Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Think about it for half a second...

Saying "we found some useful intelligence" hardly tips anyone off.

Besides who is stupid enough to use a work phone for personal matters. It's like no one would use their work phone to buy drugs except worse.
 
  • Like
Reactions: mrxak
I doubt they'll find anything useful however long they take, but that's kind of irrelevant when it comes to the argument they had with Apple. Apple themselves wanted to do all they could to help the FBI find any valuable info - just not to the point where it put the perfectly innocent info of everyone else at much greater risk.

With one major difference. The FBI is fighting terrorism, but Tim Cook's Co (Apple) ideas about 'protecting your privacy' may actually help terrorists to hide their trails. This is also why I believe that trusting Apple is a bad idea.

Apple was defending freedom and privacy, two key principles in our society that the terrorists are trying to destroy. A calm, reasonable and proportionate approach towards terrorists is the best way to fight them. A reactionary and authoritarian approach that tramples over civil liberties merely rewards them with exactly what they wanted, and arguably encourages further similar incidents in the future.

Undermining encryption for everyone is a much worse idea than protecting it even if it means that sometimes bad people can use it too. Bad people still drink water, eat food and breathe air - that doesn't mean we should make all water toxic, all food poisonous and all air unbreathable, just to stop them. 'Cutting your nose off to spite your face' is a phrase that I think sums up the argument against maintaining strong encryption fairly well.
 
Last edited:
With one major difference. The FBI is fighting terrorism, but Tim Cook's Co (Apple) ideas about 'protecting your privacy' may actually help terrorists to hide their trails. This is also why I believe that trusting Apple is a bad idea.

just like any company.

This is a straight forward process.... we also "trust" our ISP's not to hand all our habits over to to the govenment either.... But we "trust" them our ISP..


Not that it matters, but i don't care if they found stuff on the shooters iPhone or not useful for the FBI,, they opened the phone..... What they do is their business..

Thing about testing, weather it would be only other phones they have, or compromise all is irreverent...

Once u get to a forensics company all bets are off. and if anyone thinks privacy should be first only what Apple says, then they are criminals since they are putting any law above privacy.

This whole thing we are just clinging onto the idea that 'iPhone's re now encrypted', as a reason for everything, which is over-seeing the law.

Kinda makes u sick being an Apple user doesn't it.
 
Last edited:
Saying "we found some useful intelligence" hardly tips anyone off.

Of course it does, because according to some people the terrorists will be relaxing in the knowledge there can't possibly be any evidence on the phone. Let me see if I can find such a person. Oh, here's one...

Besides who is stupid enough to use a work phone for personal matters. It's like no one would use their work phone to buy drugs except worse.
 
Suppose they found some communications with some guy who lived 2 streets over and was involved in the planning of another attack. They check it out, arrest the guy, and it goes to court.

How much info on the unlock process ends up in open court?
 
Of course it does, because according to some people the terrorists will be relaxing in the knowledge there can't possibly be any evidence on the phone. Let me see if I can find such a person. Oh, here's one...

If I'd been in contact with these guys I would still be bricking myself. And it's not like the search has been low profile.
 
I'd laugh to my stomach if the FBI went though all of this, then turned round and said "nah, we can't do anything here."
 
  • Like
Reactions: mrxak
1) Whether they found anything or not is irrelevant. It has a duty to sift though all evidence and anything that can provide a lead or link. The way the FBI tried to accomplish this was wrong but it's end goal was not.

2) Why would the FBI release any info in an ongoing investigation? Why should we expect them to? It serves the public no good and just gives the bad guys a new data point about what information may or may not be in Feds possession.
 
Apple was not motivated by the substantive notion of defending our freedom and privacy. It was motivated by the fact that appearing to take the "high road" would generate more dollars. That's all. It's neither bad nor good; it just is.

If Apple knew it would make more money by caving to the FBI, then that's what it would have done.
 
  • Like
Reactions: nt5672
I'll be very surprised if they find anything. They tried to destroyed other phones, hard drives etc., why didn't they destroy this one? Because it doesn't contain anything.

