Stefan Mileschin

The German press has discovered that the NSA has had the power to hack into smartphones, including the so-called super-secure Blackberry.

Top secret NSA documents seen by der Spiegel said iPhones, BlackBerry devices and Google's Android mobile operating system are all able to be hacked.

Apparently the NSA can take contact lists, SMS traffic, notes and location information about where a user has been.

The NSA has set up working groups to tackle each operating system, to gain secret access to the data held on the phones.

According to der Spiegel, the agency is particularly proud of how much data it can get out of an Apple iPhone and how they can use this to hack the computer they sync with.

The weapons of choice are "scripts" which enable additional access to at least 38 iPhone features.

Blackberrys have been hackable since 2009, where agents could see and read SMS traffic.

Briefly the NSA lost this ability after the Canadian company changed the way it compresses its data. Fortunately for the US, Britain's GCHQ intelligence agency regained access to BlackBerry data and told them how it did it.

The cache of documents also reveals that the NSA has succeeded in accessing the BlackBerry mail system, which was known to be very secure.

This could mark a huge setback for the company, which has always claimed that its mail system is uncrackable.

http://news.techeye.net/security/nsa...our-smartphone