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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.
Pretending that back doors don't exist is what will create an Orwellian society.
The back door is already there. Thats the problem. The problem isn't that the government wants Apple to use it, and certainly not that the government wants Apple to create one (remember the original narrative?)
"His name was James Damore."
We of the dark side are often accused of invoking the slippery slope argument too soon. But in this instance, if the FBI is able to convince courts that forced labor is a valid tactic to use in a terror investigation, it already has nine new cases (more according to some sources) for which it wants Apple to be forced to write custom crack code in hopes of solving. And every single one of these new cases involves the drug war, not terror.
While I happen to agree with Apple's position in this case, I think it's important to be intellectually honest here.
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.
Let's not pretend that Tim Cook, or virtually any executive at Apple, gives a shit about the US Constitution.
It's just really annoying when I see these shysters get indignant and hide behind the same Constitution that they continuously mock and use as a punchline.
While I'm on Apple's side in this one. The argument that this is against the constitution is, well...arguable.
The constitution says:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] 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"
So we need a sworn court order which, to be fair, has been attained
Maybe I'm missing something here?
not that it would make a world of sunshine and happiness either. But Orwell's book wasn't about out of control government, it was about the negative impact of television and other forms of mass media. It always bugs me that even schools don't bother to cover this until maybe when you hit college.
Sure, I agree with Apple on this one (though I'd argue they're less concerned about freedom and more so about having to pay to write backdoors and clean up the brand damage from said backdoors). But can we stop trotting out Orwell as our anti-gov't poster boy please? The man was a socialist for Pete's sake...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Thanks to the NSA and the Freedom Act, we're already there.
Kudos to Apple for trying to limit the scope of the problem, but they can't prevent something that already exists.
If Apple is doing their job right, that's not possible - a flawless implementation of a decent modern encryption algorithm would take the combined computational resources of the entire planet many thousands of years to break a single code. Even most accidental flaws don't reduce that time to something terribly useful.
Unless of course someone has a functional quantum codebreaking computer, then it should only take a few hours, depending on speed. Has anyone heard if there are any cryptographic schemes in use that would be resistant to quantum codebreaking? Seems like that should be a really high priority considering that there may or may not already be such machines in existence, and if not there almost certainly will be within a matter of a few years or decades.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Pardon me, but isn't there a less biased source to link to for this issue?
9to5mac sounds like a fanboy site. Are we going to have stories linked to Infowars, Free Republic or DailyKos about Hillary before long?
Nah, call it the FBiPhone!
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
So basically, your phone is still your enemy, and anyone with physical access to the device will eventually be able to defeat all of your safeguards. This same situation exists with laptops and other computers. Even if your entire system is encrypted, at some point you must enter a key. It would seem that anyone with physical access to the hardware can intercept that key by some means. The only "hard" problem is this ex-post facto style access where the keyholder is dead. I guess the cops will have to stop shooting first and develop better non-lethal methods.
My question is, since we now must assume that everything the FBI is proposing has probably been done, is anything safe? If you start from an initial state of not even trusting your hardware, how can you establish trust?
100% preventable,, mostly kids, our spiritual & physical allies all over the wwworld... calling it/us society must be another madison ave, tackdick? like cold or civil war? all part of our wmd on credit greed fear ego based never ending holycost.. talk about a fairytail... truth+mercy=justice !in the moms we trust!.
Holy crap, see what happens when you hid a stoner's Fritos?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
"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
That feels like a rather ironic statement given the fact that Apple and Google are at the forefront of invading your privacy so they can better jam advertisements down your throat.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
As the subject reads, I'm in total agreement with Mr. Olson. Mandatory backdoors in encryption systems lead to no good endings. I would sooner not sacrifice my privacy to catch the relative few who abuse encryption.
You mean we are not there yet?
This issue is much simpler than it's being made out to be. The 4th Amendment to the US Constitution reads as follows:
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.
So, if the US Government got a proper search warrant, then Apple is legally obligated to do as legally ordered and unlock the phone- in this instance. Just as a single instance of issuing a search warrant doesn't allow for all future searches to take place without one, any future requests to unlock phones require their own proper search warrants. If the US Government doesn't have a proper search warrant to unlock the phone, then Apple has the perfect legal right to tell them to pound sand.
-Z
I don't see why they need access.
