I'm not a hacker, But I am a skeptic; wouldn't it behoove the Gov't to just pretend they had to pay a private hacker a boatload of greenbacks to crack an Iphone? I mean, that's the smart play, no?
> What would they stand to gain from that? They had to use a 0day on it, they would never use that on the general public.
Again that would be the beauty of it. If they did have to use a hack Apple didn't know about. We don't really know how they cracked it--only what "they said". Maybe it was a Day Zero, maybe it wasn't. If the NSA has access to Everthing that Everyone does online, (and Yes I do know that E2EE is unbreakable, but were Apple engineers using that to communicate?); its possible they know as much, if not more more, about the architecture than Apple does. Have you seen the size of their data centers, and the extremes they go to for spying on us.
And speaking of Gov't State sponsored crackers: here's a nice litte article about one of our (The USA's) allies [1] who break iOS, allegedly--When Ever They Want To, not a Five Eyes Nation but still a close ally.