The FBI is betting on the fact that the terrorists were not very smart and left something that was a mistake and is not at all obvious. Like one deleted text message that went to the wrong device, etc. I also think the chances are low, but based on all the other ways the government wastes millions of dollars, this way does not seem so bad.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Wondercow and mw360
So, the FIB ...

Time to stop playing GTA V for a while...
[doublepost=1459946036][/doublepost]
With one major difference. The FBI is fighting terrorism, but Tim Cook's Co (Apple) ideas about 'protecting your privacy' may actually help terrorists to hide their trails. This is also why I believe that trusting Apple is a bad idea.

Really? Do you actually believe that? You think that the "bad guys" are going to flock to the iPhone now to hide their sinister agendas? Go check out the dark web sometime and read more about the Anonymous group. It's not that hard to hide yourself using other methods. If you really want to be hidden, you can be. Apple is just doing what they feel is necessary to protect the "good guys" (aka you and me) from unlawful and really unnecessary surveillance.
 
maybe, but how many other phone companies boast about as much as Apple saying "we have our own ecyption in iOS" No one would flock to iPhone over that ?

Be better than an app which promises its own security than a phone which doesn't encrypt.

Hardware encryption is anyways better than software based. You can attack both, but software is easy much easier to fool. All u gotta do is look at antivirus scanning software and heuristic scanning to know it is not prefect.
 
my concern is that Tim is all talk, he took the high ground about our privacy and that he would fight this, FBI found a way to get in, and Apple has gone silent on what was such an important issue for them. As of today, of the FBI can access a locked iPhone, so can others, question is does Tim have the balls to acknowledge the method used and close it, he could in the new iPhone, but he will not.....Apple will hope this just goes away...
I see this a lot and, to be honest, it's really annoying: why do people assume that "as of today" the FBI can do this? Cellebrite has been around for years and has been unlocking iPhones, dumping the phone's data, whatever, for all that time. When this story first broke many, many people were asking "they need Apple to do it as their last resort? Why haven't they gone to Cellebrite?". They even sell devices to law enforcement agencies that allows the LEA to "hack" suspects' phones and tablets on-site (limited by the os and hardware model, of course).

As for Cook, well, we can't know if he'll acknowledge the method since no one's telling what method was used :confused: However, it is thought that it was related to deficiencies that were fixed in the iPhone 6.

Lastly, Apple's talk about security and privacy. Why would they keep talking about it now? So that they could sound like a child (or immature adult) that keeps going and going even though no one's arguing anymore? Remember: it was the FBI who wanted this played out in public and Apple's statements were mainly commenting on the FBI's statements.
 
  • Like
Reactions: dk001 and Bigsk8r
Any security op anywhere in the world would NEVER reveal what they found on a hacked device. That's really spycraft 101. That's why hundreds of thousands of docs are buried for decades, granted some likely somebody's gramma's recipe for cakes.
It's not a security operation like the NSA, it is the FBI. They are different outfits. The NSA would never have told the public that they asked Apple for help and that they could unlock this phone in the first place.
[doublepost=1459955835][/doublepost]
With one major difference. The FBI is fighting terrorism, but Tim Cook's Co (Apple) ideas about 'protecting your privacy' may actually help terrorists to hide their trails. This is also why I believe that trusting Apple is a bad idea.
Top people at the NSA are saying that Apple is actually doing the right thing. Yes, protecting your privacy will lead to protecting the secrets of some terrorists. But according to the NSA, the USA is on balance better off with the secrets of their citizens protected (plus the secrets of their police officers, the secrets of the FBI, military, politicians, banks, security sensitive companies), even though it can protects terrorists as well.
[doublepost=1459956152][/doublepost]
Yes, this is going to work with someone with a bomb strapped to them looking to kill as many as possible :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:

Even in that situation, a calm, reasonable and proportionate approach towards terrorists is still the best way to fight them. Or do you think police with machine guns wildly shooting at and killing everyone nearby would be better than a calm, reasonable, and proportionate approach? (In that situation, calm, reasonable and proportionate would be to try to get everyone away from the situation, while getting _one_ excellent shooter in).

