When was the last time you heard about the FBI wanting access to an iPhone. Never, since that first incident. There is already a backdoor at the federal level, established by a national security letter.
Local police, naw they are on their own.
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Cops Suspect iOS 18 iPhones Are Communicating to Force Reboots, Making Unlocking Harder
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Local police, naw they are on their own.
It is not about protecting criminals, it IS about protecting people's rights against a police state and not opening avenues for corruption.
Once a major crime is committed, in most cases there is no suitable restitution that can be gained for the victim. Why because crimes against ordinary people are committed by criminals that have no assets.
This means that the only thing gained by the victim is resolution, which is pretty import to the victim, but not important enough to the world at large to open corruption opportunities for police and privacy invasion of law abiding citizens.
This reality is hard to accept in the current "everyone is a victim world view", but it is realistic reality.
Yeah you are right. Help the police do what they do best: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rampart_scandal
Personally I assume that everything I do digitally is trackable and retrievable by someone who seriously want to.
That`s why I keep my criminally great pizza dough recipe memorized and a copy stored somewhere nobody would imagine contains anything valuable. We don`t want to cause riots in Naples would we?
Uhhh... Noooo... No. We'll be nationalizing that pizza dough recipe. You see, all the pizza shops will have been burned in case there were untoward goings-on in their basements. So "The Project" has a section to start over with Trumpizza Hut. So, we'll be taking the brain...
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It`s kind of a 2FA decoy really. I`m prepared to give them the dough but won`t tell them I add 10 ml water and subtract 8,5 grams of flour. When they figure out that encryption they are exhausted and won`t get at what I`m actually hiding. My espresso blend and roast - kept away from Starbucks
It is crappola like this that business people I know do not travel outside of the US with their smartphones, personal or company issued ones. When they get to their destination they purchase a local burner phone. When they leave the burner gets crushed and burnt, or placed in a microwave to completely destroy its electronics. If they can use a VPN in their location what was on the burner goes into the company cloud storage.
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anything that makes
it
harder for law enforcement is fine with me.
it
harder for law enforcement is fine with me.
What US customs does is they take your Smartphone than pull you into a back office and demand you allow them access. They keep you in the office until you do. You are not under arrest but if you leave you don't get your phone back, you get an official receipt for the phone so they can claim you voluntarily surrendered it. When word got out about this these travelers would completely reset their phones to original out of the box, what I call on the iPhone the "Hello" screen. They than reloaded them with their cloud backups. Now it is burner phones.
Yep, Sometimes clean ordinary smartphones are provided for travelers to certain jurisdictions. They'll be a version or two old, and beat up a little, mixed brands, no special precautions. That hardware/software gets before/after Retina scans to reveal alterations in the phones payload and configuration. This includes the phone's signal carrier backplane, which operates more or less independently of the OS plus Apps layer. Sometimes these are left in service upon return, just to see. They get moved around and used for banal daily crap. And the findings are conclusive. State actors, foreign and domestic, are in it to win it.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. We should be recruiting the absolute best and most qualified people into law enforcement. Unfortunately, this occupation has been overly vilified to the point where most agencies can't get decent people through the door, let alone keep them. No one really worthy of the job wants to do it anymore.
This is a dual edge sword. Balancing civil liberties and the ability to bring wrong doers to account has been a challenge since the beginning of civilization. The best we have at the present is to have these decisions decided by the courts when they do arise. It isn't perfect, but it's the best thing going right now.
Making investigations HARDER is not the same as making them IMPOSSIBLE. IMHO people have every right to make it as hard as possible for the government to see their private information or data.
However, the rights of victims are often overlooked in the current political environment. And while defendants have a right to privacy, victims have a right to be free from harm. No need to go into tugging heartstrings with overt examples of domestic violence or crimes against children. It happens every day, and some of the most satisfying cases I've been involved with have been where violent or abusive individuals have been brought to justice by legal means before the court. All the while respecting due process, the Constitution, and the defendant's rights. There's no point in doing the job if you don't do it right. And well, if you break the law in the pursuit of justice then you're just another criminal and I've got no time for that.
The Ramparts scandal is a bit stale as an example, IMHO. There are better and more recent examples of law enforcement misconduct that punctuate the need for oversight and a cultural shift in how law enforcement views their role in society.
However, there are a lot of people who get into police work and other forms of law enforcement for all the right reasons. Some a desire to be public servants, others to take up for people who can't fight for themselves.
We owe it to ourselves as a society to recognize these people do exist, that they play an important role, and to encourage likeminded people to take up law enforcement as a career.
Otherwise, we will be relegated to being policed by an ever-increasing hoard of HS dropouts with GED's and the attitude that comes with a "warrior" mindset of ruling over people, rather than serving them.
Good, that said if they ever broke into my phone they would probably be disappointed. Pretty boring stuff in there.
Well this is additional reason to set the local backup to be encrypted! This is one of the first things that I do to prevent anyone from getting information from my iPhone. Of course once you have the backup of the device, there is no reason to hold on to the device.
Law enforcement officials in Detroit, Michigan are warning other police officers about an alleged iPhone change that causes Apple devices stored for forensic examination to spontaneously restart, reports 404 Media.
iPhones that are undergoing examination have apparently been rebooting, which makes them harder to unlock with brute force methods, and Michigan police think that it's due to a security feature that Apple added in iOS 18. A document found by 404 Media speculates that iPhones running iOS 18 are causing other iPhones to restart when those iPhones have been disconnected from a cellular network.After First Unlock, or AFU, denotes a device state where the owner has unlocked their device with a passcode or Face ID at least one time since it was powered on. It is easier for law enforcement to get into a device in AFU mode with iPhone unlocking tools from companies like Cellebrite. A restart apparently makes the process more difficult.
