Basically, few people are able to escape the "Snowden good, US Gov bad" groupthink and really see what happened with Snowden. The guy was a massive traitor that made the US much, much less safe for probably a very long time. Remember US Gov actually DOES care about your rights. The CCP and Putin do NOT. He made the latter much stronger.
The revelations didn't even show anything malicious. He basically won the court of opinion with all his interviews and books because his opponent literally can't argue back (would reveal classified info). He sucks, and hopefully more people will come around to it, though I fear the groupthink is too strong.
Yes. The whole existence of NSO shows that the iPhone is preeminent in platform security. No one pays hundreds of thousands of dollars to access an easily exploitable system.
Security is a lot more than just the OS. Modern iPhones have security chips that ensure the integrity of the main OS during boot and while running. A large part of Apple's security excellence comes from their hardware security integrated with their software/firmware.
If anyone thinks any non-Apple platform is more secure than modern iPhone/Macbooks running iOS/macOS, you are dead wrong. Apple's security is far ahead of other platforms.
But the Stasi was a secret police in a totalitarian state, not a liberal democracy. Apples to oranges. Good faith actors in government, with intense oversight from elected officials, makes your concerns null and void.
Obviously not. Southwest issue isn't even close to having to do with FAA systems. Not everything is a cyber attack... most things are just accidental systems issues.
Everything in competition is about time and effort. No one cares if they figure it out 20 years down the road. It literally won't matter at that point, because the US will have much better by then. The world may be a different place, etc. It's all about the now.
Why are you citing a year+ old article? It's clearly out of date. iOS is a much more secure platform, and exploits are much rarer than Android exploits.
HN has really gone down in quality of readers/commenters.
Even though the article you linked is not about an iPhone, I'll respond as if it was, since there have been published iPhone vulnerabilities recently.
You rarely hear about Android exploits, since the devices are assumed insecure, whereas when an iPhone vulnerability comes out, that's a big deal. iPhones are miles ahead of Android, Pixel is the closest and they're still far.
Case in point: You never hear about how the government couldn't open some bad guy's Android, do you?