But the calm, reasonable and proportionate approach is to start much earlier and keep idiots from doing stupid things. Clearly someone with a bomb strapped to himself is an idiot and getting to him much earlier and removing the motivation for doing something stupid would be much better and safer. Like building bridges instead of declaring that 1.6 billion muslims hate the USA.
[doublepost=1459956394][/doublepost]
Suppose they found some communications with some guy who lived 2 streets over and was involved in the planning of another attack. They check it out, arrest the guy, and it goes to court.

How much info on the unlock process ends up in open court?

I think they would ask Apple for help in court. Apple would testify that since the data is all encrypted (it _still_ is encrypted, the FBI just found a way to get at the key and decrypt it), it is basically impossible to forge any of the data on the phone during the unlocking process. You can mess up and destroy encrypted data, but you cannot forge it.

Apple would also testify that since this is a phone with an AppleID and without the correct password for that AppleID, the FBI couldn't have erased the phone and re-created it with completely faked data.
[doublepost=1459956605][/doublepost]
Saying "we found some useful intelligence" hardly tips anyone off.
Well, if you had been the guy who supplied the guns, "we found some useful intelligence" would worry you and would make you try to disappear.
 
Last edited:
I think they would ask Apple for help in court. Apple would testify that since the data is all encrypted (it _still_ is encrypted said:
One issue is chain of custody and the second the approved/documented method used to establish the evidence. There are some detailed posts on other threads from legal folks that explain the complicated nature of such info.
 
  • Like
Reactions: dk001
I'm still extremely skeptical as to whether they even got into this phone at all. First, they dropped the lawsuit like a hot potato when their "either you're with us or you're with the terrorists" ploy failed in public opinion (they also misjudged the legal merits of their case, which were weak).

Now, saying they found someone to hack the phone looks like a face-saving gambit. And since they can simply claim none of what they "found" should be visible due to "national security", there's no real way of knowing if they did in fact hack into the phone, is there? Or knowing what levels the hack succeeded in For example, maybe they got time stamps, senders, and recipients of messages, but not the message text itself. Does that count as a successful hack?

People have been taking the FBI at their word, but their word isn't worth much lately.
 
  • Like
Reactions: mrxak and SteveW928
No, they would not.

In all likely hood if the FBI found anything substantial they could leverage to go for a "Round 2" with either Apple or Google you can bet they and the DOJ are meeting as we speak.

So, I wouldn't say no.
Then again, with the FBI reaching out to help LEOs, the method will get out and it is a matter of time till the we get some semblance of what was really on that phone.

Till then, based on the FBI's current reply, the public and media will predominantely claim the FBI found nothing.
[doublepost=1459959204][/doublepost]
...
If I recall correctly didn't the shooters go above and beyond to destroy their computer hard drives and other cell phones? In that case, it sounds like they weren't taking risks on the government retrieving the information. I imagine the work phone would have been destroyed too had there been anything if significant value.

That said, you never know what kind of information they could pull off of it to help build a timeline (location data, calendar events, etc)- little bread crumbs that might help solve questions of the bigger puzzle.

That is the problem. Anything from a timeline perspective quite likely was in the form of an input/output of the device. This means that this information is already in hand via the carrier, email, tweet, or other avenue. Unless you input it manually into your device and never send it or back it up or... it has been captured or the movement captured.
I would be very surprised if there is anything of any significant value. Even at the bread crumb level. JMHO, YMMV. ;)
[doublepost=1459959418][/doublepost]
Suppose they found some communications with some guy who lived 2 streets over and was involved in the planning of another attack. They check it out, arrest the guy, and it goes to court.

How much info on the unlock process ends up in open court?

They would already have that. Every time the device was used to communicate or transmit, the FBI has. To whom, how long, and frequency. This "neighbor" would already be in the "go through their life with a fine toothed comb" process.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: mrxak and SteveW928
They're trying to determine whether Angry Birds is a national security threat or not.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.