Of course, if you buy an iPhone in Europe, and you want to use it any significant manner, you're getting spied on by US agencies as well:
- GPS: the wifi and celltower db queries that optimize the service are transferred into a foreign country.
- use Siri: uploads your whole address book to US servers before use
- use iCloud tabs: every URL you visit it uploaded to Apple's US servers
- turn on the only cloud backup solution available on the device, and all your data, including every SMS, every call and all your most private notes and photos are also transferred into the foreign country of the US, with a chance of it being analyzed by certain agencies.
In other words, this might qualify as getting spied on as well.
- GSM/CDMA: location and communications peers can be tracked neatly, over time, forever, in a manner that can be used to easily determine social interactions even based on proximity. Data very frequently extracted from your carrier for 'outsourced billing' purposes to Mossad/NSA via http://amdocs.com/
These are cases of making trade-offs for capability, not outright malware. And why limit it to the iPhone? Do you honestly believe Google is capturing less information?
Whereas if you buy an Android phone in Europe, you know for certain that your data and behavior are being examined by Google, and are available to US agencies.
> NSLs exist, and is there any reason to believe they're not enforceable for non-US data?
Given the pains the NSA took (no matter how tortured the logic got), to keep trying to claim they weren't spying on Americans [except when they talked to non-Americans, or talked to someone when outside the US, or when an otherwise American communication got routed outside the US, or they accidentally included American data in a sweep "targeted" at non-American data, etc.]... I think we have plenty of evidence that the opposite is true.
Assuming the data is available in the US (so no other country can get in the way), it's easier to demand non-US data than it is to demand US data. Don't forget: part of the detestable legal rationalizations behind this surveillance is that non-US people have no Fourth Amendment rights - eliminating many classes of potential or actual legal barriers.
I wouldn't try to minimize this issue - it's terrible that the Chinese are trying to fit spyware into unbranded phones like this. Perhaps the bright side here is that when the Chinese do try to commit electronic espionage, they're pretty clumsy about it.
BUT...
Given the way smartphones everywhere are made - China and elsewhere - it's impossible for even technical users to know that their phones aren't spying on them. While most of the software running on your smartphone's application processor is now open-source (if you're in the Android majority), the software running on the baseband processor is 100% closed source and secret. We don't know anything about the horrible agreements that have been made between shady government agencies and the baseband manufacturers like Qualcom.
False. The software running on your Android phone's application processor is not open source.
A significant fraction of it is based on a closed source fork of AOSP. The rest (both the Google Mobile Services layer, and the manufacturers customizations) are all closed source and have never been open.
> False. The software running on your Android phone's application processor is not open source.
You're skipping over an important practical distinction: The precise software running on the application processor may not be open source, but it is closely related to usable software that is. Given that, it's possible to learn quite a bit by comparing the behavior of the closed-source fork and the open-source base.
Is that as good as "open source all the way down"? Of course not. But it is a hell of a lot better than the "opaque binary blobs all the way down" offered by most of the alternatives.
>Is that as good as "open source all the way down"? Of course not. But it is a hell of a lot better than the "opaque binary blobs all the way down" offered by most of the alternatives.
I fail to see how. It's not like a partial binary blob is better than a full on binary blob. The opaque part might do anything too...
Qualcomm is American, but on the other hand, Chinese/Taiwanese companies like Spreadtrum and Mediatek which make the bulk of the processors in these unbranded phones have no incentive to cooperate with the US government (including the NSA).
Am I the only one to find this article really thin ?
Where is the disassembled code ? To whom the public key that signed the software belongs too ?
Which server it sends the info to exactly ?
If you start to get as paranoid as the entire forum is at the moment accusing blindly Apple, Google, Qualcomm etc. Why nobody asks for a simple piece of evidence for anything ? This could really be a cheap manipulation ...
There's a ton of these generic MTK-processor-based phones available online; I bought and played with a few a year or two ago. They range from "really crappy" to "pretty nice", but in most all cases you're stuck with the version of Android that they ship with, as there's no ongoing support, no upgrades from the vendor, etc.
On the software side of things the closest you can get is a phone running OsmocomBB. That only runs on some dumphones and is not useful from a user perspective, it is only for research. For smartphone software, the closest you can get is a phone running Replicant. That still has all the embedded proprietary software; baseband OS, bootloader, wifi/bluetooth/camera firmware etc.
On the hardware side of things, we have no ASICs with libre designs. I think there have been some cases with libre designs but none manufactured in large quantities. There are myriad patents covering various hardware processes, instruction sets, CPU stuff etc. See bunnie's talk about layers of openness and the Novena laptop for more on this.
RMS uses other people's phones, he doesn't have one himself, mainly due to the network side of things though.
Wow, I guess that there aren't really any "fully open" phones in that case.
For the truly paranoid (with or without reason), I guess that they would have to go the RMS route -- or find a payphone that isn't within sight of a security camera.
Agreed. But my question is still valid (and not deserving of the down votes) given that so many Americans do not react to their government's privacy and anti-democratic intrusions with the same disdain they have toward China's.
- GPS: the wifi and celltower db queries that optimize the service are transferred into a foreign country.
- use Siri: uploads your whole address book to US servers before use
- use iCloud tabs: every URL you visit it uploaded to Apple's US servers
- turn on the only cloud backup solution available on the device, and all your data, including every SMS, every call and all your most private notes and photos are also transferred into the foreign country of the US, with a chance of it being analyzed by certain agencies.
In other words, this might qualify as getting spied on as well.