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Arizona County Attorney To Ditch iPhones Over Apple Dispute With FBI (networkworld.com)
alphadogg writes: Apple's refusal to help the FBI unlock an iPhone 5c used by one of the terrorists in the San Bernardino, California attack on Dec. 2 has prompted the Maricopa County attorney's office in Arizona to ban providing new iPhones to its staff. 'Apple's refusal to cooperate with a legitimate law enforcement investigation to unlock a phone used by terrorists puts Apple on the side of terrorists instead of on the side of public safety,' Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery said in a statement Montgomery described as a corporate public relations stunt Apple's positioning of its refusal to cooperate on privacy grounds. On the other hand, I suspect Apple's public refusal to decrypt, and Tim Cook's strong words in favor of user privacy, have probably triggered an opposite reaction among many would-be phone buyers.
I wouldn't recommend iphones to anyone but certainly not for this reason. The whole notion of lumping Apple in with this classification of criminal is just batshit crazy.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Good thinking Maricopa County! Cue the lawsuits regarding disrespecting grand jury confidentiality in 3, 2. 1...
A government agency wants to use, factually, LESS secure phones in its office to make a political statement.
Is the point that government agencies should always use less secure phones so the public can access their salient details? In that case I agree but I don't think that's the point he's trying to make.
This is a publicity stunt, but Americans should be terrified that it is now considered un-American for a corporation to refuse to assist the government to spy on citizens and bypass protections.
I would at least expect some of the Republicans to be howling about this, but it seems like all sides of American politics have pretty much said "refusal to comply with the government demands to spy on people is wrong, we need more government spying".
Holy crap, guys, really?
Papers please, comrade. You have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Apple's refusal to cooperate with a legitimate law enforcement investigation to unlock a phone used by terrorists puts Apple on the side of terrorists instead of on the side of public safety
Apple isn't refusing to cooperate. They are filing an appeal to a novel ruling. There is a difference.
Managing your fucking iPhones! What dipshit organization deploys iPhones that they do not have absolute control over?
Apple DOES cooperate, when they are able to do things like pull data out of iCloud backups.
What they are being asked to do is write a custom OS for free. To fix a mistake the FBI made.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The police department definitely wants to be using phones that can be tapped.
San Bernadino County didn't use a properly applied MDM solution. If they had, this wouldn't be an issue. One would hope that this is a wake-up call for similar organizations.
- Henrik
- when the Shadows descend -
This is exactly how fascism rises up as a 'peoples' movement via propaganda and hysteria. The Trump phenomenon operates on the same principles. It works today as well as it did 90 years ago. It is a fatal flaw of majority rule.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I'd imagine that public procument in the US, even if all the suppliers were also US companies, would likely have to be done on a non-discriminatory basis or the procuring body would run afoul either of competition laws or of laws requiring they get best value.
If it's the right thing to do, I don't think it matters much why they are doing it. They also aren't putting in back doors for China. The only thing I've read is that they've agreed to let China verify that there are NOT backdoors, which is just the opposite.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
the FBI has what it needs to unlock this phone any time it wants.
It just wants to make a big deal out of it to justify legislation.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
[citation needed]
Never mind that while it may, technically, be a legal request at this point, it's STILL legal for Apple to challenge this in court.
No! Let's pander to the media!
Asshats.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The FBI and Apple have already conspired, but Apple requested the theater over this to give the appearance of being a privacy advocate.
"...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive...it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it..."
Morons make themselves easier to attack. Please remember this when choosing your next targets...
I see that the county attorney is as moronic as their sheriff.
They're knucklewalkers anyway. Probably have a hard time getting their minds around the UI.
They should stick with clamshells.
Distancing themselves from Arpaio will do nothing but improve their standing.
Some would argue that justice is ALWAYS for sale, if you have enough money.
Where not totally true in all cases, sadly money can still buy a lot of justice in some situations.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
This dispute is the best that could have happened to us. In a couple of months, iPhones will be unhackable, Apple will make sure that they will never ever be in this situation again.
