Justice Department Officially Drops Lawsuit Against Apple in Ongoing iPhone Unlocking Dispute [Updated]

[BaldiMac]

No, it was stupid for Apple because that phone was going to get unlocked one way or another. Now they have to live with the fact that it can be unlocked and they don't know how it was done. That sure doesn't help their sales pitch.

Additionally, what "right" were they standing up for? Was it the right to defy a court order? If it was, I'd like to be able to use that, too, some day if I ever need to. Doubt it works.

You seem to not be very informed on the topic that you are commenting on. Perhaps you can read Apple's statements on the issues involved or any statements made in support of their case.

As far as rights involved, it's quite a few. From the top of my head:

Free speech
Privacy
Liberty
Due process
Equal protection
Involuntary servitude

 

[JohnGrey]

So, in a nutshell, your position is: I would rather have people die than sacrifice my security and privacy.

Sorry, but that's an untenable position, and, I might add, a morally derelict one.

It's untenable only if one is willing to sacrifice one's rights on the pyre of Security, which history has unceasingly shown is the means by which republics, made shaky by corruption as they inevitably are, give birth to the sort of fascism in which far more people die.

As for being morally derelict, it's anything but that. I accept that any morality, personal or civil, must be based on a dispassionate and logical rule of law and, as a result, that deference of law must be shown by the lesser to the greater. Irrespective of the hydra that the Federal State has become, it is the body politic, the people, and not the State, which is the sovereign. In concordance with that, the State is obliged to see that the discharge of its duties results in the least abridgement of the rights of the fewest number of people, which are the sovereign of the State. The state is not obliged to save the lives of individuals; we were assured protection of our ability to self-defence via a second amendment because the State by far lacks the passionate self-interest which we naturally exhibit in defence of our lives. The province of the State where physical defence is concerned is and always has been martial: the security of borders and the raising of armies. When the execution of martial duties introduces the abridgement of rights, the outcome has universally been deplorable, and deplored after the fact, whether Lincoln's unlawful suspension of habeas corpus or the interment of good, patriotic Japanese-Americans at Manzanar.

The reason that many of the Founders reject, some very vocally or in print, the notion that civil rights must give way to security is because when one accepts the primacy of the martial over the civil, the inevitable outcome is a State which favours expediency over principle, bellicosity over diplomacy, and the justice of the club over the justice of the letter.

 

[dk001]

...
Android phones are 10000x easier to get data from, I can tell you that from personal experience with running forensic investigations on them since they hit the market. Any investigator would rather see an Android phone used than an iPhone because it's going to make getting at the data so much simpler.
....

Does that include Android 5.1.1 (with encryption on) and Android 6.0?

 

[bradl]

Actually they will.
By law, the FBI must inform security system manufacturers of discovered/known weaknesses.

Not that I doubt you, but do you have a source for this? This would be good to know and would shut this entire thread down.

BL.

 

[tgara]

It's too bad that some vendetta you may or may not have with me is clouding your ability to look at this from FL350 and see what other lingering questions there are surrounding this case.

BL.

I have no vendetta or argument with you. It's your lazy analysis and sloppy thinking I take issue with.

 

[ctdonath]

So, in a nutshell, your position is: I would rather have people die than sacrifice my security and privacy.

Considering that this Administration has declared the likes of me (to wit: anyone showing conservative/constitutionalist/prepper/patriot tendencies to any degree) a potential terrorist (WTF?!), d@mn straight I want my security & privacy precisely because revealing it may result in _me_ being the one dying - not because I'm up to no good, but because someone who _is_ up to no good may wantonly construe my private information as violently actionable.

You forget that governments are quite prone to killing people.

You also forget that governments are not good at keeping other people's secrets. Some TSA grunt consented to a photo of their authorized-luggage master keys, which was published and resulted in complete sets being available on eBay within days. There are a lot of people willing to pay a lot of money for info about whatever back door the FBI would impose on Apple et al, rendering _your_ private data as practically cleartext to people looking to fleece you.

 

[diegogaja]

Yes. I've read the article and I'm rather familiar with the 4th amendment...

Once again...no 4th Amd rights were violated. The FBI had, LITERALLY, permission from the owner to access this phone and it's data (just in case you need reminding, it was the killers work phone, not his personal phone, therefore the FBI and Apple (during the period they were assisting) had every right to work on this phone. The 4th focuses on UNREASONABLE (based on your post you may be unfamiliar with that word) search and seizure. Which when dealing with criminal acts is not applicable because it is a REASONABLE search by LEO's.

