NSA references original Macintosh ad in calling Steve Jobs Big Brother and iPhone owners zombies

An NSA presentation by NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden pointing to the potential of smart for government surveillance suggest thatSteve Jobs was an unwitting Big Brother figure by popularizing the devices and iPhone owners zombies for buying them.The reference, made in slides to German news siteSpiegel, is to the 1984 ad (below) crted for the launch of the original Macintosh.About 130 million people in the US have [a smartphone]. The mini-computers have become personal communiion centers, digital assistants and life coaches, and they often know more about their users than most users suspect.For an acy like the NSA, the data storage units are a goldmine, combining in a single device almost all the information that would interest an lice acy: social contacts, details about the user’s behavior and loion, interests (through srch terms, for example), photos and sometimes credit card s and s.The 2010 presentation,Exploring Current Trends, Targets and Techniques, describes steps the NSA was taking to into iOS, Android and devices, and refers to the range of data it is possible to extract.Under the hding “iPhone capability,” the NSA specialists list the kinds of data they can analyze in these cases. The document notes that there are small NSA programs, known as “scripts,” that can perform surveillance on 38 different ftures of the iPhone 3 and 4 operating systems. They include the mapping fture, voicemail and photos, as well as the Google rth, Facebook and Yahoo Messenger appliions.The presentation does not suggest that any of the smartphone or online companies werecomplicitin allowing access to user data, although it has been suggested thatdenialsmade by and others in regard to server access via the PRISM program may have been a matter ofcareful wording.The slides include two stills from the original Macintosh ad from 1984. famously aired the ad just once, relying on stations repting it in news reports at no cost to .