And people wonder why the police and the government is so hated and untrusted by the citizens...
This is a GOOD thing! ...because we wouldn't want to let an Arizona County Attorney off the hook for any crimes they might commit in the future just because they dug deep into their wallet in order to afford a smartphone from a company that respects people's right to privacy.
Apple's refusal to cooperate with a legitimate law enforcement investigation to unlock a phone used by terrorists puts Apple on the side of terrorists instead of on the side of public safety
Translation: "Apple isn't letting us run roughshod over civil rights in the efficient manner to which we are accustomed so we're going to throw a juvenile fit instead of having an adult discussion about a complicated problem."
Law enforcement officers with an overdeveloped sense of entitlement and a lack of regard for civil rights are a very scary thing.
According to the article on Ars, the prosecutor had this to say:
"If the potential for unauthorized access to an encryption key is truly motivating Apple’s unwillingness to assist in downloading information from specific iPhones, then let’s define the problem in those terms and work on that concern"
If only he really meant that.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
They did manage them. The FBI told them to reset the account password, which locked the FBI out of the phone. Convenient, really, almost like they did that on purpose.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Is planning a run for office.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
What they are being asked to do is write a custom OS for free. To fix a mistake the FBI made.
Which will be used repeatedly in the future on other phones in other cases regardless of the legality of doing so.
Ah, good ole Maricopa County. The home of jurisprudence by publicity stunt.
Isn't that in the neighborhood of that Sheriff that uses the pink underwear and tents for his county jail?
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The OP says "I suspect Apple's public refusal to decrypt, and Tim Cook's strong words in favor of user privacy, have probably triggered an opposite reaction among many would-be phone buyers"
Based on what exactly? Why do you suspect this? Your opinion? Gut feeling? unsubstantiated rumors? Tea Leaves? Fox news?
There's a reason Trump is winning every state in the primaries....
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
even without proper warrants
Source, or STFU.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
More than that, using the enshrined appeals process to make sure that you are being correctly compelled by a PRELIMINARY order means you are on the side of the terrorists.
It's not even an actual court order yet - that won't get issued until after the 26 February deadline (tomorrow) for Apple to file a motion that this would be unreasonably burdensome, which Apple will most certainly do. Then there will be a hearing on 22 March where the real decision from the Federal Magistrate will come down, and that will be the actual court order. Then, Apple (or the FBI) can (and will) request that the case get transferred to another district court judge, to see if they agree with the first one, during which time there will be a stay applied to the order. That will bring us some time into the summer before it's over. Then the appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals begins, first with a 3-judge panel, and if the parties aren't satisfied by that, the full panel of appellate court judges.
Then, they can apply to have the Supreme Court hear the case. The road ends if they decline it, or continues all the way to a decision if they hear it.
This won't be over any time in 2016, and probably not in 2017 either, depending on how stubborn the FBI wants to be about it. We already know how stubborn Apple will be about it.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Indeed. The solution is...don't use smartphones!
I don't care what their motivations are. Their motivations have brought them to the correct side of the issue, regardless.
This is an insanely bad precedent that the FBI is trying to set. They probably don't even give a shit what's on the phone - they want the body of legal opinion that they can use in the future.
I hope Apple takes this thing all the way to the Supreme Court.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Actually if Apple decides to put some sort of back door on iPhones just because some stupid USA law I for one will never again buy an apple product, I would prefer my devices to be backdoor free and since I don't live in the USA I see no reason why I should buy something that can affect my privacy just because some paranoid government can only provide security by spying on their citizens
To them we are all criminals who have not been caught yet.
I can see Doctors ordering iPhones to protect patient data (This a legal requirement)
Business executives wanting to protect merger talks.
The list goes on and on.
Very good marketing move by Apple!
And depending on what effect the coming new management at the top does or does not have.
Most of us have the same conflicting thoughts about any decision. Expecting a corporation's motives to be somehow "pure" or "rational" presupposes a regularity of mind that does not exist, neither in man nor in the organizations he makes.
