Well law enforcement can employ third parties in the aid of gathering evidence, but afaik, they don’t do the actual gathering. They would provide expertise on their product with existing data to assist. What is going on here is the FBI want’s Apple’s help by asking them to create something that they don’t have and where the information to create it isn’t readily available and has to be developed. Thats way different then asking them for technical information about their products.
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President Obama: 'You Cannot Take an Absolutist View' on Encryption Issue
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I disagree with him on this issue too. I also have numerous other concerns with his policies, especially regarding terrorism.
But the worst president ever? That is pure hyperbole.
Was the same prior to the TSA. When you consider that the TSA only catches a portion and any dedicated can get around security. So many tests, checks, and news hounds doing it just to prove how ineffective the TSA really is you have to wonder why we even have the TSA.
The government has been fighting personal encryption since the 90’s with the clipper chip affair back when Clinton was back in office. They were using the same arguments back then too. They lost back then and they should today.
I guess English must not be your first language.
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Nice stigmatization of Mental Health issues and care. I guess you don't know anyone currently or formerly having taken a prescription for depression or anxiety? I guess you're mistaken as well.
People who don't understand how PKI and crypto in general work shouldn't be lecturing those of us who do about what is possible and not possible. People, like Obama, with a shallow understanding of this technology look at it as if it were magic (See: famous Arthur C. Clarke quote) and think the "spell" could just be tweaked a bit to make it work how they want. Protip: Math isn't fuzzy, math is concrete. You either do crypto right or you you weaken it, making it compromised for everyone.
Beyond that, the ship has already sailed. Strong crypto algorithms are public knowledge and can be re-implemented in code by any decent developer anywhere in the world. The only way to do what Obama asks is to make weak crypto mandatory. How do you enforce that?
Why yes, you suck up and test decryptability (by actually decrypting it, so much for "limited access") of vast swaths of internet traffic to catch the "terrorists" that are using "unauthorized" crypto. Welcome to "1984", suckers.
Finally, the warrant clause of the constitution gives law enforcement access to protected items with judicial oversight...It does not mandate that they know how to read that data. Encryption is actually not a new concept. The founders used "ciphers" in the American Revolution and were well aware of the capability.
Bottom line, even if I agreed with him on the need to do it (and I don't), it can't be done and he sounds like a simpleton for suggesting it.
Beyond that, the ship has already sailed. Strong crypto algorithms are public knowledge and can be re-implemented in code by any decent developer anywhere in the world. The only way to do what Obama asks is to make weak crypto mandatory. How do you enforce that?
Why yes, you suck up and test decryptability (by actually decrypting it, so much for "limited access") of vast swaths of internet traffic to catch the "terrorists" that are using "unauthorized" crypto. Welcome to "1984", suckers.
Finally, the warrant clause of the constitution gives law enforcement access to protected items with judicial oversight...It does not mandate that they know how to read that data. Encryption is actually not a new concept. The founders used "ciphers" in the American Revolution and were well aware of the capability.
Bottom line, even if I agreed with him on the need to do it (and I don't), it can't be done and he sounds like a simpleton for suggesting it.
Yes. This isn't about cracking encryption. This is just the topic being used to drive what the FBI and Government want: unfettered access. Not to your device rather the ability to force, conscript, whenever and whoever they want to do what they want. Sounds crazy right?
Today the FBI wants remote access to a device by forcing Apple to build a custom OS. Tomorrow they want a custom Android version that allows the same. Next add stealth updates and stealth access. As there is no realistic way to keep this 100% secret, the criminal enterprises and other nation-states get the same access.
Face it, encryption has been around for a long long time. I've used encryption on my "drives" for a number of years. I own the "keys". Other than ease of use, how is this any different?
It's not. The Government end-game is the difference.
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Apple is acting like a "petulant child?" How? From day one after iOS 8 was released, the FBI has been employing fear-mongering like none other. It has been trying to appeal to emotion by mentioning the buzzwords - "rapists, terrorists, child molesters, etc." to get people to hand over their rights without a second thought rather than allow the populace to engage in any semblance of rational thought.
