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More Than Half of Americans Think Apple Should Comply With FBI, Finds Pew Survey (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Apple may not have the public's support in its legal fight with the FBI, according to a recently published Pew report. In a survey that reached 1,000 respondents by phone over the weekend, Pew researchers found 51 percent of respondents believed Apple should comply with FBI demands to weaken security measures on an iPhone used in the San Bernardino attacks, in order to further the ongoing investigation. Only 38 percent of respondents agreed with the company's position.
Limiting the sample to respondents who own a smartphone only improved the numbers somewhat, changing them to a 50-41 split in the FBI's favor. Among those who own an iPhone, the numbers are even closer, but still in the FBI's favor 47 to 43 percent.
Limiting the sample to respondents who own a smartphone only improved the numbers somewhat, changing them to a 50-41 split in the FBI's favor. Among those who own an iPhone, the numbers are even closer, but still in the FBI's favor 47 to 43 percent.
If Apple CAN unlock this particular iPhone, then Apple can unlock ANY iPhone. If it is already technically possible to comply with the judge's order (i.e. get the data off an existing phone that was running previously released software), then Apple doesn't want anyone to know that.
The FBI is asking for a universal backdoor so that they can hack the iPhone's pin password using brute force. There isn't a way to specifically hack just one phone the way the encryption and decryption method is built.
I can't find any link to the actual question(s) used
Really? The Pew Research Center publishes their findings for all to see. Here is the report. Page 7 of the report lists the actual questions used.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
The backdoor doesn't directly unlock the iPhone. The backdoor allows Apple to alter the firmware without unlocking the phone itself. The authentication mechanism is baked into the ROM, but the "10 strikes and auto-wipe" is not. The FBI wants Apple to disable the 10 strikes so they can guess as many times as they want, as fast as they want (through a cable interface). However, once that altered firmware gets on that particular iPhone, the FBI has that firmware permanently and can re-use it at a later date on some other iPhone. (At least that's the gist I get from the various articles I've read.)
Republican 56 to 32 in favor of unlocking
Democrat 55 to 37 in favor of unlocking
Independent 45 to 42 in favor of unlocking
Exactly, its a Pew survey and the question is of course trash meant to make it seem like the public supports the FBI.
Apple CANNOT unlock the phone, and Apple has NOT BEEN ASKED to unlock it either. That makes the question utterly invalid in the current situation. literally nothing to see here but paid shills doing what they are paid to do, tricking the citizens into agreeing with something completely different and spreading it then as proof of support for the actual issue.
Half of Americans vote Republican too.
Nope. Not even close. More than half of Americans don't vote at all in most elections. Of those that do vote, the majority often vote Democratic, but Republicans win anyway because their votes count more. Sparsely populated rural states are overrepresented, and tend to be Republican. Both Democrats and Republicans do gerrymandering whenever they can get away with it, but the process works better for Republicans because they are less concentrated: Even the reddest of red districts (say a rural county in Utah) have only about 70% Republicans, but it is easy to find urban districts that are 95% Democrat. Also, Democrats are less likely to show up and vote, and more Democrats are excluded from voting because of criminal records.
You haven't been following what is going on. Farook (the guy who perpetrated the multiple shooting deaths) destroyed his personal phone. This is his work phone. Since he had the awareness to destroy his personal phone, how much useful data do you think is on this phone?
Furthermore, they have the metadata for this phone, so why not get the data off the phones that this one communicated with? Do you really think he was calling people in the middle east with his work phone?
Going on, the FBI screwed up one possible way to access the phone: allowing it to sync with the iCloud.
What you are left with is the conclusion that the primary reason that the FBI is expending time and money on this is to establish a precedent. The FBI thinks that "because terrorists", people will be more sympathetic to unlocking this phone, and, once it has been done once, it can be done a thousand time, or ten thousand times.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The only senator to ever vote against the patriot act in all 3 of it's approvals is Bernie Sanders.
A funny thing about a republic is that no one can vote away another person's rights.
Let's say we do live in a true democracy. I get enough people to agree with me on something, like perhaps that people that take welfare should not get to vote. If you don't pay a net income to the government then you cannot have a say on how that money is spent. Then next year I get a smaller group of people to agree with me, only landowners get to vote. Why not? If you don't actually own the land then why should you get to vote?
Now that I've narrowed the field quite a bit I might have to be a bit more careful on picking my allies. I might be able to find a majority of men that think that women should not be able to vote. Perhaps I make this a religious cause. Those that do not pray to the great pasta in the sky should not be allowed to vote. Then I keep redefining who gets to vote year after year until it's just me and my inner circle of friends. We used democracy to become what is effectively a monarchy.
