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Apple Court Testimony Reveals Why It Refuses To Unlock iPhones For Police (dailydot.com)
blottsie writes: Newly unsealed court transcripts from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York show that Apple now refuses to unlock iPhones for law enforcement, saying "In most cases now and in the future, the government’s requested order would be substantially burdensome, as it would be impossible to perform." “Right now Apple is aware that customer data is under siege from a variety of different directions. Never has the privacy and security of customer data been as important as it is now,” Apple lawyer Marc Zwillinger said at the hearing. “A hypothetical consumer could think if Apple is not in the business of accessing my data and if Apple has built a system to prevent itself from accessing my data, why is it continuing to comply with orders that don’t have a clear lawful basis in doing so?”
The sad part is, you could probably accomplish the same thing by requiring them to implement data access fire walling, since most will probably buy the canned 'solution' that comes to market cheapest and fastest, with the least amount of code review or thoughtful design.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
It takes guts to stand up to government, especially the U.S government.
One U.S. attorney argued that it was "more concerned with public perception" than helping catch criminals.
Duh? No shit? That's not Apple's job, dipshit. They're not here to make your job easier, stop being a bunch of lazy jackasses.
get a warrant, use a snooper, spend a week cracking the data.
haven't the Big Feds said all the terrorist activity is headed into the Dark Web anyway, and Google says best advice is block them from the indexed web?
lazy ass bastards don't have phone books to read and laugh at silly names any more, so they want to randomly hack phones for fun and profit.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
For one, I love the fact that Apple is saying "fuck you" to the cops.
On the other hand, it shows the power of multinational corps - they're above the law. Meaning one day, they may do me or others some serious harm and get away free - like Wall Street did.
And as far as my personal privacy is concerned, neither can be trusted.
.. is worth risking a few lives.. including my own.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
the government’s requested order would be substantially burdensome, as it would be impossible to perform
That, to me, would seem to be the end of it. It's impossible. Can't be done. Don't even bother asking.
But then the lawyer goes on to image a hypothetical customer asking:
"why is [Apple] continuing to comply with orders that don’t have a clear lawful basis in doing so?"
How is it complying if it's supposed to be impossible to do so?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
It will be very interesting to see how Apple's intransigence holds up when China goes through with its threat to prevent the sale of phones that don't contain a back door. It seems they could be painting themselves into a corner.
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The problem with this of course, is that it will not really stop the really bad guys from using strong security, since they are going ahead and breaking the law anyways, and while it might stop the otherwise too incompetent person who wouldn't know how to use such facilities from getting away with something they might have otherwise, in general, all this does is mean that most of the stuff that law enforcement is able to access is stuff that is entirely benign and wouldn't be of interest to them.
But of course, no matter how well intentioned the government and law enforcement may claim to be, and even if they *COULD* be fully trusted to not abuse such access to the general public's highly confidential and private data (leaving aside the whole matter that they may not be as trustworthy as they claim aside, and suggesting that even *IF* they could be trusted so completely), if they can decrypt it, then so can the bad guys, who will abuse it and invariably cause harm to completely innocent people. And suddenly, law enforcement actually has a harder job than they had before, because while their job may have become slightly easier with respect to catching otherwise incompetent criminals that don't know how to use strong encryption that isn't legally available, and that they might have been able to catch in other ways anyhow, now they *ALSO* have to work harder to protect the public from the new potential attack vector on completely innocent parties that such regulations would give the bad guys.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
What even is the point in designing security where this is possible? If Apple can just circumvent the security and hand over any data, then who else can? Isn't that just admitting that their security/privacy is flawed?
The Government's argument to force Apple is because Congress has yet to specifically pass a law saying "don't do this" it's all legal and fine.
THE COURT: So short of Congress passing a law prohibiting what you want here, it's fair game? Anything else that Congress may have done in terms of considering legislation one way or the other, because it doesn't result in a statutory prohibition, wouldn't be enough to say, it's off limits for the All Writs Act?
