Do All Your Macs Belong To NSA, Too?? - Granite Grok

Do All Your Macs Belong To NSA, Too??

Macs aren't watching you?
Macs aren’t watching you?
Apparently, our Mac-toting readers think that even though Google (Don’t be evil) has fallen into the clutches of the NSA, and the Evil Empire of Redmond is mainlining all their encrypted data through a PRISM, darkly, that Apple disciples can remain smugly insulated in their unique MacOS platforms that NEVER fall prey to viruses and trojan horse programs. Hah! Glance right, then read on…

Once upon a time, in a land far far away, when creations were “Insanely Great”, the great and powerful Wizard of Jobs and his pal the Magician of Woz, created a truly unique operating system, called “MacOS”. Back then, it was all theirs, and truly unique, just as, over on the Dark Side, DOS belonged to Lord Bill of Gates, and his henchmen…. Bzzzzzp! Time for a reality check!

Nowadays, Macs are still better, but they run a standardized operating system (FreeBSD), with a lot of glossy features on top, and a terminal window which allows the initiated to peek at the inner workings when necessary – just as even the latest versions of Windoze still have remnants of DOS embedded in their lower regions (See Command Prompt) like some kind of prehistoric binary shrapnel (it’s meant to sound painful!).

Who's watching the Droid watchers? (Bloomberg Image)As you were reading my piece on Androids getting an NSA implant, you may have noticed the reference to “Security Enhanced Linux”, also sponsored by the NSA, which is purported to improve the security of Linux, and of course “operate invisibly” to the user. We have no doubt that it does indeed help keep hackers out, but does it let the NSA in?

your move NSAWell, FreeBSD is not that different from Linux (some would say it’s superior), and you might not be shocked to learn that, just like “Security Enhanced Linux”, there is also a “Security Enhanced BSD”, which has been built on top of the Trusted Mac framework and is considered more (Ahem) suitable for government use(!). Geeks can check out the specifications here.

So, the question to ask, as we did with the Android and Linux examples, is whether there is more going on here than making both the government and civilian infrastructure of the USA more resistant to hackers? Does the very enhancement which keeps one class of criminals out, let in the “Pirates of the Constitution”, instead? Even though Android, Linux, and BSD have not yet been shown to have the encryption backdoor which has been mainlining otherwise secret data directly from Windoze to PRISM since 1998, can we be certain it’s not there?

Dear Mac users – do you still feel luckier than everyone else? Well Do Ya?

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