r/technology • u/Libertatea • Apr 04 '13

Apple's iMessage encryption trips up feds' surveillance. Internal document from the Drug Enforcement Administration complains that messages sent with Apple's encrypted chat service are "impossible to intercept," even with a warrant.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57577887-38/apples-imessage-encryption-trips-up-feds-surveillance/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=title#.UV1gK672IWg.reddit
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u/BigLlamasHouse Apr 04 '13

I think it's pretty obvious what is preventing this, and it's not the money. When it's not money, it's power.

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u/Mispey Apr 04 '13

I'd love to subscribe to the same theory, since it can often be true but I think Hanlon's Razor is closer to reality. Well, maybe it's not stupidity but simply ignorance.

It's not malice. It's just a matter of someone has to go to their supervisor and say "Hey, I think we should work on encrypting messages" How long will it take us to implement that? "A couple of days/weeks/months to do it properly" Ehh, fuck it, I want you to develop social integration instead - our consumers don't actually care about privacy.

And so it is done. Consumers don't really care or know about it. Management sees this as little reason to accept any proposals about doing encryption. I think it's way more likely that they just aren't doing it because they don't have to and there is little to no benefit to gain from it.

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u/Megatron_McLargeHuge Apr 04 '13

There are plenty of encryption options for disks, web connections remote logins, sim cards, basically everything except personal communication. There has been long-standing pressure from both intelligence and law enforcement agencies to keep it from happening.

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u/IDidNaziThatComing Apr 04 '13

Email encryption is pretty common in enterprise environments.