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Justice Department Wants Apple to Extract Data From 12 Other iPhones
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But the government is enlisting the court of public opinion on this, telling just part of the story, much like the current crop of political candidates do. And given the ignorance of the American populace, what ends up happening is that people think Apple is simply doing something wrong - or like the news is reporting, that they're worried about their marketing value.
"Pew poll finds when the government misinforms the public, the public is misinformed. Scientists baffled."
Bring back the whig party! LOL or just let the libertarian party take over and leave everyone alone.
Apple is doing the exact same thing, enlisting the court of public opinion. Why do you think Apple posted Tim Cook's letter to customers?
http://www.apple.com/customer-letter/
Hypothetically, if this was a German court, worst case they could close down Apple in Germany (in a situation where a US court could close down Apple in the USA), possibly in the EU. A US court cannot _force_ Apple to do something either, depending on what you mean by _force_.
Our Government was caught off guard when 911 happened, anyone think it's any different today? Does anyone really think forcing Apple to make this hacking iPhone software, will make us any safer then back when 911 was allowed to happen?
It's the same Government same bunch of Government people, just flopping around trying to find answers and have no real idea how to get them.
It's the same Government same bunch of Government people, just flopping around trying to find answers and have no real idea how to get them.
If they insist on "national security", the ex-NSA and CIA chief has spoken in public and said that unbreakable encryption is overall _helping_ US national security. With pro's and con's but an overall advantage for national security. And if you add in the financial cost, then he calls it "a slam dunk".
And really, I wouldn't expect anything of value on the phone of a terrorist who owned and destroyed two phones plus a hard drive, and didn't destroy his work phone.
Then we get into the realms of Apple products banned in countries x, y, and z.
Apple is in the business of creating/producing and making a few $'s too. Imagine if China dropped them, and what about Russia, and a few other markets...
Apple pursues its own interests-if Apple doesn't stand up on this they could loose serious markets, or worse be subject to cracking for other governments in interest of their security.
Myself i don't use the password as it just causes me something extra to have to do, each time i want to use my iPhone. But i am glad Apple gives me the choice of using it.
If Apple want to sell their products in a country then they need to play nice with the government in that country. Tim Cook has spoken of this I think. If he gives the US Government a backdoor, then China and Russia etc... will want access otherwise they will ban the sale of Apple products. By engineering their products to have no backdoor Apple can never be put in this scenario.
It's ironic that they worst thing the FBI/DoJ could have done here is to make it all big and public, because if they do win their case then China will know they can start leaning on Apple, especially as Tim Cook speaks openly about China being Apple's main growth market in the coming years!
...for a very narrow definition of "backdoor". A 6 digit PIN with anti-bruteforcing measures is a decent level of security. Remove the anti-bruteforcing and allow multiple combinations to be tried at high frequency and the actual cracking of the PIN is trivial: you might as well just unlock the phone for them. Saying its not a "backdoor" really is splitting hairs.
...which is now practical because phones have Touch ID so you don't have to type "c0rr3cTh0r53batt3rY$tapl3"* on an iPhone keyboard every time you want to use the phone.
However, what's the difference between "make us a custom iOS that lets us bruteforce the PIN" and "make us a custom iOS that lets us modify the fingerprint sensor and feed in a scanned fingerprint"?
If Apple concede to the first, its hard to later argue against the second.
* if 'correcthorsebatterystaple' is such a good password, then obviously substiting punctuation, numbers and mixed case must be better
What I think is absolutely stupid: There are people who say reading that phone or other phones is necessary for "national security". But most of the "national security" effect gets destroyed as soon as they _read_ about this. The FBI should from the very start have kept this very, very quiet, should never have gone to court, and convinced Apple to do this. Quietly. Telling nobody about it.
If this is really a national security problem, then all terrorists have wiped all incriminating evidence from all their iPhones in the last days. Or at least they will if that one phone gets cracked. It's just stupid.
There are two things involved here. The encryption and the security technologies. The encryption is tied to how secure your passcode is. 4 digits can be broken in hours. 6 digits in weeks or months. Alphanumeric passcodes increase that even more depending on length. Once your past 8-10 characters, you are talking decades and centuries.
The security technologies limit the ability of someone to brute force the passcode by limiting passcode entry to manually entering it into the phone, enforcing delays to limit how fast you can guess new passcodes, and eventually deleting all the data if you try more than 10 passcodes. That is what the FBI would like Apple to bypass.
Hello DoJ, any progress on charging Hillary with treason for transmitting classified data over unsecure channels? No time you say? strange how this one is getting fast tracked..
Nope. Apple has already said they can do this. So now they are refusing on principle, not because they can't.
I do, but I also have this information elsewhere as well. Plenty of them, in even less secure places as most people do. My iPhone isn't the only vector through which hackers or unscrupulous individuals could potentially gain this information. I do have ID theft safeguards in place, but I'm not particularly concerned. I'm with you on the government, they're the least of my worries in terms of access.
I actually find it sad that I feel this way about privacy and security these days (I used to be ardently against privacy invasion, etc), but you can thank Google and Facebook for changing that. The government is the least of my worries. It is what it is, though. It is a result of the technological world we live in now.
I don't need you commenting on my record, thank you. I actually don't have anything to hide from the government, and I'm sorry if you do.
They can? Maybe. The FBI is requiring Apple to create a brand new product, which is a new version of iOS. Can the USG force a private entity to create a new product? I don't think so. At most, they might try to contract Apple for the new version of iOS but it's up to Apple to accept or not.
"That's some pretty nice market grown you're having in our country. It'd be a shame if anything happened to it..."
So your argument is that stripping away half the protection (delay, auto erase, entering passwords digitally) is fine... just not all the way? And you are saying that anyone that disagrees and thinks that is too much is clueless? Really?
They could in the past. They can't, among other things, because of things that the government told Apple to do to reduce theft. You _must_ nowadays set up your phone with your AppleID and password, and that erases everything that the NSA might have put on it. There are different rules for company owned phones, but there you also set up your phone and you get it in exactly the state that your company wants. Sure, if the NSA convinces your company to spy on your company-owned phone, then they can spy on it. With permission of your employee.