NSA Can Supposedly Hack Your Smartphone
The National Security Agency can supposedly spy directly on your smartphone. This is according to leaked documents from Germany’s Der Spiegel. Der Spiegel reports the NSA can “tap most sensitive data held on these smart phones, including contact lists, SMS traffic, notes and location information about where a user has been.” This is quite terrifying!
The internal documents talk about being able to infiltrate iPhones as they sync to a user’s computer and that the NSA briefly lost access to Blackberry in 2009, after a Canadian company acquired it. Currently, Der Spiegel only reports that the NSA taps iPhones, Blackberries and Android, but more could be revealed.
Smartphone makers, especially Apple, have claimed that agencies can’t read the encrypted messaging that are sent between devices of the same type (i.e. iMessage and BBM). However, since those messages are sent through a company-owned server, it is possible that the NSA could have access to them.