But it doesn't have to be a vote on who gets to vote. It could be a vote on who gets the guns. No guns for you and yours, we'll just leave you to fight off the armed thugs with your fists, feet, and teeth. Perhaps I vote away your healthcare, let you die off from a lack of shots against tetanus, flu, and meningitis.
Or here's an idea, I vote away your right against unwarranted search and seizure. I'm trying to protect you from the evil terrorists in the world. So I go about listening to phone calls, poke around your backyard. If I find a wild marijuana plant then I can assume you're growing the stuff in your basement, then I take your house. Your kid thought it would be "cute" to fashion a bong in art class, obviously you are selling drugs so I take your house. I think you bought too much cold medicine, so I lock you up for five years. I think you bought too much diesel fuel, ammonia, and fertilizer, I don't care if you have 600 acres of farmland, you are obviously making bombs and meth. I take your farm and lock you up.
Oh, wait, maybe we don't live in a republic any more.
A republic means that an individual has rights, in spite of what removal of those rights might mean to the benefit of the whole. If we can vote away the rights of any one person, even if we think that person is evil incarnate, then no one's rights are safe. The FBI lost the ability to snoop on us as it wished through a series of gains in technology and civil rights cases. They want that back. If we believe we live in a democracy, and lose the basis of a republic in our laws, then we'll have the government prop up one bogeyman after another to convince us to vote our rights away.
Those that choose security over liberty will get neither. I think a wise man warned us about this many years ago.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
But it actually is reasonable!
The reason why Apple can be forced to unlock the iPhone in question is because current iPhone security still depends wholly on trusting Apple's firmware. They are not being asked to create a backdoor - they are being asked to exercise a backdoor that they already have. They already have the keys to the kingdom.
Now, what would be unreasonable is for the FBI to require that Apple don't actually fix this in newer iPhone iterations, thereby making it technologically impossible to comply. Which I hope they do (fix it, that is - there are technical ways of plugging this hole). But, in the meantime, this is no different from previous iOS versions where Apple willingly performed data extraction for law enforcement. The technicalities have changed, but only somewhat - Apple can still, in practice, extract all of this iPhone's data, given their master firmware signing keys. So, the only thing that has actually changed is that Apple has changed their policy to start refusing these requests.
Now, whether you believe that technology companies should be able to be compelled to help law enforcement is another matter. But, many arguments being used by the pro-Apple side (such as the "this would create a backdoor" argument) are nonsense from a technical standpoint. In practice, literally the only change of substance is that Apple is now resisting this kind of request, where they didn't in the past - and none of this has anything to do with technical security measures in iOS at all, even though Apple is trying hard to make people believe that it does (and, in some cases, actively lying about technical details).
You can simply boot into DFU mode and upload arbitrary (signed) firmware via USB that way. This is how forensics-without-Apple's-help works with iPhones that had vulnerable boot ROMs (and thus you could bypass the signature requirement). It's not that Apple has built this technology in, instead, they haven't built technology to stop this use case. The iPhone design from the very beginning included the ability to boot off of USB into a ramdisk, as this is how iTunes restores work, and by extension, that can be used to extract data and/or generally replace any behavior of the standard OS if you have Apple's keys. Regular restores using the official mechanism may or may not in practice require the PIN to work, but the underlying DFU technology allows for that kind of bypass because it doesn't have any mechanism to ensure otherwise.
This is something that I've mentioned in the past, before this debacle: that large parts of the iOS security system are just policy decisions made by their software, and that they are therefore trivially vulnerable to replacing said software - which Apple can do, as they have the keys. This allows the system to be more flexible, as it's a lot easier to write code to implement a policy than to design a cryptographic system that guarantees it.
I hope that in future iPhone versions Apple uses cryptography to secure user data in the face of unexpected updates (i.e. the requirement for a PIN is actually enforced cryptographically, and if you attempt a cold restore without the PIN you inevitably lose access to user data storage keys), but right now, that is not the case.
Android, comparatively, tends to have a weaker security system, but, on the other hand, uses "hard" crypto-based security in places where Apple doesn't. For example, iPhones use full disk encryption but it is not based on the user PIN - so, again, that's a policy system, not cryptographically guaranteed - which means that some/most data is encrypted with your PIN in newer iOS versions (at another layer), but the metadata isn't (filenames, and perhaps data that is accidentally stored without adequate file-level encryption config), and anything that isn't based on the PIN can be extracted by Apple. Android full disk encryption is cryptographically based on your PIN/passphrase (which you enter on boot), and therefore guarantees that every last bit of data and metadata is safe without depending on OS policy.