CIA
sought to hack Apple iPhones from earliest days: The Intercept
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[March 10, 2015]
By Eric Auchard
FRANKFURT (Reuters) - CIA researchers have
worked for nearly a decade to break the security protecting Apple
<AAPL.O> phones and tablets, investigative news site The Intercept
reported on Tuesday, citing documents obtained from NSA whistleblower
Edward Snowden.
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The report cites top-secret U.S. documents that suggest U.S.
government researchers had created a version of XCode, Apple's
software application development tool, to create surveillance
backdoors into programs distributed on Apple's App Store.
The Intercept has in the past published a number of reports from
documents released by whistleblower Snowden. The site's editors
include Glenn Greenwald, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work in
reporting on Snowden's revelations, and by Oscar-winning documentary
maker Laura Poitras.
It said the latest documents, which covered a period from 2006 to
2013, stop short of proving whether U.S. intelligence researchers
had succeeded in breaking Apple's encryption coding, which secures
user data and communications.
Efforts to break into Apple products by government security
researchers started as early as 2006, a year before Apple introduced
its first iPhone and continued through the launch of the iPad in
2010 and beyond, The Intercept said.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2015/Mar/10/images/ads/current/ccaonline_sda050208.png) Breeching Apple security was part of a top-secret program by the
U.S. government, aided by British intelligence researchers, to hack
"secure communications products, both foreign and domestic"
including Google Android phones, it said.
Silicon Valley technology companies have in recent months sought to
restore trust among consumers around the world that their products
have not become tools for widespread government surveillance of
citizens.
Last September, Apple strengthened encryption methods for data
stored on iPhones, saying the changes meant the company no longer
had any way to extract customer data on the devices, even if a
government ordered it to with a search warrant. Silicon Valley rival
Google Inc <GOOGL.O> said shortly afterward that it also planned to
increase the use of stronger encryption tools.
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Both companies said the moves were aimed at protecting the privacy
of users of their products and that this was partly a response to
wide scale U.S. government spying on Internet users revealed by
Snowden in 2013.
An Apple spokesman pointed to public statements by Chief Executive
Tim Cook on privacy, but declined to comment further.
"I want to be absolutely clear that we have never worked with any
government agency from any country to create a backdoor in any of
our products or services," Cook wrote in a statement on privacy and
security published last year. "We have also never allowed access to
our servers. And we never will."
Leaders including U.S. President Barack Obama and British Prime
Minister David Cameron have expressed concern that turning such
privacy-enhancing tools into mass market features could prevent
governments from tracking militants planning attacks. The CIA did
not immediately reply to a request for comment.
(Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)
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