Based on these 2 facts alone: permission from owner and investigating a crime, there are no pesky legal hoops or even the 4th amendment to stand in the way. It's LITERALLY doesn't apply here.

AS to the company that is assisting the FBI...it's likely NOT a software hack, but rather a hardware exploit that is quite involved.

Final thought: please take off your foil cap....

Have any of you read this article? You're all talking about one phone, in the case as it existed several weeks/months ago, in the past. I'm talking about the present, and the future.

Perhaps you missed where the government no longer needs to jump through any pesky legal hoops & suffer through public discourse on the matter, because some unelected, private company in a foreign nation, (some ally, thanks Israel) will give them software (which they apparently have) that enables them to simply breach iphone security as desired, and just get right on with trashing what little remains of the 4th amendment, as desired.

 

[dk001]

...
You just described the perfect phones for terrorists, pedophiles, rapists, murderers, cop killers, kidnappers and drug dealers. You're a genius!! A whole new growth market segment for Apple! Somebody call Phil Schiller!!

That's lame aside from being so wrong. If I was in that group and had a bit of resources I'd just hire someone to create a basic encryption code or use an app like Wickr and it wouldn't matter who made the phone nor much about how old it was. If you, a group, a business, or other collection of people can do this legally, lawbreakers and nefarious individual will do it too.
Knowing this, how would deliberately weakening the basic encryption on phones for daily use help? It wouldn't.
Besides, that wasn't the end game of the current administration.
[doublepost=1459279526][/doublepost]

It was stupid of Apple to not do this for the FBI behind closed doors. If they simply had unlocked the phone owned by San Bernardino County and handed it back to the FBI -- it was a court order after all -- then the FBI wouldn't have ventured down the path they took.

Apple asked for this issue to be private. The FBI is the one who played headline hero and invited the press to the submittal of the warrant based on the writ and cawed when it was issued.
This was played into the media in screaming full technicolor and Dolby Surround Sound by the FBI.

 

[diegogaja]

Already fixed. Current iOS and iPhone software combinations prevent this exploit on newer models...

They didn't say what they did though so unless Apple finds the bug themselves they won't be able to fix it.

 

[bradl]

I have no vendetta or argument with you. It's your lazy analysis and sloppy thinking I take issue with.

Yet you have had no counter to it except for assumptions you draw up in your head instead of looking at the incident on the whole, and relying on your biases instead.

Yet you accuse me of having sloppy thinking and lazy analysis. Case in point: the 'untenable and derelict' position of not trading security and privacy to save people from dying. I'm sure you remember that quote from the aforementioned 1st US Postmaster General, because he maintained that same 'untenable and derelict' position I do, which became one of the founding principles of this country.

You may want to examine your own 'lazy analysis and sloppy thinking' before accusing others of the same.

BL.

 

[kdarling]

It is my understanding that this "side loaded" OS, resident in RAM only, doesn't necessarily need to adhere to the same standard signature from update servers, etc.
That essentially it could bypass quite a few built in security measures.

Where did you hear that? According to court documents, it was supposed to be a slightly modified version of standard iOS, that would be loaded in DFU mode. That means signing.

If someone can sideload an OS onto an iPhone without Apple's signing, an OS that can disable login delays, then the iPhone is already in trouble, security wise. Much worse than anything the FBI asked for.

So a backdoor is a process (a synonym for method) for access. That process can be easy and instantaneous (as you implied) or it can be more involved...such as the backdoor the FBI was requesting. But that's semantics really.

I get what you're trying to say, but the thing is, no one ever has called password guessing or brute forcing a "back door". Moreover, time wise, a real back door is quicker than possibly taking over a half decade in the worst case

So saying this is a "back door" is like saying all the hundreds of millions of devices and web sites over the years that did not limit the number of login attempts, all have had a "back door" because a password could be guessed or brute forced. This is kind of like my 90 year old mother calling every software hack a "virus". It's poor semantics.

We need a different term for this request, because calling it a "back door" is inflammatory language, especially considering that

• it's not installable via remote control,
• it doesn't defeat the embedded encryption,
• it doesn't avoid authentication,
• it doesn't get around the core delay caused by stretching the key,
• it doesn't avoid possibly spending years finding a good password, and
• most importantly, Apple can easily set it up to be unusable on any device not under their direct control.

It's just a login delay hack.

I agree with you that this whole thing is more about whether or not the government can force a company to spend time and effort helping.

