The NSA Can Crack Your Smartphone And Has Been Able To For Years

The latest revelations in the NSA story have been published by Der Speigel, the German weekly news magazine. The point being made is that the NSA (and thus by association, GCHQ) can get into your smartphone and read much of the information on it:

The United States’ National Security Agency intelligence-gathering operation is capable of accessing user data from smart phones from all leading manufacturers. Top secret NSA documents that SPIEGEL has seen explicitly note that the NSA can tap into such information on Apple Apple iPhones, BlackBerry devices and Google Google‘s Android mobile operating system.

The documents state that it is possible for the NSA to tap most sensitive data held on these smart phones, including contact lists, SMS SMS traffic, notes and location information about where a user has been.

Quite where the magazine got the details isn’t known but given that one of the authors is Poitras the source is pretty obviously Edward Snowden.

This isn’t though a mass surveillance scheme. This is not akin to the agency’s habit of trying to read all the internet traffic it can lay its hands upon. Rather, this is much more like dedicated surveillance of named individuals. It’s that they are now capable of doing this across the various different operating systems  in a manner akin to the sort of thing the FBI might do if it had a warrant to allow it.

That the NSA probably didn’t have a warrant when it did it is the fly in that ointment of course.

Der Speigel goes on to claim that the NSA was able to access BlackBerry phones as well:

The documents also state that the NSA has succeeded in accessing the BlackBerry mail system, which is known to be very secure. This could mark a huge setback for the company, which has always claimed that its mail system is uncrackable.

In response to questions from SPIEGEL, BlackBerry officials stated, “It is not for us to comment on media reports regarding alleged government surveillance of telecommunications traffic.” The company said it had not programmed a “‘back door’ pipeline to our platform.”

I have a feeling that this is more about definitions than anything else. It’s been known for some time that people using BlackBerrys on public platforms could indeed be read. But those running on their own, perhaps firm level, systems cannot be. It’s entirely unclear whether Speigel means that those private platforms can now be cracked or whether it’s simply a restatement of what we already knew, that the public ones can be.