Prompted by the Jones case: Is all digital data really saved and retrievable? The mind boggles

To put it into perspective, I just checked my laptop library folder–just ebooks. Little over 31GB of data, almost 13K files. Can’t imagine why anyone would need THAT much space for text files on a phone–media is a lot more likely. Dick pics do add up!

Or maybe just sharing a lot of funny cat memes with Steve Bannon?

Let’s compromise and assume those creepy fucks are trading cat dick pics!

I’m assuming from what the news is saying, the many gigs of data were the entire phone dump, someone in the law firm forwarded that rather than selective content.

It’s still a lotta shit to have on a phone, dang. I’m super lax about ever deleting text messages but even so I occasionally have Signal bundle them up and send them in a CSV to my email so I can drop some of the really old stuff out of phone memory.

I mean, it’s almost certain that he does have at least some innocent personal material on his phone, and it might well be that that innocent material accounts for the lion’s share of the data dump. I mean, for all we know, maybe he really does collect cute cat videos as a hobby.

Reporting on the total size of the data, rather than the size of the relevant part, or at least broken down by file type, is irresponsible reporting, because the total number of bytes is almost certainly irrelevant.

I am not sure we know this is the case. I know Apple says it is the case but I would be really surprised if they haven’t built a way for them (Apple) to read customer messages.

Certainly US law enforcement and Apple have been going back and forth on this.

Somewhat off-topic, back in the Bush era, our Library Board reacted to rumors of such a possibility by voting to change our library data system so that check-out information would be deleted once the book had been checked back in, and verified as undamaged. So that information simply wouldn’t be there for Homeland Security goons to subpoena.

It turned out that this actually saved our library system some money, in that it was a sizeable reduction in the amount of data we had to store online (and smaller, faster backups, too).

We did get a few complaints, but just a few:
Patrons who wanted their checkout-list to see ‘which Agatha Christie books I haven’t read yet’ and ‘I checked out a murder mystery about a racehorse 2 or 3 years ago, but I can’t remember the title’ – mostly pretty minor complaints.

That is extremely unlikely. But if you have actual evidence for what makes you draw that conclusion, please provide it.

These tech companies have never been keen on user privacy. Do we have a smoking gun? No. But if you trust Apple with your data you are naive to think they will not use it for their own purposes.

(I am also pretty sure they only do encryption between two iPhones…if you send to an Android then no encryption. They totally could, but they don’t.)

Also, remember the NSA is hoovering up everything you send. The likes of AT&T are in cahoots. It should not be shocking if Apple and Google and so on are too.

Guys, it wasn’t a phone.

It was a 300 gigabyte image of the main hard drive used by Infowars’s lead attorney in their Connecticut Sandy Hook trial.

In this 300 gigabytes were 2-3 gigs of Alex Jones’ cell phone records. But there was 297 gigabytes which were NOT Alex Jones cell phones but ARE critical to his defense. Financials. Emails. Excel charts. Schedules. Memorandums written by the lead attorney. Defense notes and theories.

So, no, Alex didn’t have a cell phone with over 100 gigs of data. Not even close.

Forget about the gun, you don’t even have the smoke.

Maybe, but you could say this about virtually every single business on the planet. You yourself are trusting this very website with your data, does that make you naive? Either way, it’s a non-sequitur that doesn’t back up your position that Apple can read users iMessages.

No, you’re wrong about that. All Apple devices that use iMessage are E2E encrypted, so it includes iPhones, iPads, Watches and Macs. The post you commented on explicitly said “iMessage,” not SMS texting to Android. But hey, let’s lower the bar a bit—do you have evidence that Apple is reading users unencrypted SMS texts?

Another non-sequitur.

None of those articles offers any evidence that Apple is reading your messages, so I guess the answer to my question is no, you don’t have any evidence.

That doesn’t mean Apple is perfect. It sucks that Apple still holds the decryption key to iCloud backups (from which they can access your backed up messages when presented with a legal warrant, but that is completely different from breaking the E2E encryption) and its plan on handling CSAM has the potential to be very worrying, but has Apple broken its own encryption so it can read our 2am drunk texts justbecause? No.

You have faith in the corporation despite no evidence that their goal is to protect your interests.

You asked for evidence and I gave you abundant evidence that Apple is not working in your interest or protecting your data or concerned with your privacy. I showed above that the FBI decrypted Apple messages.

Waiting for your citations (other than Apple webpages).

Apple steadfastly not giving in to the FBI’s demand that they develop a version of iOS with a backdoor is evidence. That’s from your own wiki link.

No, what I asked for is evidence that Apple has figured out a way to read E2EE’d iMessages (and ostensibly is already doing it). You still haven’t haven’t shown a shred of any evidence. None of your links do either.

You’re talking about the iCloud backup? As I mentioned, that is not the same thing as breaking the E2EE. The iCloud backup is basically like printing out your conversations and handing them to Apple. So long as you don’t do that, there is no way Apple can read you messages (outside of an exploit, anyway, which is not what we’re talking about here). That’s why the FBI is always pissed at Apple. It is the FBI’s wet dream that Apple would do what you think they have already done and quite obviously they have not done it. The null hypothesis, therefore, is that they have not done it.