It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I'd say 95% confidence Apple will lose. More interesting is that this is once again a good example of the media spending a lot of time covering something and getting most of it wrong. The fact that Tim Cook is lying, doesn't help. He's claiming the court is asking Apple to put a backdoor into it's products. Media has it all incorrect too, widely reporting that Apple is being asked to break the encryption.
Truth is the court order is very specific. For the one terrorist iPhone they are being asked to:
1 - disable the feature where if you incorrectly enter the password
10 times, the phone erases all data.
2 - provide a means so that the FBI can try passwords via an electronic means, eg Bluetooth, wifi, etc., instead of via the keyboard.
BTW, Trump is calling for a boycott on all Apple products until they comply.
I agree. All it will take is one terrorist attack while this argument is going on, and then Apple will need to explain how those who died were less important than those with I-Phones. Privacy is fine, but they are defending a dead terrorist privacy rights. Once you establish that the owner is such, it is not like you are defending the rights of innocent owners.
If the media reported it accurately it would not get the attention they want. I do understand you don't want to start down a slippery slope, but the way you put it from the court order it does not should so bad.
IMO, we should never have heard about it. The FBI should have quietly approached Apple, "pssst, can you do us a little favor?" and never made it public. They guy is dead, the guy is a terrorist.
I think apple is making a mistake but the first mistake was the FBI not doing this very quietly so the precedent was not set in the first place. Now Apple has put the government in a corner forcing the geeks at NSA to crack the whole i-phone security apparatus and making all I phones vulnerable. I have no doubt the boys at the puzzle palace in Ft Meade can do it even if it means taking the flash chip off the card and installing it in a machine designed to do nothing but read encrypted flash chips.
This overlooks the obvious: you can run an "app" on the phone. That app can implement ANY encryption technology that you choose! I.e., one that *Apple* can't crack! One that may change more often than a "mainstream phone supplier" (Apple) would likely want it to change (because Apple wants things to be compatible; bad guys only care that THEY all have the same "code"!).
Bad guys can throw a phone into a meat grinder or incinerate it at extremely high temperatures. Remove the battery, carry it out into the desert and drop it in a sand dune. Etc.
You've got a group that everyone *claims* is "tech savvy" and you're HOPING to "not be too far BEHIND them"?
Paraphrasing your initial comment:
"All it will take is one terrorist attack AFTER APPLE HAS BEEN COERCED INTO COMPLIANCE, and then THE FBI will need to explain how those folks died DESPITE the lost privacy."
Cracking is possible for anything. It's the matter of time. When I was working team of guys took 6 months to crack a system with security rating of B2. I believe FBI wants to save time to get going with their investigation; possibly a matter of national security. There is no such thing as perfectly secured anything in this world. Apple is not above law, they are just doing political stunt(kind of an advertisement of their OS)
One funny story I heard about cracking ws Charles Mansons computer. The government tried for a long time to crack a file on a computer found at his place. When they could not do it, he admitted that he did not have anything to do with comuters and it was just random key presses he did at one time.
That was what jumped into my mind the first time I heard pundits discussing the issue.
Understood that the immediate issue is disabling a certain feature on a single phone and writing an app to try many passwords against that phone... but I think their endgame is precedent because it really is a problem for law enforcement not to be able to get to these devices if/when they can demonstrate a legitimate need.
But so far, I have not heard anybody bring up two obvious-to-me points:
1) As you say, encryption can be implemented many ways. It seems like Apple is just putting this in to get a little marketing edge over the Android world - and, maybe, to avoid the hassle/exposure of guarding their database of backdoor PWs from intruders like China, North Korea, or organized crime interests.
But, in the end, it seems like the functionality will become universal as software solutions emerge, Android makers play catch-up, and computing power increases (I would guess encryption takes more horsepower implemented via an app than a chip).
So, within a few years, any Bad Guy with half a brain will have unbreakable encryption on their devices regardless of what happened with Apple. OTOH, maybe mainframe computing power will increase too - so that big organizations will have the horsepower to crack even the strongest encryption within a reasonable time
Should be interesting....
2) The precedent that the government seems to be looking to set would go beyond that single iPhone and beyond iPhones in general.
For instance, one of the outfits I work for gives me a laptop so I can VPN into their system. Said laptop has an encrypted hard drive - as do all of their corporate laptops - and I am guessing that if I do not supply the password, nobody on God's Green Earth is going to be able to read that drive without a few hundred years of supercomputer time.....
So I would think the government will be wanting a back door into corporate laptops too.... and once that backdoor would get out into the public sphere a lot of corporations would be feeling a lot of pain.
it seems to me that this seems more likely a case of the gov't covering its ass...we have the NSA that can recruit the smartest people in the world and they are saying they can't crack the encryption. I say bullshit...if they can't crack it, they don't deserve any future funding, if they can crack it, they have cracked it and don't want anyone to know that.
So, lets make it illegal to install "non-Apple-sanctioned" (and secretly blessed by the spooks) apps on phones? And, lets make sure there is no way an EXTERNAL DEVICE that can be manufactured by a hobbyist (e.g., $5 Raspberry Pi) can't interface to a STANDARD Apple-sanctioned app and exhange data that has been encrypted OUTSIDE of Apple's sight!
(i.e., we'll just remove any connectors, display, speaker and microphone from the phone and make it unusable by bad guys... OR, anyone else!)
Exactly. So, what's the outcome? Make it illegal to sell a device that doesn't contain "crackable" protections? And, make it illegal to publish information on how to BUILD such a device (even if "not for profit")?
And, just hope the bad guys obey *those* laws (while ignoring other laws!)?
Or, hackers wanting to hold your device hostage for ransomware.
Depends on the encryption technology used.
E.g., a one-time pad takes very little computational power to implement (i.e., YOU could encrypt and decrypt using a pencil and paper sitting at your kitchen table)
Esp if said encryption is intentionally designed with (secret) flaws.
Anyone recall "40 bit" encryption? :>
I see it as disheartening. It tells me that the folks who are supposed to be keeping us safe have no real options other than playing catch-up.
"Yeah, we've got some arabs, here, who want to know how to fly large aircraft. But, they aren't interested in knowing how to LAND said aircraft (presumably, that would be the FIRST thing you'd want to know as the ground can be pretty hard when encountered from a great height)..."
You *know* there will be stories about how the spooks were unable to prevent an attack despite having access to all that telephone metadata.
Or, the encrypted contents of phones (recall phones can be accessed remotely! You'd have to be pretty naive to think the spooks haven't figured out how to remotely, surreptitiously install an app on a specific phone that was "of interest" to them!)
Businesses (here) are concerned that commerce will move to foreign suppliers -- who provide better legal protections for this sort of stuff ("global market"). Why keep your sensitive corporate data in a cloud service run by a US firm -- subject to US laws that make its contents available (probably with a SECRET search order) -- when the internet can let you access a cloud service running in another country that doesn't have those same "risks"?
OTOH, I'm 100.0% sure this technology is not in use BY DEFAULT in their phones! (But, there's nothing to prevent the phones OWNER from having used it!)
I don't see why we have to figure out the outcome, the endgame of all encryption, for all devices, for the whole world, etc. That is an interesting debate, but it's not what's being asked for here in the current case. What is being asked for is very specific and very limited:
Prevent this one iPhone from erasing the evidence on it if the failed PWD attempts reach 20 and create some way for the FBI to be able to enter PWDS via Bluetooth, usb, wifi, etc.
All that has to be determined is if that is legal or not.
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