The CIA has been trying to hack Apple devices for years

The CIA has been trying to break the security of Apple devices for years.

A Tuesday report in The Intercept, which cites the Edward Snowden documents, detailed an annual conference called Jamboree in which intelligence researchers shared ways to penetrate Apple’s walled garden and obtain data.

These include a customized version of Apple’s Xcode development software, which the report said could be used to insert backdoors or extract encryption keys from other applications or force data to be sent to a third-party server.

Another tool can install keyloggers via Apple’s desktop operating system update tools.

The report does not make it clear how the CIA could have persuaded developers to use “poisoned” versions of these tools, or whether it ever managed to hack an Apple device.

But it is one of the most significant pieces of evidence yet to show that intelligence officials are concerned about trends toward default encryption.

“Only the user knows the security code. Apple and Google say they can’t crack this code. Neither do the police, even with a court order,” said CBS’ Bob Orr.

FBI Director James Comey rightly called this a “blackout” problem.

“Those charged with protecting our people do not always have access to the evidence they need to investigate crimes and prevent terrorism, even when they have the authority to do so,” Comey said at a conference at the Brookings Institution last year.

The other side of the coin: By trying to solve the problem with their own backdoor tools, intelligence agencies are discouraging Silicon Valley. This latest development is only expected to increase this tension.

Apple hasn’t commented on this story specifically, but maybe it doesn’t need to. When news of the backdoor surveillance spread, Tim Cook wrote a standing letter detailing Apple’s security policy:

“I want to make clear that we have never collaborated with any government agency in any country to create a backdoor in any of our products or services.”