The capability they were claiming to have would make a three letter agency very excited.
sorry i didn’t understand. didn’t you say you don’t doubt TLAs likely already have this capability?
oppressive regimes
most (all?) of whom are operating outside typical legal constraints and likely already have access to the million dollar exploit trade which already exists.
further, i’m not sure how this changes the landscape anyway? its not without precedent that variations on capabilities can be useful to more than one market segment concurrently?
trivial to discover and flag as malware
can you explain further what you mean by this? i’m not sure there’s anything trivial about conclusive analysis of the deep complexities and dependencies of modern smart devices
Apple and Google would also be very keen to find and squash whatever loophole let’s them record without showing the notification.
historically we’ve seen google can take over half a decade to address such things, afaict (welcome correction on this) apple’s generally been faster to respond, and i do agree apple’s current public image attire would be contrary to be seen to enable this. [not simping for apple btw, just stating that part of their brand currently seems to be invested in this]
in reality there are a confluence of many agendas and there’s likely ALOT of global users running non-bleeding edge or other variations on the myriad of sub-system components, regardless of what upstream entities like google implement. if you are aware of any conclusive downstream binary analyses please link
which if true would have been exposed/validated by security researchers long ago.
i agree the probability of discovery increases over time. and the landscape is growing more hostile to such activities. yet i’m not aware that a current lack of published discovery is actual proof it’s never happened.
tbh we have our doubts this leak is directly connected to solid proof “they are listening”.
but we’re not currently aware of any substantiated reasons to say with certainty “they’re absolutely not listening”