Slashdot Mirror
Apple: Terrorist's Apple ID Password Changed In Government Custody (buzzfeed.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Apple ID password linked to the iPhone belonging to one of the San Bernardino terrorists was changed less than 24 hours after the government took possession of the device, senior Apple executives said Friday. If that hadn't happened, Apple said, a backup of the information the government was seeking may have been accessible.
Had that password not been changed, the executives said, the government would not need to demand the company create a 'backdoor' to access the iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, who died in a shootout with law enforcement after a terror attack in California that killed 14 people. The Department of Justice filed a motion to compel the company to do that earlier Friday.
Had that password not been changed, the executives said, the government would not need to demand the company create a 'backdoor' to access the iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, who died in a shootout with law enforcement after a terror attack in California that killed 14 people. The Department of Justice filed a motion to compel the company to do that earlier Friday.
I understand that the government can issue a warrant, completely in the spirit of the 4th amendment. However, how can they "deputize" or force independent individuals/organizations to do their bidding?
This whole charade smells of the government abusing this one request to make precedent for future requests.
So we want to let these government geniuses -- who changed the password -- have a means to change the basic programming of an iPhone. After all, they promise that they'll only use it in really bad cases and that they'll be sure to keep it safe from the bad guys getting it.
Right.
So apple can show that the iPhone was tampered with after the government took possession. Well that makes the information on the phone totally suspect.
That to me shows there is no reason to decrypt the phone as nothing on it can be trusted to be authentic any more.
For example, highly paranoid version,
Did the CIA get someone to re-image the phone and plant false information.
This phone belonged to the place where this guy worked. So when he murdered a bunch of people, I am sure HR started a process to terminate his network access and revoke his use of things like this phone, in part by changing the passwords.
He may have died in a shower of bullets but god damn it Sally in HR was gonna cross every T and dot every i on that termination form!
Sig for hire.
Was this guy really a terrorist? or just a asshat nutcase?
All terrorists are just asshat nutcases. They are only criminals with guns and bombs and slightly weirder motivations than most other criminals with guns and bombs.
There is no such thing as a terrorist, as a legal distinction. There are military combatants and there are civilians. If a civilian plants a bomb, he's still a civilian. He's just a criminal civilian. If a civilian shoots a bunch of people with an automatic weapon, he's still a civilian. He's just a criminal civilian. If a civilian gets together with a bunch of his buddies and plants bombs and shoots a bunch of people with automatic weapons, he's still just a civilian.
We even have a name for that. We call them mobsters.
Attempting to create terrorism as a legal distinction is stupid twice. Once because you're playing in to their narrative, giving them far more credence than they deserve, and twice because it's being used to foment fear and trample rights here at home. One is cowardly, the other treasonous.
Taliban, Al Queda, blah blah, these are just mobs. Organized crime. Treat them as such.
If the US govt can force them to do it, the Chinese govt can force them to do it. And so on.
"Ownership" is the right to say "No." If Apple can't say no to writing a new way to access their own devices, then they don't own Apple. The FBI is not asking for access. They are asking for a service to be performed.... and not by any one individual... by a company. Last I heard, there is no enlistment right for corporations (yeah, yeah, despite corporate personhood). You can buy something, you can lend something. But if you can't tell someone "no" when they request your services, they own you. And FBI does not own Apple. They are not asking for something which already exists. They asking for work to be performed at their behest. This case is becoming about more than the right to privacy. It's becoming about the right to not be deputized at a judge's pen stroke. If Apple can be compelled to write code because FBI so chooses, then anyone can.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
And just adding fuel to the fire. Real terrorist have an agenda. They're trying to accomplish something. Asshat nutcases are either mentally ill or financially desperate.
There's two distinct classes there. You can't do much about the mentally ill except watch out for them and give them what help our science has. For the destitute you can stop oppressing them. We do horrible, horrible things to people in the middle east. We do worse to folks in South America. These people don't hate our freedom, they hate what we've done to them. Isis aren't terrorists. They're a bunch of men with no jobs and no wives. I suspect the shooter in San Bernadino was severely mentally ill.
Given a chance most people will choose honesty if their brain chemistry allows it. That's why the Mob eventually got busted. Rather than rail on against them as criminals start asking why they turned to crime in the first place. Start getting at root causes and the real social distortions that take what started out as a young boy and turn him into a killer ready to throw it all away.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I don't think you've got the issue here quite right. There's a couple reasons to believe that the 4th Amendment is not applicable in this case. The user of the phone is dead, so a lot of his privacy and autonomy interests are nullified now. He has no papers or effects that belong to him because he's a legal non-person. At best you could argue a chilling effect for other iPhone users -- and that's a pretty good argument. But thing this wasn't even his phone, it belonged to his employer. So while I think the 4th should be applied to phones owned or leased by living users, if the employer has no objection to the government searching the phone I don't see how the 4th applies in this case.
I've heard two serious issues actually raised, namely (1) that what the government is asking Apple to do is bad for the privacy of Apple's customers and (2) that the government has overstepped its authority in what it can compel Apple to do. This isn't a case of Apple sharing documents it has access to with the government, in fact Apple has already done that; the government is in effect asking Apple to develop a new tool that will give it easy access to any iPhone, any time, not just this one.
Aside from the fact that if Apple did it's job well (what are the chances?) developing this tool should be non-trivial, in absence of some kind of established oversight mechanism for using such toolsk the public shouldn't be too keen on letting the government have them.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.