MS. KOMATIREDDY: Yes. Short -- essentially yes
I mean, at the very core, a phone is a tool (let's pretend it's a diary in this example) -- it can contain useful or useless information, but ultimately it is a very private thing. It has the power to incriminate someone beyond the investigation at hand. Law enforcement's desire to decrypt first, ask questions later really is equivalent to violating a person's privacy and fifth amendment protections to abstain from revealing information that could potentially incriminate themselves.
C. Griffin
"Can I keep his head for a souvenir?" --Max from Sam 'N Max Freelance Police
I've worked in a few corporate environments where they were extremely paranoid about e-discovery (back when this was a new thing.) Almost always, the answer was to set the retention policy to 30 days, as in, no email backups older than 30 days, no (sanctioned) way to archive email, and everything older than 30 days was purged from mailboxes. This allowed the company to say with a straight face, "I'd love to give you the messages relevant to such-and-such business deal gone bad 5 years ago, but I simply cannot."
It sounds a lot like what Apple's doing -- they purposely built the encryption system with no way to bypass it so they can push it right back on the police and courts -- "Sorry, can't help you!" That gets them tons of great customer PR, as opposed to Google/Android, so it makes sense.
But then the lawyer goes on to image a hypothetical customer asking:.......How is it complying if it's supposed to be impossible to do so?
You are implying that the lawyers are making an illogical argument (of course, lawyers are always perfectly logical, right? um.....)
Imagine if the court case escalated and went to the supreme court, where the supreme court decided, "you must change your software to make this possible." That is the scenario the lawyers are trying to avoid.
The trick to understanding legal arguments is to remember they happen in context of the law, and are only vaguely related to reality.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Mechanics of "why not" here: http://blog.cryptographyengine...
Math of "why not" good introduction here: http://www.eetimes.com/documen...
Even if it is possible, there is the question of cost effectiveness. If it takes millions of CPU-hours to crack -- or, worse, days or weeks of some expert's time to take the cap off a chip, peer with an electron microscope, and poke with an electron beam -- then the nation-state will probably limit attacks to cases where they have exceptionally high expectations of return.
Or the police will break out the $5 wrenches and rubber hoses, which runs into its own set of problems.
So much this. I don't know much about how iPhones work, but how complex is the average person's password? Surely they must use a key derivation function during authentication. I doubt it has something even as sophisticated as a chip that holds the private key or a symmetric key and only performs encryption operations without sharing that key.
Back when I used to hang out with the local uni computer club, we used to crack passwords for fun using John the Ripper on a cluster of various old hard like 386s and 486s. I started watching Mr. Robot recently and had a laugh at the sad but true nature of passwords people pick.
This is simply law enforcement being unnecessarily intrusive into everybody's lives. Power-tripping authoritarian assholes. If they had an iPhone that had data of life or death importance, I refuse to believe that the sucker wouldn't be decrypted in under 24 hours.
As an official from the Department of Homeland Security had previously testified, law enforcement had a device to easily run through every possible passcode to unlock an iPhone. But Feng’s phone was configured to erase all its data if someone unsuccessfully tried 10 times in a row to unlock it.
I think I see the problem. Law enforcement views iPhones as magical palantirs powered by waldos and doesn't know how to back up the raw contents of the filesystem before running a distributed brute force. Incompetence.
And the public is so fucking ignorant we're debating whether government should have a back door into magical palantirs powered by waldos instead of debating why cops and elected officials are so fucking stupid when it comes to technology and what we need to do to send them all to the unemployment line.
There may be some actual technical brilliance here on Apple's part like the crypto chip I mentioned above. Even then it should be possible to hook that chip up to some other device and feed it the ciphertext along with a decode command. But we'll never know for sure because computers are sufficiently advanced technology and therefore indistinguishable from magic.
