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Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter To Back Apple With Legal Filing In FBI Case (recode.net)

Posted by whipslash on from the common-foe dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Google plans to follow Microsoft in throwing its legal support behind Apple in its increasingly contentious dispute with the federal government around the iPhone connected with the San Bernardino terror attacks, according to sources.

At a congressional hearing on Thursday, Microsoft's legal chief, Brad Smith, said that the company plans to file an amicus brief next week in support of Apple's resistance to helping the FBI hack the phone. Google will deliver its own supporting brief 'soon,' according to sources familiar with the company.

3 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Not very secure by MerlynEmrys67 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    If you assume that those 5-10 apple employees have access to the signing key that is needed to load the firmware. Without that, it would take another 1-2 M compute years to reverse the signing key needed to sign the firmware.

    What is being asked to do isn't that complicated - please disable this feature, please reduce this timeout... It shouldn't take 1/2 staff year to produce that firmware (and even if you include full review and validation). It is in Apple's interest to increase this time because this is what they will charge the FBI when they are required to produce the firmware if/when they loose the supreme court hearing. (which by that time, all of the data would be worthless in 2-3 years)

    --
    I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
  2. Time to create another terrorist attack by kbsoftware · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Oh oh looks like the industry is bushing back against the government. Looks like it's time to create another terrorist attack to make the industry look like they are the bad guys. I know what I'm suggesting here is purely conspiracy but I do believe there is more here than what meets the eye.

  3. Re:You can not find the truth in a legal document by adamstew · · Score: 5, Informative

    Have you read what the court order to apple says? Actually says? I have read the actual court order.

    It says:

    1) It will bypass or disable the auto-erase function.
    2) it will enable the FBI to submit passcodes to the subject device for testing electronically via the physical device port, bluetooth, wifi, or other protocol available.
    3) it will not purposefully introduce any additional delay between passcodes attempts beyond what is incurred by hardware
    4) they are to provide a signed iPhone software file that can be loaded onto the device and run from RAM without modifying the iOS installation on the actual phone, the user data, or system partitions on the device's flash memory

    Source: http://www.ndaa.org/pdf/SB-Sho...

    So yes...they are required to allow for electronic entry of the passcode. And they have to write the software in a way that hasn't been done before... without touching the flash memory on the iPhone. You can not run iOS on the phone "from RAM".

    This is absolutely a new piece of software that they will likely have to start with. Much more complicated than just "removing a few lines of code".