 

[OldSchoolMacGuy]

On some level the scary thing for me is what can be done quickly. If I'm going to a foreign country I could certainly be separated from my phone for short period of time. If that government can crack every phone in five minutes, they might use their border crossing as a type of wholesale surveillance process. I'm assuming that if a phone is encrypted, like this iPhone was, that it will take days to break it. I'm not a big enough target for anyone to bother doing that to my phone. But if it only takes five minutes to copy the phone and then break the encryption at leisure down the road, than maybe that happens to me next time I travel to China or Russia.

China would just detain you and take the phone if they wanted it. My boss helped make a number of tools for their government and he was always surprised how easy it was compared to designing tools for the US and other markets because you don't have to worry about violating anyones rights when they have none.

China would also likely just capture everything going on through your LTE connection when you're there.

 

[duffman9000]

I have no vendetta or argument with you. It's your lazy analysis and sloppy thinking I take issue with.

Lazy analysis? Looked into the mirror lately?

 

[Glideslope]

LOL, sure it is

Cheese,

This shows that Apple was right all along that it was not necessary for the government to make it weaken its encryption to get what it needed pursuant to its warrant, Neil Richards, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and many others have stated, "It’s an implicit concession by the government that its All Writs Act argument wasn’t a good one."

It's over until Congress Acts. So, it's over.

 

[dk001]

Cheese,

This shows that Apple was right all along that it was not necessary for the government to make it weaken its encryption to get what it needed pursuant to its warrant, Neil Richards, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, and many others have stated, "It’s an implicit concession by the government that its All Writs Act argument wasn’t a good one."

It's over until Congress Acts. So, it's over.

Except... Check out this recent article. After reading it all I can do is shake my head and look forward to an Administration change.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...-use-court-system-again-to-defeat-encryption/

 

[Rocketman]

I just want to say yea Apple.

FBI lied about breaking into the device to drop the case. Apple (and amicus) should pursue that claim to the bitter end. If FBI is shown to have lied in court, thousands of prosecutions can be reversed and we can empty the jails.

If you are in the camp they dropped the case to protect methods and sources, that's true, but they used the false claim to drop the case. They fraudulently entered it into prospective evidence!

I say prove it's true.

cite:

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...shooters-iphone.1962988/page-10#post-22732019

 

[Larry-K]

It's good the case was dropped. Not so good the FBI managed to access the iPhone. Overall though, the outcome is preferable to what could have been.

EDIT: What a waste of taxpayers money though. I'd be furious if I was American.

In case you haven't noticed, a lot of us are furious all the time, some are also fast.

 

[igorsky]

In a nutshell, "No worries Apple, we got a 15 year old to bypass the security".

Apple has never claimed that you can't hack their hardware.

 

[rowspaxe]

And finally, how much crow, humble pie, and rhubarb is the FBI going to have for dinner this week?

BL.

Its really an NSA problem. Israeli consultant firm outperforms NSA. By the way--why is this always presented as an encryption issue rather than a password issue.

 

[BurntReality]

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/boro...hless-after-f-b-i-spills-glass-of-water-on-it

I will just leave this here.

 

[rowspaxe]

The FBI is now publicly in the phone hacking business (along with other government departments like the NSA).

I would hope the got into the business in 1993 with WTC bombing. I personally was shocked NSA could not hack into an iphone 5c--breaking phones should be a top priority for anti terror enforcement

 

[jimbobb24]

I have always been on Apples side in this case because in general I just don't trust the Obama administrations handling of these powers or any other future administration be they "better" or (heaven help us) even worse.

However, after listening to some very smart libertarian lawyers- I changed my mind because for the most part Apple has been running a total PR scam and the actual case request was very small and not asking for a global backdoor at all, and the FBI even went back to Apple saying - hey if this is unreasonable lets figure out what you can help us with. Very disappointed as I learned more about the case to find that Apple has been pretty brazenly dishonest about the case. I guess if I were a lawyer I could figure that out on my own, but I am not.

 

[Rocketman]

Apple has never claimed that you can't hack their hardware.

The FBI and DoJ has not "for purposes of this suit". Perjury.

 

[Nuvi]

Its really an NSA problem. Israeli consultant firm outperforms NSA. By the way--why is this always presented as an encryption issue rather than a password issue.

Cellebrite is located in Israel but it's actually a subsidiary of Sun Corporation which is Japanese company. Anyway, this had nothing to do with ability to hack a mobile device. This was all about harnessing fear of terrorism so that laws could be changed and privacy of every person in this planet could be reduced (if US manages to squeeze in backdoor then every single country will want one too).

 

[rowspaxe]

...t's not like we're storing nuclear launch codes on our phones. This isn't the end of the world.

Unless your a member of isis in Belgium