The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is a federal law enforcement agency under the United States Department of Justice, tasked with combating drug smuggling and use within the United States, that at times would need to intercept mobile communications to gather valuable data. But recent report from CNET suggest that Apple’s iMessage service is turning out to be a big pain to crack and intercept as iMessage’s encryption are not vulnerable to existing methods used by the DEA. Apple’s terms include a clause to share their iMessage details with governing agencies to comply with law enforcement is deemed necessary as does any other tech company like Google or Facebook. But as of now the laws only state backdoor access to be provided to agencies like DEA by all telecom operators and Apple not being a telecom operator is exempted from it.
Since its launch in 2011 Apple’s iMessage service has seen a rapid adaption which functions as a default messaging service for SMS and MMS across Apple devices like iPod touch, Macs, iPad and iPhone when a user is logged in using his Apple ID. The seamless integration into the OS makes it much easier to use a third party messenger service. The last stats provided by Apple indicate around 300 billion iMessages being sent till end of October 2012 which might be much higher right now.
So all of you enterprise users and other users concerned with security out there, here is a good piece of news for you to switch to iOS and iMessage.