(Also interesting trying to separate out the Apple reality distortion field from the normal reality distortion that makes computers magical palantirs powered by waldos.)
Captcha: tyranny
I think the statement reads oddly out of context because the case is about an iOS7 phone, where it's not 'impossible' (only burdensome) yet warning them that it will be impossible in the future. They're afraid that un-encrypting it now, just because it's not 'impossible' will mean that in the future they might be forced (by law) to make it possible, so they're arguing that they shouldn't have to do it, even now that it's only 'burdensome'.
Seriously folks. Is there a way to encrypt my non-rooted phone that does not rely on anything the manufacturer provided and won't kill performance? If we can't trust the manufacturer to leave out backdoors, what's the alternative?
One of the reasons Apple can do this is that its dependency on government contracts is very, very low. Cell carriers are pretty dependent on the Feds and have a lot of revenue/relationships at risk.
That's not saying what Apple is doing isn't great, it's that it's easier for Apple to do that because the cost of doing it is relatively low.
some contempt of court / accessory changes will change there tune or maybe some GITMO time.
There is just too much magical thinking.
Apple has built a device and market that gathers money in large ...... all must be secure enough.
and small chunks from millions heck billions of people to the
tune of billions.
Cash into iTunes must be secure enough.
Cash to pay for that phone swiped coffee in the morning must be secure enough.
Connection to HealthCare.Gov must be secure enough.
Connections to Amazon commerce must be secure enough.
These collectively mandate a secure design foundation.
If Apple installed a side door to security in all their products as per these
requests and dreams and that side door was to be hacked the liability to Apple
could make the airbag recall and regulatory fines seem small.
Heck Kafka just called to remind me that a class action involving
all 700 million iPhones would need a secure payment system
to disburse the judgement. iPads, MacBooks.... too. iTunes
runs on WindowZ... so iTunes must have its own methods and policy
because Windows is so fragile.
The law enforcement goobers that want access via a side door simply
to make their job easier today FAIL to understand that if the keys to
the side door were to be stolen they could not keep up with the
flood of crime that theft enables. CSI is fiction but some magical
thinking wonks accept it as fact.
Wonks like this forget that great fiction works because suspension of disbelief
or willing suspension of disbelief happens and allows the author to explore
a fictitious story line.
Watch a TV show then watch the credits. The fantasy is that a couple .....
of guys like Jamie and Adam can just do what they want to entertain us.
Finance, sponsors, writers, production, a support team that scrolls on the
screen in tiny print permits from fire departments, ATF and more.
Product placement
Extra points for Cognitive estrangement ....
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
It's long, but that transcript is really worth a read. First the judge thoughtfully skewers every argument the government presents, and tries to get to the fundamental principles involved. Then he thoughtfully skewers every argument Apple presents and tries to get them to throw away all of the marketing nonsense and just say what they think the actual issues are. Then he takes it all into consideration and says he'll go try to find the proper balance in his ruling.
No matter how that case comes out, that's one judge who is doing his job.
The only way you can trust your phone is if there are no security flaws in the code, the software has been security audited by someone with the source code and tools to do the job properly, the hardware has been security audited by someone with the full hardware design and the tools to verify it, and you trust both people not to lie to you.
Agreed, but that is a delicate argument, since if a person is already a suspect, then a diary is fair game in a search warrant. However, if someone says "papers please..." and then thumbs through your diary, the search is illegal because they had no cause to search. It's important to point out the difference for those who see it more like a web-blog than a diary.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Different rulings from different courts in the US. Let's just say the answer is not clear at this point. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
By publishing deliberately malicious software on the App store to circumvent their own device security in select cases. Because the data is encrypted in storage doesn't mean it's encrypted while in RAM. This something which has been attempted before, although I doubt Apple themselves were responsible in that case.
VoIP over wireless. Which essentially is what VoLTE is. So the choice is to either provide customers with the privacy they need, or watch your billion dollar investment in packet voice go up in smoke because everyone is using an open source alternative.
