> This does not seem like an accurate statement. After the PRISM revelations, which named Apple, Apple said they were unaware of the program and were not giving them access. As far as I know, this is the way things still stand today. The leaks claim access to Apple, Apple says they are not providing access. This may be explained through either party lying, or by the FBI being able to access Apple without their cooperation

Of course, gag orders (and PR common sense), prevent them from giving you this information.

But given what we know about the NSA and the context around it, I'm enclined to trust The Guardian and Snowden about it.

> This also seems inaccurate. Apple has never claimed you need to buy a new phone if the home button breaks. The actual issue is that the home button is part of the security system of the phone, runs its own fingerprint detection and is paired with the mainboard, and thus cannot be replaced without updating this pairing, otherwise there would be a trivial security break for the fingerprint protection. As a result, only Apple have the required access to replace the button, and thus third-party replacements are impossible.

No, the failure I'm refering to is of the iPhone 4 home button, which didn't have a fingerprint sensor yet.

Dang, I'm keen to understand the process here on HN because I can see my reply is hidden, not flagged. It is only visible to me when I am logged in. Where can I read about your framework that you use to make decisions like this?

> and thus cannot be replaced without updating this pairing

Congrats, you've successfully swallowed both the marketing of Apple the corporation, and the marketing of the 'benevolent' rentier hacker empire that is America! [1]

I believe PRISM, Crypto AG, Dual_EC_DRBG, Intel Management Engine, etc. are just the tip of the iceberg. I think we're only just now starting to understand the massive impacts of the continued existence of these backdoors. The immense covert power the NSA has had since the beginning of the digital age (and in the case of the CIA-owned Crypto AG, even long before [2]), most of these powers it has actually been able to keep post-Snowden. Have you heard of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which Snowden revealed is used extensively by the NSA [3]? If yes, then you know that it is undemocratic, yes? We cannot have courts that are closed, and at the same time call ourselves a democratic country. That is Doublespeak.

Is it strange that many are starting to see the US as essentially the biggest propaganda machine in our new hyperconnected digital world? That it is selling the wasteful consumerist nuclear family way of life, plundering the commons, while at the same time being a militant (military industrial complex) hypocritical rogue agent through parasitical corporate neo-colonial practices [4]?

How many times do these things need to happen for us to start believing it?

Fuck Captain America. Fuck Hollywood. Fuck the NSA powered US empire. Fuck the corporate charter.

I am talking about the power we humans have given to these ideas. I mean the people in them no harm. I am campaigning for us to collectively transcend these ideas and to stop destroying our earth's capacity to support humanity. The idea of America, the NSA etc. are in actual fact metaphysical power systems that do violence to hundreds of millions of people, daily [5]. The sooner we dismantle the current racist systems [6], especially black-box surveillance apparatus, and shift away from Platform Surveillance Capitalism and move towards Protocol Cooperativism, the better. We can do this using technologies like Ceptr and the Holographic chain pattern/framework by the MetaCurrency Project (an agent-centric Ruby on Rails-type framework for distributed networking applications, built using ideas from Git and BitTorrent)[7].

I believe Commons based peer production (instead of firm production) has to be our future. For beautiful visions I often turn to the works of Kevin Carson, Arthur Brock and Eric Harris-Braun.

[1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...

[2] https://www.npr.org/2020/03/05/812499752/uncovering-the-cias...

[3] https://theintercept.com/2019/10/10/fbi-nsa-mass-surveillanc...

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btF6nKHo2i0

[5] http://www.openculture.com/2017/11/carl-jung-psychoanalyzes-...

[6] https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/banking-against-black-ca...

[7] https://medium.com/holochain/holochain-reinventing-applicati...