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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.
More than half of Americans are wrong.
I find it odd. I don't know anyone who thinks Apple should help the government. I realize this is the definition of anecdote ... but still, this seems odd.
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You mean, not everyone in the country understands the technical aspects of encryption, how that encryption is used, how backdoors cause exploits that are not limited to 'authorized' users, and how their right to privacy and security in their papers and effects are affected by those kinds of backdoors?
What are they teaching in these civics classes?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Isn't there a compromise? Can't Apple unlock this individual phone without providing the government a universal backdoor? From what I understand, the county has given them permission to unlock the phone, so we aren't treading on the 4th amendment.
Journal
One big problem with Pew studies is how they are conducted. They're often done using random telephone calling, and the people who are most educated on technology issues are also the ones least likely to pick up the phone.
Response rates are only something like 10%, and they're likely to be skewed towards the elderly. Take a look at the Snowden studies, where people over about 40 were highly skewed towards believing the government, whereas people under 40 were highly skewed towards believing Snowden, and you now understand why this poll should be taken with a grain of salt.
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I would tend to believe that the question is invalid.
They likely did not ask the obvious followup: "Would your answer change if you knew the NSA already had this information, and the FBI just hasn't asked for it?"
In fact, in my experience, the majority is wrong quite a lot.
Fortunately, this is not a popularity contest. The question is whether the government can compel a company to rewrite its products to make it easy for the government to snoop on its customers. If they can, it's only a small jump to forcing companies to include a backdoor in their products in the first place.
As you may know, RANDOMIZE: [the FBI has said that accessing the iPhone is an important part of their ongoing investigation into the San Bernardino attacks] while [Apple has said that unlocking the iPhone could compromise the security of other users’ information] do you think Apple [READ; RANDOMIZE]
Should unlock the iPhone
Should NOT unlock the iPhone
Don’t know/Refused
Brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants.
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
We keep on getting fed media of fear. Rational discourse of events and ideas showing the actual scale of things, just doesn't make money.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The right way to ask it is "Do you think Apple should help the FBI, even though it helps Russian hackers get into your phone?"
That might change a few people's minds.
More Than 500 Cherrypicked Americans Completely Clueless About How Encryption Works, Finds Pew Survey
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Most of them have no clue about anything but "FBI wants terrorist iphone unlocked."
Case in point, listening to NPR this morning they had an "expert" on that said that apple shouldn't be forced to create a backdoor to add to a phone, but they should be required to unlock any existing phones.
Considering the so-called expert was a government spook, was that "opinion" a surprise?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
This isn't exaggeration or hyperbole, especially since the FBI said they only want a firmware update on this single phone under Apple's auspices.
Fuck them.
They can have the data they want tomorrow two ways:
(1) Have a FISA court order the NSA to give them the data, since it's just traffic analysis and MMS/SMS data the FBI wants, and NSAs PRISM collects that.
(2) Let Apple do a hardware hack on the phone, desolder the flash, socket it, and reset it on every 4th attempt until it's cracked.
Quit fucking asking for a tool to get the data that can be applied to every phone. There is no such tool, if such a tool were possible to create (and I was discussing this today at lunch with the guy who *designed* the security architecture in question: it's doubtful), it would take *man decades* to create it.
We do need to 'get along' with each other, but not at the expense of any one group or even one individual for that matter, and no, 'diversity' won't fix a damn thing, but 'mutual understanding' will. You can't just take cats and dogs and put them in the same room and expect it all to get sorted out -- you'll end up with a bunch of dead cats and dogs. But if you can get the cats and the dogs to talk to each other and come to a mutual understanding? Then you've got something.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
John Oliver famously coined the "dick-pic" angle of looking at the surveillance programs Snowden helped reveal. The resulting understanding in the masses when you boiled down the question to "can the government see my dic pics" showed a massive reversal of general opinion (IMO).
Something similar is needed here. Perhaps the question should be reworded to "Should the FBI be able to force Apple to rewrite their systems so that an Apple phone will unzip your pants to see if you have a penis or not?" Because at this point there is no evidence (that I've heard) that there is anything pertinent on the phone. Only the possibility that there *might* be. Much the same as there is a 50/50 chance that any particular person may have male genitalia under their pants. Hmm.. Schrodinger's Dick Pic???
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.
People with a telephone line to their home are less likely to understand technology.
sorry for my comments, I'm drunk
I have a friend who is very right-wing nut job. In most cases he's staunchly "anti-big-gub'mint." Yet in this case, he thinks that Apple is being downright traitorous. I guess the only thing he hates more than Uncle Sam's grubby paws on his cell phone, is terr'ists. So strange. I even pointed out that this is forcing a company to do something on behalf of the government. When "Obamacare made Hobby Lobby provide abortions," he got all upset about that. But it's OK if it's Apple working for the FBI. WTF?!