Correct, you do not know much about how iPhones work but it didn't seem to stop you from speculating.
If you want to learn how the encryption works, see this explanation.
Yes, it does use dedicated cryptography hardware. Yes, the key is protected from the rest of the OS.
Good plan. Send Apple to Gitmo. Your 401k will thank you.
ah, putting words into Apple's mouth is so much fun. Of course, they never said any such thing. Instead, as you could read from the quotes above, they say that they believe in the customer's privacy. You aren't playing devil's advocate, you are willfully misrepresenting Apple's position.
Nice strawman, btw
A hypothetical consumer could think of anything, including that an iPhone will give them god-like powers and cause women to swoon at the mere presence of said iPhone. In fact, the distortion field has people thinking that spending the extra money gives them perceived status.
You mean it doesn't?! Fuck!
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
How is it complying if it's supposed to be impossible to do so?
The short answer to your question is that the phone in this court case is an iPhone 5s that's still running iOS 7, and thus it predates the safeguards in iOS 8 and 9 that prevent Apple from decrypting it. The lawyer is arguing that even though Apple is technologically capable of decrypting it, law enforcement cannot compel Apple's assistance, since doing so would put an onerous burden on Apple by forcing them to undermine their own business.
To go into a bit more detail, Apple markets itself as being incapable of decrypting their own devices. Which is true...for everything sold in the last two years. But that's a distinction that is lost on most customers, so the lawyer is arguing that if Apple is compelled to assist law enforcement in this case, it would cause direct harm to its business by resulting in exactly the sort of confusion you're having. After all, how would a typical customer reconcile the conflicting information? If Apple is seen decrypting this guy's iPhone while advertising that it's outright incapable of doing so, customers won't buy their products because customers won't believe what's being advertised.
The long and short of it is that Apple is telling law enforcement that if they want the phone decrypted they should do it themselves, since Apple is under no obligation to assist, nor can it be compelled to assist, any more than, say, a bottled water company could be compelled by law enforcement to tarnish their own product by putting a pollutant in the water.
What you call a flaw, the government would call a feature.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
When did they do that?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
... magical palantirs powered by waldos.
I never even found one waldo... how the heck do you get a set of them?
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
The trick is to RTFA. Those two sentences are from different contexts but the summary shoved them together. One is talking about the latest iOS, the other is talking about older versions that aren't end-to-end encrypted.
"The last company that makes lethal injection drugs, decides to stop doing it. In fact Justice Alito referred to this in recent cases - guerrilla warfare by these companies. Right. So the last company that has been providing drugs for execution, says to the Government, we are no longer going to help you out when it is time to execute somebody in Terre Haute. Can -- are they thwarting a lawful death sentence by doing that, and can they therefore be compelled under the All Writs Act to re-import something that is held abroad or release something from existing stock or actually manufacture the drug anew?"
You can't, they are encrypted too.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
Maybe, just maybe, because that backdoor provides a vulnerability that can be hacked. One less complication in the system means at least one less vulnerability to be exploited.
Maybe Apple will now figure out how to have the newer iOS installed and running on the older hardware, assuming that the older hardware has the necessary encryption support.
More specifically politicians but most often that is just a longer spelling of lawyer.
Oh, now you're just talking crazy shit.
sadly and unfortunately.
The same cesspool that claims that people have only the rights granted to them by their government. Yeah, many here on slashdot subscribe to that theory.
The last thing that Apple wants is another incident that inconveniences people of more-than-modest means.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Is everyone not seeing the sarcasm, or am I mis-imputing it?
To me the parent post was clearly sarcasm, but the moderators and every other respondent seems not to have read it that way.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Aspin's "Cold Cash War" was before that, and Mack Reynolds stories even before that. And I'm not sure he was the first.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It is complying with the orders when they _try_ to do it (which has no result as it is impossible). What they want to do is to be able to reject the orders outright, and that is the only sane thing to do.
