A leaked White House memo reveals that the NSA already have a tool that allows them to bypass security on iPhone devices and access private user data. The current media frenzy about Apple’s stance on user privacy is likely to be a deliberately orchestrated distraction from the fact that the government already routinely accesses private information from Apple and Microsoft products. Apple CEO Tim Cook’s “protests” against FBI’s demands are a ploy to distract the public from the reality that there’s already a backdoor on every new iPhone that ships around the globe: the ability to load and execute modified firmware without user intervention. Counterpunch.org reports: Ostensibly software patches were intended to fix bugs. But they can just as easily install code that compromises sensitive data. I repeat: without user intervention. Apple isn’t alone in this regard. Has anyone noticed that the auto-update feature deployed with certain versions of Windows 10 is impossible to turn off using existing user controls? Update features, it would seem, are a bullseye for spies. And rightly so because they represent a novel way to quietly execute malicious software. This past September the Washington Post published a leaked memo from the White House which proposed that intelligence agencies leverage “provider-enabled remote access to [...]