iSpy: How the NSA Accesses Smartphone Data

Perhaps the reason that the outstanding Nokia N9 and N900 Meego products were so quickly and effectively killed had nothing to do with market acceptance, but had everything to do with the difficulty of compromising the security of that platform.

I consider my Nokia N9 to be the first and only smartphone I've owned that I can verifiably secure. It comes with the three security must-haves:

1. The ability to use packet capture so that I can monitor rogue activity.

2. The ability to invoke a firewall so that I can control and log inbound (and outbound) access.

3. And most importantly, vendor supported root, so that I can do the above without having to resort to someone's closed exploit to gain control of my device.

Nope,... I have (but no longer use) an N900,... Maemo/Meego died because there was little to no support for a third party app market... Meego was great for open source, but lousy for making profits. I still love my N900... and would use it if I could get decent integration with Google calendars & whatnot (yes, I know that they are security compromised).

Then,... Nokia was taken over by MS...

And if cracking the encryption is too hard, why -- the NSA can just sabotage it:

John Gilmore On How The NSA Sabotaged A Key Security Standard http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130909/11430124454/john-g...

Re: [Cryptography] Opening Discussion: Speculation on "BULLRUN" http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg123...

NSA attains the Holy Grail of spying, decodes vast swaths of Internet traffic http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/nsa-attains-the-holy...

I would like to welcome you all to the ranks of the Conspiracy Theory academy.

Now that you've realized that they really are out to get you, please send $10 to the secretary to get your membership card and blazer badge. Just call anyone at all, and ask for an information packet be sent.

No need to state your name, they already know who and where you are.

I don't think concern of data security can be dismiss for conspiracy theory anymore. And it's easy to see just by what Verizon admittingly does.

Android can do packet capture too with various apps. For iptables firewall, you have to root the phone, but AFWall+ is an app that can manage it. And with root, there are some apps or roms (like AOKP) that can manage what permissions an app is allowed.

It's probably better to use an international unlock version not tied to a carrier and preferably running AOSP (stock Android) without any google apps. But I decided to use Google service framework since its the only way to get the find my phone app to work correctly.

The only secure way of using a smartphone is not owning one.