" In a survey that reached 1,000 respondents by phone over the weekend"
That pretty much ended it for me too.
I figure they reached 1000 grandmothers who think a company should do what a court ordered.
Good thing the Constitution & the law aren't a 'popularity contest'...I don't CARE what 'the public thinks'...the question is one of 'legal rights'...society can't be beholden to the '50% below the curve'..
Why didn't they go for the gold and just make stuff up with something like "should Apple stop breaking the law?" They'd get more yes responses then. Try asking "should Apple write software if FBI demands that they do?" And see how many positives you get then.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
That time, the question was "should this radical proposed document be adopted?" accompanied by the actual US Constitution. And the results were roughly the same:
http://www.constitution.org/co...
Did the pollsters add the information that the court limits it to this phone, and apple would have to create and test a new version of the iOS operating system code at the expense of potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars and likely a possibility of having to specifically hire additional people to make up for the diversion of resources internally in Apple to comply, as well as potentially delay the release of new versions of the iOS software in the normal flow, as well as potentially ripple the delay to delaying new products?
...
People seem to think this requires no effort or expense on Apple's part to comply with the request, where the reality is it affects the iOS family devices as a whole, and carries a considerable expense.
Additionally it is to cover for the sloppy government handling of the iCloud account associated with the phone in the first place.
And the open liability issue if their one of a kind OS version, tied to a single device and no other, fails catastrophically. Testing alone would be a nightmare as you'd have to duplicate the essential elements of the target phone on a test device, and then test against it
Tim Cook is correct in denying compliance. It opens a huge can of worms (read liability) on Apple. And Tim's job is not to give the government free services and incur liability that can be avoided. It is to protect the fiduciary rights of the stockholders.
I think if the pollsters included a scale of what amount of money Apple should spend on compliance, as well as what amount of delay is acceptable for Apple's product shipment dates given as multiple choice questions, the results would be very different. You could be talking about delaying the next releases over a significant time period where apple not only losses expenses related to the compliance directly, but losses due to product delays and loss of market share as unencumbered companies have a DOJ wedge edge created.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
What, exactly, was the wording of the question?
Chances are that could have had quite a lot to do with the respondents' answers, in either direction.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
In other words some hundreds of people could create it in a month. Color me unimpressed by the level of difficulty. IF, that is (and it's big IF) your premise is accurate.
Hundreds of people as qualified as the creator of the architecture.
Let's say Fred Brooks was wrong, and all engineers are equivalent cogs that can be replaced by any other cog. It's just a lot of typing, right?
So let's also say "hundreds" is "300".
So 300 x 1 month = 100 x 3 months = 25 x 12 months ... OK, that's ballpark for "man decades" if that "s" translates to 2.5.
What do 25 engineers of that calibre cost for a year? Well, minimally, you are looking at 2 x their salary -- that's the "flooring cost" for an engineer, and equipment, and rent, and computers, and ... that you have to pay them.
What do you think this guy got in stock options and base pay for one year of work? So basically... you are looking at a minimum of about $100M, with no guarantee that they outcome is possible.
Can Apple pay this out of petty cash? Probably. Will they? No. Should they? Hell no! This is (effectively) contract work for the FBI: they get to pay any costs, and the outcome is uncertain.
But wait! If Apple has 300 engineers of this calibre working on the thing for a month ... what about their opportunity costs? That $100M is just to cover expenses related to keeping these people working and the lights on. During that month: they can't work on any Apple products, because they are too damn busy working on cracking the iPhone in software for the FBI!
Apple loses whatever work product those engineers would have produced in that month, plus whatever value in time to market that that one month lead would have gained them on any competitors, and they lose that lead *in perpetuity*. And you know that if Apple is paying an engineer *that* much, they are going to be making at least *twice* that much off their labors. Or they wouldn't be willing to pay them.
So now we are in the 1/5th to 1/4 billion dollar ballpark for the work.
OR.
The FBI could just pay some ordinary engineer $30,000 to pull the flash chip, and reset it every 4 tries, up to 250 times.
Tell me again why Apple should do it the FBI's way instead of the *easy* way?
Nearly half of American disbelieve evolution and think the world was created 6000+ years ago. So, when you have so many people even disbelieving the most successful predictive theory in biology, I don't expect that many either to udenrstand complex themes like encryption, walled garden, and civil right to privacy.
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That may be true if and only if you can find hundreds of people that 1) are willing to work on this project, 2) are very well versed in (breaking) encryption, and 3) know the source tree of iOS in and out. There may be a couple hundred that fulfil the last criteria, the overlap with the first two will be very small. There is the chance that some of the people that could do it are principled enough to resign from Apple and start to work for one of the competitors (if you have such skills that shouldn't be too hard to do).