I hear you and sort of agree .... but .... what is the difference between my encrypted smartphone and my encrypted HDD? I don't see this level of "OMG!!!" from either the FBI, DOJ, or other government agencies over an encrypted HDD.
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Excellent question, although I'm assuming you mean not evidence of a crime but rather evidence of who has participated in that crime (ongoing threat, ticking timebomb, all those discredited rare scenarios that we are suppose to give up liberty to thwart). I'll play along. What does the FBI do in the following scenarios:
1. That evidence is in the perpetrator's mind. He knows what he did. If only we could get it out.
2. That evidence was written on a stack of papers, the entire plan laid out in precise detail, but then the papers were sent to the shredder, the shreds burnt to ash, and the ashes distributed from the top of Mt Denali.
3. That evidence of a wide conspiracy including hundreds of co-conspirators' identities and the level of their involvements, was definitely in someone's head and on their hard drives and printed out, but they physically destroyed their drives beyond our capabilities to recover (magnetic, physical shred, accelerated combustion, dismantle, disbursed), then shredded and burnt all the printouts, then shot themselves in the head so even our Fringe "read the last thoughts the person had if we get to them before they are dead-dead" super top secret machines can't recover it?
4. That evidence is inside a secure messaging app using a TOR routing mechanism which we had not infiltrated prior to its use, and saved in secure notes encrypted using an app supporting AES-256 encryption.
I would assert that in all four cases, the response is exactly the same. This is called an investigative dead end. It sucks. You make sure there is nothing more you can do, and keep it open in the back of your mind, but in the end there isn't a direct route to that data. Instead, you go around it and investigate the circumstances of the dead end (ex, if the guy didn't put a bullet in his own brain, perhaps someone else did that for him after assisting him with the cleanup; if the messages were sent between two people perhaps there is an artifact of the conversation or the envelope of the conversation on some server; if the data is encrypted perhaps there is a flaw in the encryption protocol).
I would also assert that there is absolutely nothing law enforcement can do to stop any of the above scenarios. The first three have been happening from time immemorial to varying degrees, and the last has been happening for hundreds of years, just getting more common in recent years with computers available to assist in both the encryption and in the brute-force decryption attempts.
Law enforcement has not ground to a halt because of the availability of turn-key AES encryption for the past decade, nor inrecoverable-without-the-key encryption for the past several centuries, nor of the availability of mechanisms to permanently hide secrets from LEO in the past, I don't know, ten millennia. There is no reason to expect that the availability of freely-available encryption being built into a device will trigger that apocalypse, because that is barely a half step removed from what any criminal can put together on their own from component part
The FBI can do it themselves and that's what they will do. They are going to make Apple give up the iOS source code and signing keys (iphones are designed to only allow software signed by Apple to be installed).
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/11/fbi-could-force-apple-to-hand-over-private-key
Case closed.
All you have to look at is the actual people being hired to work for the TSA.
Umm, did you read the report and understand it? Yes, they described that scenario as what they were examining in section 2.2. They then spent the next ten pages discussing in detail why it would not work and why it is a horrible idea.
From Section 4.0:
... then the rest of 4.0 is detailing questions that must be answered if the policy were to go forward anyway. They conclude:
This is not a ringing endorsement of the proposal.
Absolutist
noun
1. the principle or the exercise of complete and unrestricted power in government.
2. any theory holding that values, principles, etc., are absolute and not relative, dependent, or changeable.
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What am I missing? Apple did offer to keep this private, not public, and the FBI went front page headline instead. How do you define something that "broad" as burdensome from a discussion point when the underlying premise is wrong. That's starting from a point of strength on the FBI's side and Apple admitting that the warrant is factually correct. Burdensome and expansion of powers are "discussion points" except in a very broad sense and not as a starting point for solution discussions.
You also said:
... which would have been significant evidence in favor of your assessment of this being petulant and childish. It is, however, entirely incorrect. They did respond to it, in a timely fashion, as laid out in the order itself.
