probably available and ready to be analysed if/when you ever cross the threshold from potential target to target.

Isn’t there a very well-known Isreali tech company that can break iPhone encryption given enough times? This isn’t just a feeling but I also think there’s some zero-days intelligence agencies have planted and could be hiding

It totally depends on your definitions and which government you’re talking about. Israel’s use of pegasus malware to exfiltrate sensitive information from journalists and detractors is notorious. Considering how tight big tech in the US is with fascists (and the history of the NSA), it wouldn’t be a huge leap of logic to assume that they are at least trying to get backdoors installed and are making off the books deals with tech companies to acquire information extrajudicially.

There was a story from the podcast ‘Darknet Dairies’ where it was discovered that a journalist’s phone had tracking software uploaded to their phone in a zero click text. The target’s phone received a text in the middle of the night that uploaded the software and then deleted any history of the text being received. I think this is one of features of the Pegasus software sold by the NSO Group. And that was 5 or 6 years ago.

I swear to God, the government has done a good job of making people forget about the Snowden leak.

Many governments, all over the world, but especially the U.S. and China, can and are installing physical hardware backdoors into essentially every consumer grade phone and computer in the market.

I’m pretty sure they’ve broken into my phone a few times.

And got severely disappointed.

Just because they are out to get you, it doesn’t mean you’re not paranoid.

As long as it remains difficult and rare ….

• Apple and Google regular close vulnerabilities so anything based on those is very temporary
• I’m kind of fine if limited to intelligence agencies for national defense. For example partly brute forcing encryption would take significant time and computing power
• there are no visible indicators that it is being done for police action
• current us administration has no hesitation to do things like that to individuals out of personal spite, yet doesn’t appear to have

Of course they can, and do.

There used to be a time people would watch what they saud on their landlines while talking for fear they were being wiretapped.

Now nearly everyone is asking their wiretap for chili recipes and other dumb things.

I’ve been certain of it for years. I’ve assumed the NSA can access any american made technology since the Patriot act, IDF any Israeli made piece of technology, CCP any Chinese made…

They can get into most phones for sure, and even if you have GrapheneOS in a paranoid config they can get you if they put in significant effort. They will come at the data from a direction that doesn’t require compromising the phone itself if that’s too much challenge. You need to think about the total attack surface, the phone itself is just one thing. Ultimately it’s about what resources are necessary to get what they want, for most phones the resources are relatively minimal but also most people are not worth the resources to them.

You have to look at jail breaking iOS as one of the most powerful security movements in the history of computing.

Every time a new exploit would come out, jailbreakers would open source it, give out every detail. So Apple could fix it. That made the OS very secure. Like, to the point where jail breaking is in one way no longer possible.

Remember the time when you could jailbreak your phone just by downloading a PDF file? Imagine jailbreakers not open sourcing that but selling it to a shady company or government. Suddenly, every PDF file you get in an email can complete take over your phone.

You’re right - exploits exist that these companies hide from the people and from mobile manufacturers. They do so because they’ve built multi-million dollar models for using these exploits against people they want to target. But is there a universal exploit for all iOS? No. If it were, someone would be loading cydia on it and uploading a grainy video on X or whatever.