If I were to have such skills and if I were to be (in part) responsible for the design and implementation of what is arguably one of the most secure consumer devices in the world, I would take great pride in my work. Being asked to undo such an accomplishment, is a really, really big thing. This is an issue that is often enough ignored: the actual people doing the work. Apple may be a company, but a company is made up of people, and if there are no people that are willing and able to perform a certain task, it won't happen, valid court order or not.
There is the chance that some of the people that could do it are principled enough to resign from Apple and start to work for one of the competitors (if you have such skills that shouldn't be too hard to do).
If I were to have such skills and if I were to be (in part) responsible for the design and implementation of what is arguably one of the most secure consumer devices in the world, I would take great pride in my work. Being asked to undo such an accomplishment, is a really, really big thing. This is an issue that is often enough ignored: the actual people doing the work. Apple may be a company, but a company is made up of people, and if there are no people that are willing and able to perform a certain task, it won't happen, valid court order or not.
Job interview:
Q: "What did you do at your last job that makes you feel you are qualified to work on cryptographic systems?"
A: "Wrote cryptography hard enough to break that the FBI invoked the All Writs Act of 1789 to try and force my company to break it"
Q: "Reason for leaving last job?"
A: "They asked me to comply with the request, so I quit."
Hired!
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.
Half of Americans are by definition, below average intelligence. Coincidence?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Actually, Mexicans in the US are 3 times as likely to be rapists compared to their white counter part. Easily found in this document from the Department of Justice
That document neither talks about who commits the crimes, nor does it mention Mexicans. It does say that hispanic women are twice as likely to be victims of rape than white women, so perhaps you were confused. If we assume that every rape victim is raped by someone of the same ethnicity (dubious, but let's run with it), and that rape victims and rapists make up the same proportion of the population (also quite dubious: it's more likely that a rapist rapes multiple people) then that means that 99.88% of hispanics are not rapists, whereas 99.94% of whites are not rapists. Which makes the original claim fear-mongering nonsense.
Do I really need to go there? Fish in a barrel are envious about easy this one is. I mean, you brought this up. But, since you asked, in the last 3 days, 157 attacks in 22 countries killing 1747 people
In the same period, around 3,400 people died in road traffic accidents worldwide, around 128 of them in the USA. Oh, and around 14 murders are committed every 3 days by white men in the USA. If you think that your chance of being blown up by a muslim is statistically significant, then you're an idiot.
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No where do they list the actual questions they used, so the only thing you can "take away" from it is surveys can't be trusted without full disclosure of the questions used.
The evidence does suggest more than half of US citizens don't know dick about security or encryption, which also suggests the education system is totally fucked. It's not that hard to understand "the basics" of security and encryption. Being an expert, which I am not, takes decades. You don't need to be an expert to understand what the FBI is asking is a backdoor. With respect, I say fuck any government that demands a backdoor on smart phones.
After partnership with Apple to defeat world-wide encryption tactics, they have announced that they will be installing a webcam on Schrödinger's cat, for security purposes "in an emergency". Pew study shows that more than half of Americans think we should be able to know whether Schrödinger's cat is alive.
It's a fact!
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
The devil is in the details. How were the main questions worded? "Should Apple comply with the court writ to assist the government with obtaining data from a terrorist's iPhone?" is a lot different than "Should Apple be forced to create software that will break the encryption on all iPhones?"
And 1,000 people is a terrible sample size to draw any conclusions other than they asked 1,000 people questions.
The first thing I was taught in my statistics class is how they can lie. And in a wide variety of ways. The first thing I would ask is who is asking the questions, and who wrote the questions in the first place. In addition, most of the public is so "high strung" with news designed to scare the into accepting anything with the word "security" or "anti-terrorism" they many are now psychologically programmed to say yes to anything with these key phrases in them. The fix is in folks. I just wonder if the bus for "1984" was early, or late...
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
Did you just ignore the rest of that line? Here:
I think he's wrong on a lot of things but he's a stand up guy.
He disagrees with Bernie's positions but he likes him as a person. Which is understandable, because Bernie is honest and consistent, you can look through his history and see the same themes over and over for the past 5 decades. That's what a politician should be like, not someone whose opinion changes with every poll or donor check. Our political races would have a whole lot more substance and meaning if the people participating in them had anywhere near the same level of integrity that Bernie Sanders has. Note that nothing that I just said has anything to do with his actual policy positions, just the fact that they have remained stable. Everyone else changes their policy positions based on who is giving them money and what the polls say, and Bernie doesn't do that.
That's a major reason why he has the level of success that he does against Clinton. The media has portrayed him as unelectable since day 1, but Clinton is not out there winning landslides against him, if she wins at all it's a small margin. People don't trust Clinton, and they do trust Sanders. It's that simple.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black