As for it being petulant and childish after the FBI has told the media you are compelled to compromise the security of a phone after you have made a point in marketing materials that it is not possible for you to decrypt the phone ... this hardly seems petulant to me. Apple could have waited and let the legal motion to vacate speak for itself entirely, but that would have been over a week of very bad press most of it wondering why Apple is not making any public statement reconciling what the FBI had already announced with what Apple has told the world about its security mechanisms. I see the existence of such a response as absolutely necessary and frankly it would have been fiduciary malpractice to not have spoken publicly until the motions had been filed.
In any case, you apparently think it is childish of Apple to describe exactly what is being asked of it and what it is doing as a result. Fine; it is a subjective assertion in any case. I just think you have a very warped sense of "petulance" if this triggers it.
Really? I have a safe and you know one of the first things I did? Had the fekkin' default combination changed.
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That is a never ending race. Technology will advance faster than the government can dream p adequate controls or ways to "access" it. The only thing any semblance of "control" would do is slow down technology growth locally. The world would leave us in the dust.
Technology evolves. Our use of it evolves. Government response to it must evolve. Adaption.
Depends on SCOTUS reconciliation of a case in the 11 district which agrees with you and another which does not (unfortunately I forget which district the other one was in, and haven't heard from it in a few months so maybe a lower-level appeal reversed the inter-district discrepancy). But, yes, it appears that SCOTUS has a lot of case law which says that even a non-incriminating set of letters and numbers which leads to asserted-incriminating evidence is protected by the fifth amendment (specifically dealing with combination locks versus physical key locks).
The last one unfortunately leaves the your-rights question and goes to the third-party's-rights question. There, it rests primarily on two things. First, code is established as a form of speech, and so writing even one line of code is forced speech and against he first amendment (which does extend to corporations per this court). The nuance here is that the important bit isn't so much the writing of the code but the signature of that code, and although physical signatures have been deemed protected and code has been deemed protected a code signature has not to my knowledge been deemed one way or the other yet. Second, if the first falls in favor of the government, the fourth amendment requires due process of law which means that Congress would either need to make a law requiring this company to act (or a law investing that authority in someone else) or one of the existing laws like the catch-all All Writs Act would need to be applicable.
The thing with the All Writs Act is that what it covers has been traditionally defined almost entirely by precedent. That is, if a particular company has agreed to X then the assumption is that X is covered under the All Writs Act. This is why it is critical that Apple fight this expansion of AWA authority; if they allow an abridgment of their first amendment rights to not have to code anything as allowable, that really opens the door wide for future AWA orders (as discussed in detail in the amicus briefs). It wouldn't stop another company from challenging it when they are given an order, but the presumption would be that since this level of conscripted service had been deemed reasonable by a large entity like Apple it should also be deemed reasonable by Company C, and Company C then has an uphill battle through the legal system to prove otherwise.
Not really. Slippery slope? Today the FBI want remote access. Tomorrow the FBI wants remote access on a live device. By Friday the FBI wants remote stealth surveillance access. Slippery slope analogy is spot on.
Exact same thing we did back in the old days when criminals burned their papers and scattered the ashes beyond reconstruction, and refused to incriminate themselves based on the 5th amendment. We didn't allow the FBI to require everybody in the country to use flameproof non-erasable paper, and/or drug/beat all suspects into confessing.
And still shouldn't.
What a crock. I'd like to know where you get your statistics. Most gunshot crime is black on black or minority on minority gang killings. A significant number of Muslims are black and the media don't report religion or anything else for minority on minority gang killings. Drink that Koolaid and drink it fast.
A request which is even more fraught with Constitutional issues, not the least of which is the fourth amendment's limit on eminent domain (the Just Compensation clause) which requires fair market value be offered for this. Will Congress approve a single legislative action which will cost a trillion dollars? And which would make that trillion dollar investment worthless in less than six months?
Apple made $234B in 2015 in revenues, most of which was from iOS products. They don't break out the value of the software from the hardware but I would expect them to claim quite convincingly that half of the value is in the software. So assign a yearly revenue of $100B. Apply a reasonable market-derived value per revenue factor of about 10 and you end up with $1 Trillion being the cost of this little endeavor. That is about two years' worth of defense spending, by the way.
