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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?”
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.
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.
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'
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."
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
... 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.
More specifically politicians but most often that is just a longer spelling of lawyer.
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.
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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