It’s not about opening the phone. It’s about creating firmware that the government can use to open any iphone, any time it wants.
I’m on the fence on this one. I agree that the government should not be allowed to force a company to create code that doesn’t exist, which is what the FBI wants. If that very narrow scope is the question, then yes I’m on Apple’s side.
However a judge can issue a search warrant for your house, your car, and your safety deposit box. If they can’t find the key to your safety deposit box they can drill out the lock. When searching your house they can totally tear it apart including knocking holes in the walls and pulling up the floors to look for stuff.
In this case, a judge has issued a warrant to search the data on the phone. The FBI is just at a loss as to how to search the phone without it self-destructing (10 failed logins and boom it wipes). So I support the FBI’s legal right to search the phone, they just have to find a way to do it without forcing Apple to have one of its employees spend time creating a means to do so.
I think the more broader and interesting question for us as a society is, do we want or need to enable these ultra-secure forms of data storage that are impossible to circumvent under a valid legal search warrant? If we accept a lawful judicial order as a reasonable bulwark against having our homes searched, why should we not also accept that safeguard as being reasonable for our electronic data?
From my understanding, they don’t want Apple to reverse engineer the hashing algorithm. They want Apple to “upgrade” the OS so that 10 (or whatever the number is) consecutive unlock failures don’t wipe the phone. Hence, if you can steal the code signing certificate (the credential that says this code you are about to install is good), you’re in.
I’ve also had discussions with hardware engineer friends who are convinced that there are other ways to access the data, albeit very invasive and massively expensive.
I still think the FBI thinks this is the perfect precedent case.
No where did I say that people who disagree with me should not post. What I meant is that if people don’t know why it is a bad idea/can’t see the drawbacks then they probably have poor imagination/risk assesment skills/are misinformed, hence the part about not belonging to CC (which was meant as tongue-in-cheek, btw). Doesn’t matter though, seems like it’s second nature for some posters to immediately respond with snark if they even suspect an insult. To everybody else, apologies if my post was misunderstood. I assure you that I, unlike the FBI with Apple, am not trying to infringe on your First Amdt. rights.
“I think the more broader and interesting question for us as a society is, do we want or need to enable these ultra-secure forms of data storage that are impossible to circumvent under a valid legal search warrant? If we accept a lawful judicial order as a reasonable bulwark against having our homes searched, why should we not also accept that safeguard as being reasonable for our electronic data?”
The problem with that is a standard search warrant is very much a tangible thing. When you get a warrant, you are searching a premises or car, you have to tell the judge what you are searching for, where you will search for it, and most importantly, when. If a cop went into a judge and said “I want to search the property at 666 Mockingbird lane, we believe the suspect is stealing cars and keeping them in his garage and believe he has cars in the garage”, he could not search your bedside table and if found drugs, arrest you, he could not go through your clothing, and if they said “I want to be able to search every day”, the judge would throw it out.
With something like this, the problem is if they are in effect telling Apple to give them something that would allow them to crack into any phone, it is like a universal search warrant…and that is the problem, it is a lot easier to control accessing someone’s home then something like this. Obviously, with this thing, they would have to get the phone to be able to log into it more than likely, so the warrant would have to cover that (though there are ways they could theoretically remotely access the phone and break in, if they had the password, though not an expert at all on that one). I think the real fear is apple will be forced to do this, and then you’ll have actors like the NSA or the Chinese government demanding tools like this, it would be a precedent.
It also assumes that law enforcement would even bother with a warrant, we have too many cases where law enforcement is only too eager for warrantless data gathering. The NSA had a lot of law enforcement agencies wanting them to turn over their meta data, and when the Patriot act was passed Dick Cheney and some other like minded types wanted written into the act that if let’s say the NSA using the authority to tap into transmisions and data without a warrant (the FISA provisions) based on terrorism threats, found evidence of criminal activity, that that data be allowed to be used in court, even though it was gathered without a warrant…fortunately, congress said no (equally conservative libertarians and liberals, interestingly), but it gives you an idea of what goes on. And like I said, then you have something like the Chinese government and their insanity, once things like this get done, it is almost 100% certain they would demand things, too.
We accept search warrants of our home, in other words, because we have reason to believe that in fact the warrants do protect us from fishing expeditions and the like, they are well spelled out, and are visible as well, when it comes to things like this, there is no reason to believe it will be used legally and responsibly, especially since what is legal, like the Patriot Act provisions, are open to all kinds of interpretations, especially when dealing with places like China where legality is whatever the government says it is.
