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Apple Lawyer Ted Olson: Creating Unlock Tool Would Lead To 'Orwellian' Society (9to5mac.com)
Apple's lawyer, Ted Olson, explained in an interview with CNN that what the government is asking Apple to do is "limitless." Olson explained that if the tool that the government wants is created, any judge anywhere could essentially order to list to any customer's conversation, track location, and much more. The lawyer likened it to an Orwellian "big brother" type society. When pressed about how Apple could potentially help fight terrorism by creating a tool to access locked devices, Olson explained that while Apple will help the government defeat terrorism in every way that it can, it can't be done by breaking the Constitution.
"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself – anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called."
"The telescreen recieved and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever the wanted to. You had to live- did live, from habit that became instinct- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."
-Some quotes from 1984
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
There is a while bunch of privacy law that hangs on this.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
It is simply not possible to build the required tool in a way that:
- it will only run on this iPhone
AND
- it can not be trivially adapted to run on every other iPhone
The first part is completely possible, but the second part is impossible - by building the tool, you have done 99.999% of the effort required to do it for another phone. Maybe not quite that for secure enclave devices, but certainly for everything pre-A7.
This isn't a 4th amendmant issue - it's a government owned phone. The same government that:
- bought, but did not use Mobile Device Management software that would have let them unlock the phone
- did not use Apple's free Device Enrolment Program, that can make MDM mandatory & non removable for institutionally owned devices
- did reset the ICloud password so the backup was no longer recoverable
For institutionally owned devices, Apple has already supplied a tool set to do exactly what the government needs here.
They chose not to use it, and now want Apple to build a new tool set that digs them out of the hole they found themselves in, due to their incompetence.