this post was submitted on 17 Jan 2025
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Best you can do is a disassembler that will turn it into readable assembly or some kind of best-guess pseudocode, and you'll have to reconstruct it into a higher level language from there by yourself. Or learn to read assembly I guess.
So if it's possible then it's possible for the government to have that done by people that are capable.
That would tell me then that it's more than likely not a national security concern, it's a profit concern. Apparently Zuckerberg was a major actor pushing for this ban as it is, he supposedly kept harping on the security aspect. :/
If the code were static and unchanging, sure. But it's not possible to conduct such analysis every time an update is issued on a continuing basis, without fast becoming a hundreds of millions of dollars or more program.
So the better question isn't whether it's possible — it's whether it's feasible. And the answer is no, it's not.
I think if pirates working on their bedroom PCs can release cracks and keygens only days after a game or other piece of software is out, then the government can probably keep up with app updates.
It's a lot easier to scan for very specific code behavior than it is to scan for "anything useful for espionage". And that still wouldn't solve the question of what their server software is doing or where the collected data is ending up.
Oh yeah, with the resources the government has, they are more than capable of reverse-engineering everything the app is doing.