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DoJ Wants Apple To Decrypt 12 More iPhones (macrumors.com)
tlhIngan writes: The Wall Street Journal (paywalled) is reporting that the Department of Justice is seeking Apple's help in decrypting 12 other iPhones that may contain crime-related evidence. The cases are not identified, though a list of the 12 phones in question has come out, but it is not known what level of Apple assistance is required (i.e., how many of those cases are waiting on the FBI request for special firmware to be developed and to be used on "one more phone"). It appears Tim Cook's assertion that hundreds of requests are waiting on this software may not be a fabrication, and the goal is not about just one phone, but to set a precedent to unlock more phones.
As TechDirt (which also lists those 12 cases, a list which certainly does not encompass all the phones the Feds would like to peer into) puts it, "[O]nce again, Director Comey was flat out lying when he claimed the FBI has no interest in setting a precedent."
Tim was right: gov't wants to open Pandora's box.
Table-ized A.I.
The San Bernadino phone was just the start, pretty soon, it will be "DOJ wants the backdoor keys for all your iPhones"
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
"This is my surprised face."
Meanwhile: "...New York City police commissioner, William J. Bratton, and the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., criticized Apple after it refused to comply with the court order and said that they currently possessed 175 iPhones that they could not unlock."
So that's 188 on the list so far...
My go-to person for security issues is Bruce Schneier. Here's what he says about the issue:
The current case is about a single iPhone 5c, but the precedent it sets will apply to all smartphones, computers, cars and everything the Internet of Things promises. The danger is that the court's demands will pave the way to the FBI forcing Apple and others to reduce the security levels of their smart phones and computers, as well as the security of cars, medical devices, homes, and everything else that will soon be computerized. The FBI may be targeting the iPhone of the San Bernardino shooter, but its actions imperil us all.
He elaborates on this in another section:
This is an existing vulnerability in iPhone security that could be exploited by anyone.
There's nothing preventing the FBI from writing that hacked software itself, aside from budget and manpower issues. There's every reason to believe, in fact, that such hacked software has been written by intelligence organizations around the world. Have the Chinese, for instance, written a hacked Apple operating system that records conversations and automatically forwards them to police? They would need to have stolen Apple's code-signing key so that the phone would recognize the hacked as valid, but governments have done that in the past with other keys and other companies. We simply have no idea who already has this capability.
The best solution I've seen so far, from right here on Slashdot, is to have future firmware updates require the phone to be unlocked. IOW, the user is presented with an alert, and the user must type in the passcode before the update is applied.
This would seem to solve the problem for future releases, Apple could legitimately say that there's no way to unlock the phone.
This will open the floodgates of making all of these companies be responsible for developing tools for law enforcement to demand access. And then law enforcement will demand they simply be given those tools to avoid the whole pesky court system and due process.
Welcome to the future, where law enforcement wants it to be illegal for you to have information they cannot access, and failure to allow yourself to be spied on is a criminal act. You can't have any freedom and security because they need to remove it to protect your freedom and security.
You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide, citizen.
In Soviet America, phone unlocks you.
But keep telling yourselves you don't live in a surveillance society, one day you'll believe you have always been at war with Eurasia. Failure to comply is now a thoughtcrime.
What happened to those oaths to defend and uphold the Constitution, instead of wiping your ass on it?
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
DOJ is requesting remote backdoor capabilities to all phones so that they can browse for hot nudes at any time anywhere. They originally wanted it to stop terrorism, but then realized that every other thing they've done to try to stop terrorism seems to have failed miserably. The DOJ is happy to announce that this time their plans will be used 100% as expected, and will for sure have great success.
Once the precedent is set, the feds are only a national security letter away from telling Apple (and all other phone an IoT manufacturers) that "your next routine iOS (or whatever) update will have remote access to everything that we can activate without your involvement, and if anyone finds out it exists, you go to prison." That's not a hack, that's a built in back door, as part of the OS, and no security can possibly protect you from the manufacturer's deliberate intent.
The precedent is the only thing that matters here.