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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.
There were two shooters, and they had documented terrorism involvement prior to this, once the investigation traced back far enough.
Most people don't bring their wives with them to help with "random and impulsive" workplace shootings, or set up a bomb factory in their garage weeks / months ahead of time.
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.
which again leaves me wondering about the relevance of not being able to back it up to the cloud.
The idea was that they could bring the iPhone back into range of a WiFi network it already knows (e.g. the WiFi network at the terrorists' condo) and within a day or two it would do another automatic cloud backup.
Once that completed, Apple (and therefore the government) would have access to that backup, and therefore could try to break the backup's encryption via brute force without triggering the 10-attempt-failure auto-erase that is present on the phone.
However, since the password was changed, it seems that now the phone will be unable to initiate a backup without someone logging in to the phone first.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.