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.