Most times a stand is not principled. It usually happens because it is the best course of action someone can think of at the moment.
That is all.
Odd that the word 'Apple' isn't in your source.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
No, you prove your claim.
Otherwise, I'm calling bullshit.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
You skipped the end part where the Supreme Court deadlocks at 4-4, remands the case then decides to hear it again sometime after a new Justice is sworn in. Which from what is being said will be when Hell freezes over.
"The ferrets, they're every where I tell you!"
Not justice - politics, grandstanding, getting re-elected.
That's always for sell.
So have these idiots never heard of Mobile Device Management. Anyone distributing any phone, Android, Microsoft, Blackberry or Apple without a central managed MDM system is a fool! If San Bernardino had their phone in a simple MDM system none of this would be an issue. They could lock it change the passcode anything they wanted all from the central system.
It all starts at 0
It would be a simple matter for Apple to write the patched OS so that it only works on one particular phone.
If they do it once they will be asked to do it again. There is no putting the toothpaste back in the tube.
"...puts Apple on the side of terrorists instead of on the side of public safety" says the lawyer who one would think wants to keep his business private.
How long ago was it that lawyers were outraged by the TSA's policy to "search" laptops at the border? They adopted a clean hard-drive policy and the lawyers would download content via "the cloud" after arriving at their destination.
But this lawyer wants his phone to be searchable. Interesting indeed. Please define Public Safety.
My concern is around unlocking data for "1%" such that the other 99% of us are open to (a more likely) cyber attack or gov't intrusion. We need to find a happy medium on this topic.
So wait, the government is ditching phones that are secure to move to phones with lower security? How does this even make sense? Are they trying to have secrets leak? Why not start building their tanks out of glass and bullets out of cotton while they're at it? The USA is going to fall faster than Rome over this stupidity... I hope somebody there comes to their senses soon.
Apple has never said that its impossible for the data to be revealed, they have just said that they refuse to assist the FBI.
But if its possible to write software to decrypt the phone's data, then its not actually cryptographically secured - or at least the key is available. In any case, if apple doesn't do this task for the FBI, NSA/CIA will do it at greater cost.
SURELY NOT!!!!!
Apple WILL comply when it gets to the point where federal marshals show up at Apple HQ to arrest Mr. Cook for not complying with a court order.
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
Here we have another outrage from Maricopa county. The simple fact is that our government can not secure information given to them. If Apple develops software to crack the encryption you put everyone at risk and you also damage Apple's ability top do business. And that doesn't reach the summit of the issue either. The government did not offer to pay for the work needed to develop the decryption method. And it also has equality issues as well. If we allow the government to crack encrypted devices how can we disallow an individuals right to do the same thing? This is not a kingdom in wich a monarch is allowed to do things that the public is not allowed to do. We are a nation dedicated to the notion of equality in which the rights of the person, the corporation and the government are identical. I do not argue that equality is a practical way of life but if we do not have equality then we need to declare what we really are as a nation.
Apple WILL comply when it gets to the point where federal marshals show up at Apple HQ to arrest Mr. Cook for not complying with a court order.
Here's the deal, though: This was apparently the Order of a fairly lower-court, and thus has at least 2 or 3 levels of Appeal before an actual, final decision. So, it SHOULD be quite a long time before the Jackboots have their feet on Mr. Cook's neck.
Yup. Just like how asset forfeiture started out by nailing those bad drug dealers who were making money off of selling drugs to our kids. Fast forward and you've got cops stealing people's sh*t like gangsters under the same rules.
Or how about Stingrays (used for the parallel construction you've mentioned)? Those things would only be used to catch really dangerous terrorist types, right? Hell, with all the secrecy and backdoor-buddy'ism behind that we can't even *get* records of where those are being used, but 2000 cases got dropped because of them. It's not like they can't use the tools, they just need to get a f***ing warrant, but don't.
Let us not forget all the cases of other compromised internet security devices with suspicious circumstances behind them. Do we truly believe that none of those track back to certain 3-letter agencies.
Land of the free only seems to apply when it's government agencies having a free-for-all with your privacy.