Coming from market value, the market cap of Apple could convincingly be claimed as at least 75% based on the viability of iOS. Which means that 0.75 x $567B or about $425.5B would be a market-based valuation of iOS, very conservatively.
Between the two methods of valuation, we have a $0.4-1.0 Trillion valuation at the low end, and up to $2.3 Trillion on the higher end (well, much much more, like $25Trillion, if you apply the EV or RV ratios to iOS instead of the lower Apple EV ratio).
If they did this, Apple's business would plummet. Nationalizing iOS would force the vast majority of customers to look to alternative mobile OS products. Apple obviously loses here, but so does the US economy. Android would obviously be the big winner, but then the DoJ needs to float the idea of declaring eminent domain on Android too, maybe Windows next, at which point we end up with non-US ventures like Tizen owning the market and the DoJ with at least $3 Trillion invested in worthless software.
Yeah, that is an empty threat from Comey and he knows it. As sensible as the Florida sheriff threatening to arrest Tim Cook because Apple has filed a motion to vacate the order.
He might be a number of things like anti-american, anti-christian, racist, anti-capitalist, anti-privacy, etc., but he is no moron. He knows how to buy votes for the Presidency with promises he will never keep, he knows how to give away taxpayer money in return for votes, he knows how to keep people ignorant through secrecy and lies, and he knows how to keep the Presidency by generating racial divide and the threat of racial violence. At no time in the past have so few controlled so many through fear, lies, intimidation, and power. That does not happen by accident or luck.
Umm, speaking of koolaid. See http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/injury.htm. There were 33,636 firearm-related deaths in 2013, so the original poster was vastly underestimating this as "17,000". Even identifying all homicides (non-accident and non-self-inflicted) as "black on black" to fit your frankly racist dismissal of those deaths as unimportant, there were (per http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm) 11,208 homicides in that same year, which is almost exactly one third of all firearm-related deaths. Assuming that all those were black-on-black and perpetrated by Muslims in the general population (about 0.9%) ratio we end up with about 100 homicides attributable to Muslims. And from international statistics, even including extremist terrorist attacks, Muslims are about 25% as likely to commit murder as non-Muslims (although a good deal of that may be explained away by the oppressiveness of the regimes a large body of Muslims live under). I should also note that only 28% of Muslims in the US are African-American (less than 800,000), compared to 13.2% of all Americans (about 42 Million), so there is a correlation but it is incredibly misleading to say either that a "significant number" of Muslims are black or that a "significant number" of African Americans are Muslim.
If we look at just acts of religiously-motivated terrorism, we end up with stats as shown at https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_AmericanTerrorismDeaths_FactSheet_Oct2015.pdf - 80 Americans killed from terrorist activities between 2004 and 2013, 36 on American soil. Obviously 2015 is well above that average from this one incident alone (and 2001 towers far far above the statistical norm), but those numbers are far too low to not have significant peaks and troughs from year to year. If anything he was overstating the deaths due to terrorism.
Now, that is what I think was clear about what he meant by this:
From a technical perspective, "deaths by Muslims" would include every person who dies intentionally or accidentally from something a Muslim did, so maybe that is a higher number (closer to a few hundred would be my ballpark guesstimate), but it would be incredibly difficult to see reaching the 33,000 deaths due to firearms in the US. But, I really think it is clear he was talking about homicides by Muslims relative to deaths (accidental or intentional) by firearms.
You have it wrong.
1. The FBI wanted the data on the device.
2. Apple asked the FBI to keep this non-public.
3. The FBI went public in a big way asking for a potentially serious expansion of AWA powers and potential Amendment rights violations.
4. Tim Cook responded.
5.....
You are missing a big piece.
Smartphones have the potential to be the future smart-access-holder of personal private data. Like a private access key for home/files/banking/health/travel/etc... That is the current directional development of the smartphone. Someday this could also be the smartwatch or implant or... evolutionary all in one. To keep this level of privacy access safe (literally, your digital life and physical life access) encryption or something that can accomplish the same is needed. The fact the FBI, DOJ, Government, LEO (civil, state, federal) and potentially others would like the access ability the FBI is requesting would kill this evolutionary development.
Concern from many directions? Darn right there is.
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