Of course "sane" is not something most in the legal profession can do, as they are all living in their own little fantasy world where they are kings and define what reality is.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
It's AES 256. Try "we have a 50% chance to find it sometime before the heat-death of the universe".
Apple has addressed this as part of the way the iOS encryption system works. The encryption system creates it's own temporary encryption key each boot that it uses to encrypt everything it stores in RAM.
Physical access doesn't necessarily get you the encryption key. The encryption key is stored on the device in some very complicated silicon that is not easily read outside of the device itself. For a full explanation see this: http://apple.slashdot.org/comm...
Basically, the only chip that has access to the key also does all of the encryption itself. the key never leaves this chip and it's not really possible to get the encryption key from the chip. You can't use a different chip or brute force the key from the chip because the chip intentionally slows brute force attempts to once per hour after 9 attempts and can be set to destroy the key after the 10th attempt.
maybe...JUST MAYBE...you might be able to extract the key from the chip using an electron microscope and a large quantity of labor (man months worth) and it would cost millions of dollars to do so. And it is possible they designed the chip such that exposing the silicon so it can be scanned by the microscope could be destructive.
Apple should be allowed to charge a large sum, say a few thousand dollars for unlocking each phone. That would deter most of the casual requests and provide financial incentive to companies to aid in law enforcement.
Does it matter to me WHY they chose to tell the feds to jump in a lake? Not really. Because they chose to offer a device that has some level of assurance that the government isn't snooping on me illegally they have gained some trust from me, and that means I am more likely to buy their stuff in the future.
The primary purpose of any entity is to ensure its continued existence. If people lose trust in Apple then people stop buying their stuff. Of course this will make them money. I'm just not sure why you think this is a bad thing.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
2) iMessage which handle text messaging and FaceTime, encrypts "End to End". The "End to End" encryption generates an public private key pair where the private key never leaves the senders phone and which can't be determined by Apple engineers even if Apple has thousands of years and unlimited CPU cycles. "End to End" scares lawenforcement at the very highest and lowest levels. iMessage appears to be U breakable, to such a degree that Apple's lawyers feel perfectly comfortable walking into any court anywhere in the world and telling the judges, sorry, can't help you. Stunning is all I can say.
You're envisaging RSA when you say "public private key pair". Given what we know, it's probably Diffie Hellman, which is a public key establishment protocol that establishes a shared symmetric secret key. There is no key pair.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
You know what they say about people who don't study history? That they've never heard of an East India Company.
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Yeah, if Mossad isnt letterbombing old men, they're kidnapping and torturing people.
http://i.cubeupload.com/T6cyLu.png
Or the police will break out the $5 wrenches and rubber hoses, which runs into its own set of problems.
They should have a Obligatory xkcd upmod...
That wasn't fiction, and wasn't set in an era with fast transport. If you want to use the East India Company as a horrible example, you need to have either at least interplanetary travel or some sort of post catastrophe scenario where travel is again slow enough that it can take months for a message to get through.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You say that like it's a bad thing. When did this twist in public perception become a thing? Why in the hell would you expect a company to not "protect" criminals by providing encryption that can't be broken? Hell, we had companies that gave away secret decoder rings to children as toys when I was a kid. That you're worried a criminal might go free, because of encryption, and think that a private organization should aid the government in the prosecution of said criminal by negating their effectiveness for lawful consumers is disturbing at best an un-American at worst.
The adage about it being better that ten guilty men go free rather than one innocent one be jailed is more than a pithy saying. If the cops can't break the encryption then good - that means the damned encryption is effective - like it should be. Like all tools, it can be used for good or ill. Like a firearm, it can used for good or ill.
You're damned right, it protects criminals from discovery. That's a GOOD thing. It protects innocent people from snooping. It protects business from spying. It protects secrets, however benign, from discovery.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."