What amazes me, is that Arizona doesn't have it's own Fark tag. It's certainly batshit crazy enough.
I wouldn't recommend iphones to anyone but certainly not for this reason. The whole notion of lumping Apple in with this classification of criminal is just batshit crazy.
"Sheriff" Arpaio - the worst sheriff in the country:
http://www.arpaio.com/top-ten/...
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
How long will it take before the dumbass lawyers figure out that their computer systems & phones will be hackable by organized crime? And they will all have made it possible by passing lawsuits to cripple Apple's product security with backdoors.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
If you buy iPhones/iPads for employees and don't use an MDM (Mobile Device Manager), then you have lost control on the device, period. All of this insanity could be a if San Bernadino would have managed their employee devices.
This is a giant tempest in a teapot. The FBI was sloppy and locked the phone, even though they deny the screwup, judge for yourself.
ATTENTION: If you issue iPhones or Android to employees setup an MDM!
Your off to a good start Arizona!
Seriously who cares what 1 office, of 1 county, of 1 state does? They probably wanted to switch to Android to save money but the people in office resisted, and now they can set a standard via press conference.
while apple's public action here is praiseworthy (imo), it does not seem to spring from a well articulated principled stance. it seems to have come from a combination of individual decisions, made in rather confused way, due to variety of motives .
that, in a nutshell, describes the complete history of mankind
Apple is not refusing, it's exercising it's rights to protect itself and it's customers. If they were still refusing after all legal remedies have been exhausted that would be an entirely different matter. But pretty much until the supreme court has ruled or refused to pick it up they are simply a company not complying with a burdensome court order as a 3rd party and using the system for relief as allowed for under the law.
What next dont take a plea deal and your obviously a criminal?
No sir I dont like it.
There's a reason Trump is winning every state in the primaries....
Yeah, but he's right in lock-step with the others, unequivocally stating that he would order Apple to do the Gummint's bidding.
I'm sure that Apple is absolutely in shock over the potential loss of 8-12 sales. Stocks are plummeting and I heard Cook threw himself out a 1st story window.
Now that the county attorney wants his phone to be more hackable, can the attorney still claim to certify that he affords attorney-client privilege to his client (the county)?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Personally, I don't want Apple - or indeed any other third party, but certainly not Apple - to have any kind of say over my encrypted data and/or access to it.
I get that the device is under their control. They can unlock it. They can force updates to it. They can - legally or not - do all these things.
But if you placed encrypted data on the phone, encrypted with a secure key, and decrypted only when you provide the key and/or passphrase, then why does Apple have any say, control, or ability over your encrypted data.
The people actually doing damage using encryption technologies must have a brain of some kind, and they know this. Even a truecrypt- or similar type container is secure from anything Apple or the FBI might want to do after the event. So long as they can't actively monitor you enter the key, they can't get into that data. That's where the dangerous people will be entering their data they don't want you to have, and there's nothing that anyone can really do about it.
The stuff contained on a phone? What's going to be in there? A browsing, location and call history available from the telco's anyway? And a memo and a couple of photos. Sure they *could* be incriminating, but that's not where the real dangerous stuff will be held.
Honestly, this is overbearing requirements to catch the low-hanging fruit. Instead of doing the jobs that spies and such agencies SHOULD be doing.
Apple WILL comply when it gets to the point where federal marshals show up at Apple HQ to arrest Mr. Cook for not complying with a court order.
Filing a formal appeal in court is not the same as refusing to comply with a court order. Until the higher court either rules or refuses to hear Apple's case, they aren't refusing the order nor are they violating any laws.
Now, why don't you go back to shooting Mexicans or Potheads or jacking off to a picture of Sheriff Joe, or whatever else it is you Dumbfucks in southern Arizona do in your free time, and leave the serious discussions to the adults.
To summarize: Marketing is everything.
Achille Talon
Hop!
"Arizona police to side against public safety by promoting unsafe security practices"
1) Innocent until proven guilty.
2) Legitimate? Um, you're going to have to prove that too.