The privacy rights issue is not concerned with the rights of the terrorist, dead or not. The issue is with the privacy rights of every person who uses a smartphone. Your privacy rights might be related to financial or medical information that’s accessed on your phone, or with your location (a safety issue for those who are being stalked) or home security–everything from your security system to your lightbulbs. It’s an enormous issue for folks who travel abroad with classified, protected, or proprietary information. Ditto for anyone who is a journalist, a member of political opposition in many countries, and so on.
Maybe you know someone who can break into an iPhone that 1) is only using 4 numbers as its passcode and 2) doesn’t have auto-erase after ten unsuccessful attempts to enter the code and 3) is using an older version of iOS that doesn’t increase the delay after each unsuccessful attempt. Sadly, that’s not what the FBI is dealing with.
Totally agree. I am (surprise) pro-Apple, but really want this to be a society-wide discussion.
Because if someone illegally searches/breaks into your home, it’s easily detectable. Your neighbors will call them police, or you’ll call them when you get home and see the destruction. Breaking into our electronic data can do far more damage, to far more people, in far less time. Not having permission isn’t going to stop the people who want to do this.
Well then, be surprised. Do a search to see what a keysigning ceremony looks like.
Two good articles for those who want some technical detail. (The guardian one does go into the various forms of denialism.)
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/24/the-fbi-wants-a-backdoor-only-it-can-use-but-wanting-it-doesnt-make-it-possible
http://arstechnica.com/apple/2016/02/encryption-isnt-at-stake-the-fbi-knows-apple-already-has-the-desired-key/
Suggested reading:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four
Apple.
We may be having a commission on the issue.
I honestly go back and forth, because I see both sides (wanting the information, which may or may not be anything important, and wanting to protect privacy rights).
I just finished watching all 5 seasons of The Wire (late to the party, I know), but I do know I would love to see a new season based on this issue!
I imagine Stinger Bell wish he’d had an iPhone.
@bearpanther
Do you support the government practicing torture (the real kind, not the waterboarding lite kind) to extract information? Where do u draw the line?
Waterboarding is torture.
News reports indicate that the FBI does not want Apple to reverse a one way hash, but to somehow install a version of iOS that does not erase-and-factory-reset the iPhone after too many tries. Then a brute force attack can be tried without losing the supposedly-interesting data on the iPhone.
Of course, the risk is that if such a version of iOS is made, the risk is that it could be used (possibly by crackers other than the FBI, given the leaks of sensitive government employee data recently) to crack other people’s iPhones.
OK, if this was a living person’s phone, I would 100% be behind Apple. A few important facts for me. 1) The phone was not owned by the dead person. It is owned by the city of San Bernardino. As long as the city says it is OK, there is no privacy issue. You are not entitled to privacy on a device which you do not own.
The FBI should not need to compel Apple for Apple to attempt to get the information.
While the FBI might want the ability to crack any phone, Apple could just crack it, and provide the contents to the FBI.
So I guess my answer to the question is both and neither. I don’t think there should be some universal key, but under certain, extremely narrow situations, I think it is appropriate.
What Apple is saying there’s no such thing as extremely narrow situation. Once created, it will get into wrong hands.
So how’s Apple going to act when a foreign government demands the same thing?
@novadad99-
I totally agree, not to mention our own government whose track record is not exactly spotless, it is full of people and institutions that decided they were above the law or their own law, whether it was Hoover or the CIA in the 60’s and early 70’s.
More importantly, once apple weakens the security, someone will break it, or if they put in a supposedly secret backdoor it will come out, almost every security system and method eventually gets broken, often by insiders tempted by either revenge or by the promise of $$$$. Until someone can show me a safeguard on something like this, that prevents either the government from using this outside the narrow scope of a warrant, or where the penalties for divulging this are such that an insider will think long and hard before risking divulging information like this…
It isn’t that I don’t think there can be value in being able to break encrypted data or that there is no reason to have that ability for law enforcement and the like, I just think that the potential for abuse is such that we can’t do these kind of things unless the safeguards are proven and strong. In the days of the FISA court, which is basically a rubber stamp, I don’t feel that is in place.
Disclaimer Long time student lurker
I’m on Apple’s side because I don’t think there is much on that phone that the FBI doesn’t have. The FBI already has the phone company, ISP, email provider, and all the information they can subpoena that Apple collects. I didn’t think there is some great secret hiding behind the passcode that will help the FBI. It’s redundant.
I don’t know how genuine Apple’s reasoning for refusing the FBI is, but I really don’t care. This country is built on refusing to do things you don’t think are right, and Apple is a huge and very public company that can’t be easily bullied into submission. If the FBI wants this done, they have to do it by the books and set precident. If they win, so be it, but it should be because they have the “right” to this information, not because Apple simply rolled over. An American citizen is an American citizen even if they commit terroristic acts. I’m quite fond of the Franklin quote posted previously in this thread