Slashdot Mirror
Congressman: Court Order To Decrypt iPhone Has Far-Reaching Implications (dailydot.com)
Patrick O'Neill writes: Hours after Apple was ordered to help the FBI access the San Bernardino Shooters' iPhone, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), a Stanford University computer-science graduate, wondered where the use of the All Writs Act—on which the magistrate judge based her ruling—might lead. "Can courts compel Facebook to provide analytics of who might be a criminal?" Lieu said in an email to the Daily Dot. "Or Google to give a list of names of people who searched for the term ISIS? At what point does this stop?"
Apple, so far, has vowed to fight the order that it decrypt the phone of San Bernadino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook, in no uncertain terms.
Apple, so far, has vowed to fight the order that it decrypt the phone of San Bernadino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook, in no uncertain terms.
This is the only good explanation I've seen of what the order is about: https://www.techdirt.com/artic... As long as Apple can install a signed update on the device without decrypting it first, this will be possible. They need to remedy that quickly.
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
'The All Writs Act is a United States federal statute, codified at 28 U.S.C. 1651, which authorizes the United States federal courts to "issue all writs necessary or appropriate in aid of their respective jurisdictions and agreeable to the usages and principles of law.'
"On October 31, 2014, the act was used by the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York to compel an unnamed smartphone manufacturer to bypass the lock screen of a smartphone allegedly involved in a credit card fraud."
Looks like there is a precedent. Mind you Apple has lots of money for lawyers to make sure this doesn't happen.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
The court isn't asking for Apple to decrypt the phone, but for them to provide a special signed firmware that disables certain features meant to protect the encrypted data against brute-forcing.
If the crypto is up to snuff and a strong key was used then brute force will fail anyway, so I don't understand why this is such a big deal to Apple.
This particular phone's owner deserves no mercy. But that's not the point, or at least not the whole point. If Apple can do this to one phone, they can do it to any phone; and if the government can make Apple do it to the phone of a dead murderer who doesn't deserve legal protection, then the government can make Apple do it do it to the phone of a live whistleblower who DOES deserve legal protection. My title comes from an era of free speech rights debates inspired by porn cases; the fact that a particular image is disgusting, like the fact that a particular case involves a murderer, does not justify changing our checks and balances for "just this case", because the precedent will be used to justify many more cases.
Knowing that a former Secretary of State operated their own email server in a manner that a fairly knowledgeable system administrator would recognize as vulnerable to the known capabilities of state-sponsored attempts to compromise it and extract the contents, it's almost disingenuous for the government to claim security is both essential and working at the highest levels, when they knew or should have known that a Cabinet officer was subverting that security. They just were. Reasonable people and those skilled in the art cannot avoid coming to that conclusion baaed on the publicly known evidence.
Our government isn't very good at protecting our rights, nor at its own operations. Good enough reason to limit our government to essential activities only.
And I pray Apple actually tries to break their own encryption and fails. Security shouldn't be reserved to the few. In a nominally free society we will not have perfect security, but we will have, hopefully, more freedom than not.
Don't overlook the Office of Personnel Management data breach, in which the OPM had such bad security that they effectively released to hackers the entire collection of background check information for all government personnel and contractors who need access to gov't facilities for everyone who filled out the forms from about 2000 to 2015. It wasn't just the form data (name, SSN, lists of associates to use for references, foreign travel history) - it was all the follow up data, too. Including responses from references, clearance interview details. It even included images of fingerprints if you went through the process since the PIV-II cards came into use. All of that information is now basically free on the internet. Forever. It's a phisher's (and foreign extortionist's) wet dream-- a complete set of collated, validated data, including associations and relationships, as well as potential dirt, on everyone who has worked for the US gov't (including many many contractors) for the past 15 years.