Twinstiq, game news
This is a sad day. It bums me out to see Gov agencies playing the emotion card in order to try and get their way.
"You're either with us or against us" type mentality is so stupid.
If you have to resort to violence or emotional arguments, then the basis of your argument wasn't that good to begin with.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
You definitely don't want to distribute iphones to your employees if they are criminals whose personal data you want to be completely accessible by the FBI during an investigation.
I don't want anyone bypassing my login to gain access to my phone, especially the government! How do people get this so twisted??? I will not use any device that has a known backdoor in it, for any use!
That lock keeps people out... the only exception I want for that is for people, like myself, who know the code.
I applaud Apple for not rolling over on this.
Nick
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
A) Not terrorists.
B) It puts them on the side of consumers - somewhere Apple has never been before.
C) It puts them on the side of the constitution, also.
Such was the expectation of the writers of the constitution, who desperately tried to make it HARD. That they failed is not a surprise - the only positive is that it did take over 200 years.
Can't they just tell all their employees not to use any passcodes on their iPhones?
And I say this as an Arizona Republican. Hoi polloi are meanwhile cramming into the Apple stores in response to this controversy.
He may be just beating the rush, ditching his Apple phones before everyone else catches on that the government has been and will continue to get into them. Also, he might take offense that Apple already has a back door into the phone, as this debate makes it clear that Apple can "update" and thus change the software in the phone without any interaction or approval on the part of the user. To me that's enough of a reason to switch to a phone that really can be secured.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
With all the other appeals, it's likely that this wouldn't be heard until next year, by which time the Senate has no excuse to not at least hold hearings for nominees. (It's not like they really have an excuse now, but we'll have a new President then, and they'll have to come up with something new.)
So it's possible that the SCOTUS won't have a chance to deadlock.
-- I have monkeys in my pants.
I think Apple would get a crap load more sales by keeping the encryption and fighting the FBI than the sales they would lose by this petty boycott.
They have unlocked an encrypted 5C or higher lock d with a passcode for the Chinese government? I doubt it since, you know, it has never actually been done before. If you mean complied with a court order (or similar) to retrieve information they actually have access to, of course they have. Just like they have done countless times for the US government.
People that don't see the difference in the FBI conscripting them to write new code on the governments behalf should sue their first social studies teacher.
Apple will comply when the Supreme Court rules and refuses to hear any further appeals. If you think there is any chance of them complying before that you have not been paying attention.
I think Cook would love nothing more than for a federal Marshall to show up and arrest him. At the point the government overreaching will be complete and they will have already won. Fairly good chance whatever judge issuing that warrant would shortly be removed by congress.
Indeed the police can do whatever they want with government resources to get data off the phone. They just can't force an unwilling third party to participate. That is clearly not the intent of the all writs act. The purpose of the act is as a mechanism to compel people (or fictitious people) to comply with the law. The purpose is not to make new laws or compel people to do the states job for them.
Apple will comply with whatever the last appeal says. That is about two years off. There is strong opposition to requiring back doors in the US congress so I am not sure things are quite as simple as you lay make them out to be.
I would think that a department of prosecutors would want the best security that they could get for their employees so that the very sensitive information on their phones wouldn't get compromised by criminals. Instead, it seems like they prefer to buy phones that are crackable. I'd guess that companies looking to buy phones for their employees would want the best security available at reasonable cost.
Always trying to outdo itself... It's an even worse shithole than you imagined. Yes, some places suck simply because the people who live there are just assholes.
For all the folks who think Apple should write software to break a phone used by terrorists in America, ask yourself how you'd feel about China asking Apple to help track down one of their local terrorists. China is as legal a government as the USA's is.
Looks to be more like a blatant example of incompetent government officials working to shift blame away from their obvious inability to do their own jobs. YET - then there is the idea that if certain OTHER societal shortcomings were instead addressed and resolved, we would not even be having the bloodshed in the first place! YET - AGAIN - anyone that trusts their privacy to ANY device needs to be aware that NO guarantees of privacy exist.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.