The digital forensics lab that noticed the issue had several iPhones in AFU state reboot, including iPhones in Airplane mode and one in a faraday box. Since a faraday box blocks all electronic signals from reaching a device, there wouldn't be a way for an iPhone running iOS 18 to communicate with an iPhone in a functional faraday box.
The police document speculates that this is "an iOS 18.0 security feature addition" because one device running iOS 18 also rebooted after a period of isolation and inactivity. Several other devices in the same area did not, however, restart, and there is no evidence that Apple has added a feature that causes older iPhones to reboot when in contact with an iPhone running iOS 18.
Law enforcement officials recommend isolating iOS 18 devices from other iPhones that are in an AFU state as further testing takes place.
Matthew Green, a cryptographer and Johns Hopkins professor told 404 Media that the law enforcement officials' hypothesis about iOS 18 devices is "deeply suspect," but he was impressed with the concept.
"The idea that phones should reboot periodically after an extended period with no network is absolutely brilliant and I'm amazed if indeed Apple did it on purpose," he said.
Note: Due to the political or social nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Political News forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.
Article Link: Cops Suspect iOS 18 iPhones Are Communicating to Force Reboots, Making Unlocking Harder
Actually I never saw a reason to change the Lock Screen shortcut buttons at the bottom, so that assumption that people would change them is false.
Hmm, must be specific to your devices as I have yet to see one of those in the last ten years.
I got a childhood friend at the center of a quite bad (historically worst for that nation) police scandal, being overly creative with evidence and construction of cases. He is guilty all right, and the behavior is typical from childhood onwards.
I do agree it is (more than) a bit stale, I was deliberately polarizing to underline that police can be seriously bad and that one cannot assume justice being the agenda. (If they can unlock it, they can fiddle with it too, but the guys who got the right gear don`t need the physical phone for that).
One more relevant case not long ago was a incident of serious police brutality where 2 perpetrators (police that is) conducted grave violence and was filmed. Two other officers confiscated the iPhone form a spectator filming all of it, stuck the phone to his face, unlocked it, and deleted the evidence. They missed another spectator who got everything filmed with his phone. All of the officers then lied about everything, and they falsified their report of the incident.
Even Internal Affairs couldn`t avoid to prosecute, but the cops in that district keeps on harassing the victim of their violence, friends and people with a relation to the victim including landlords. A prominent counter terrorist / Swat cop went public defending the scum.
Trouble is, the "core spirit" and "internal justice" prevents such behavior from being cleaned out, and the gung ho idiots rules, and that is a problem when the ethics are gone and the average cop don`t come across with a civil/normal mindset.
Have seen that in several public cases where innocents have served very long sentences and their innocence becomes evident. The "heroes" who caught them consistently sabotaging the reopening and and reopened cases. Which have lead to the accused being cleared and awarded significant amounts.
I just saw a beautiful documentary about a "Sheriff", when he passed the whole community showed up, not enough room in the church. The guys he busted were there too, not to mention those he kept out of destined trouble and sorted out by proper policing.
At the core of it all, bad cops can`t be bad cops unless they are permitted by superiors and society and protected by their colleagues. Three things to do: Holding the perpetrators to account, establish regimes that makes sure the conduct is right, and remove the political aspect of the executive force. Politicians should not be a part of law enforcement, the role of politicians is to write laws. The mix between politics and "bureaucracy/civil servants" is very often to blame for dysfunctional departments in many public segments.
I fully agree with your advocacy for recruitment for the right reasons and (social) intelligence. The department then have to make sure they don`t become corrupted by the staff already there.
Meanwhile, Apple`s job is to create secure devices and systems, and whilst not being perfect at all, it is as close as we can get at present.
That's what came to my mind first too, assuming that they are actually communicating with each other in the first place.
I have no idea how good the iPhone microphones and speakers are, but it wouldn't be completely insane to think they could transmit small amount of data between each other using beeps beyond the human hearing. Especially if we are talking about the frequency range of an adult (like police officers usually are). Back in school, the boys would blare out this high-pitched noise from their phones that all the students could hear but the teachers would be completely oblivious to.
What did police officers do before smartphones? Anything actually dangerous someone is doing would have evidence outside of the smartphone. Money transactions are traced etc. The only thing I see as being targeted here that you can do on your phone is speech. So in nations with free speech guarantees access to phones should not be so easy. Location data they get through carriers (we can talk about if they should be possible elsewhere but it is so access to the phone isn’t necessary).
According to the internet the frequency range of the iPhone 16 is within the range of human hearing. That doesn’t necessarily mean higher frequencies can’t be transmitted.
So they are saying that iPhones running iOS 18 will reboot if you are out in the woods, without cellular reception, for so much time? That is not dependable at all. Has to be a bug.
iPhones do still communicate with other phones, even when turned off, it's one of the features of the "find my" network Apple added a few generations ago to help deter thefts. I wonder if this is just another feature, whereby if lots of phones are in range of each other and they all report being unable to communicate their status to the find my network, they reboot as a bit of a failsafe. Would be simple to implement as part of the handshake.
It works both ways. A criminal organisation could have access to the same iPhone unlocking technology and use it to crack open stolen iPhones.
There is no such thing as a back door only for the “good guys”. Either your device is inherently unsecure, or it isn’t. Apple identified potential security flaw in their device, and are responding accordingly.
That’s all there is to it.