Have we lost iCloud Security to Gov't?

[CPTmom2wp]

"The FBI has documents and statements from the two people, as well as telephone records and documents recovered through a search of Manafort's iCloud account..............."
http://news.trust.org/item/20180605004323-1tdvc


Was this information acquired by the FBI legally, with a Subpoena, with Apple's cooperation, or some unknown, surreptitious means? Apple has always been insistent on not providing the government with personal information. Perhaps we should be keeping our data on our local storage devices instead of the cloud. There was also a reference to "encrypted messages" in the article, which would indicate that iMessage encryption.........questionable. Thoughts?

 

[Suture]

He could have been using a third-party app to send encrypted messages, which isn't uncommon at all in the US government.

 

[Rigby]

Was this information acquired by the FBI legally, with a Subpoena, with Apple's cooperation, or some unknown, surreptitious means? Apple has always been insistent on not providing the government with personal information.

That is not true in this generality. Apple's stance has always been to provide account information if required by the law (which usually means they require a search warrant). See here:

https://www.apple.com/privacy/government-information-requests/

Of course they can only provide what they have. End-to-end encrypted items (such as e.g. passwords stored in iCloud Keychain) cannot be decrypted even by Apple as far as is publicly known.

Perhaps we should be keeping our data on our local storage devices instead of the cloud. There was also a reference to "encrypted messages" in the article, which would indicate that iMessage encryption.........questionable. Thoughts?

The article doesn't say that the messages where retrieved from his iCloud account. That said, in some cases information can be recovered from an iCloud backup (which Apple can access) even if it was originally transmitted fully encrypted. This, BTW, does not only refer to governments but also hackers (e.g. the celebrity photos in the "fappening" scandal a few years ago were reportedly extracted from iCloud backups retrieved from hacked accounts). So it may be a good idea to stick with local iTunes backups if you are concerned about this.