1). Is it the contacts list? why. Every phone call made or received is logged in the phone companies billing systems to include date, time and length. This database is already supplied to the Uncle Sam.
2). Every voice mail? Every voicemail recorded on the phone companies server is never really deleted. The phone owner thinks so, but Uncle Sam probably gets a copy anyways since the disk drive space to save a low resolution file is pretty small.
3). Every text and email sent? I don't think the emails and texts are encrypted since one may send to a different vendors phone which may not have the same encryption method or keys. Moreover, the amount of disk drive space to save them and give Uncle Sam a copy is small. In fact, Uncle Sam already can get a copy in an investigation.
4). What apps were installed? This may be of interest so that they know what others may have installed that do similar actions. It could be an encrypted talk app beyond the phone companies control. Maybe same cached message they may be looking for. Hmmm, Uncle Sam is interested in whether you have Angry Birds on your phone.
So, the amount of info that Uncle Same probably already has vs. what might be on the phone will probably provide no more insight.
You are absolutely right. There is a court order, and a public one at that, so the 4th amendment is not at issue. That's what distinguishes this from the whole Snowden thing, where government intelligence-gathering entities either act without a court order, or else on a secret court order by a secret court (which is really the same thing, 'cause who knows what happened, 'cause it's a secret).
No, the thing going on here is that Apple is being asked, or even forced, to compromise their own product using means available only to them. If I understand correctly from this article from Ars Technica, that means is their private key, used to push updates to iphones. By using their key to push a custom update to this iphone to shut off some of this iphone's security measures, the FBI would have an easier time brute-forcing the PIN and thereby unlocking this phone.
Obviously, Apple doesn't want to comply. But there's plenty of precedent for why they should. Again, this is all above-board and legal... not a back-door deal done in secret where the CIA gets a special key to unlock any iphone. Instead, this is like the cops getting a warrant to a bank's safety deposit box. The bank has one key, but the owner's key is not available - so, to comply, the bank is going to have to take a drill to their box and break the owner's key socket. But with the right warrant, banks comply.
Methinks Apple's problem is the appearance of their products being hackable with compromised privacy, something dogging Microsoft and Windows 10. Methinks Apple wants to appear to offer an active role in defending the privacy of their users, whereas competitors like Google and Microsoft make it their business to snoop on their users for ad revenue. Methinks Apple is making a fuss over this because they're afraid consumers might flock to Android in the misguided belief that Android is more safe from a legal search sanctioned by a warrant.
Methinks the only issue here is whether Apple can be compelled to help the FBI break this phone. Unlike the bank and it's safety deposit box, the phone doesn't belong to Apple. It rightfully belongs to the cops as evidence in a crime, and before that it belonged to some shmuck who shot a bunch of people, and they can do what they want with it. It just so happens that Apple has something that could make breaking into it a lot easier, but Apple is arguing that they have no responsibility or liability to do so - once the phone is sold, it's out there and Apple's done... if a consumer wants to apply an update from Apple via the private key, that's their decision and that by no way implies Apple take some responsibility over the device and how it's used. Therefore, just because Apple has a private key that can help in hacking the phone, their argument is the government has no authority to compel them to use it, because although the user of the phone might have committed a crime with the phone, Apple didn't play any part in such crime and therefore are under no obligation to get involved.
Methinks, therefore, maybe Apple has perhaps one legitimate concern: complying might suggest they are somehow complicit in an alleged crime committed with their product because of the privacy measures they bake in. Unfortunately, there can be a fine line between volunteering to help with the government, and being obligated to assist the government because of some legal connection with the bad guy establishing a liability. Once Apple gives it up over this phone, Apple fears prosecutors everywhere will start hitting them up with thousands of break-this-iphone warrants, until Apple has to dedicate an entire skyscraper-full of engineers and lawyers to deal with it all. Come to think of it, that's a shitty business to be in (and I wonder how Microsoft and Google would handle it, because they'd be next).
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Alert! 12 year old commenting. Only children think the world will be safe if only their parents are allowed to protect them.
We are their now or are we all going to pretend the mass collection and saving of that data without warrants isn't breaking the constitution? If the use of stingray,mass collection of all text messages,emails isn't Orwellian i don't know what is. But its ok for corporations "a list far to lengthy to post" to spy on our every move to make a buck is ok??
Jack of all trades,master of none
You have to trust someone.
Unless you want to write your own OS and create your own hardware you have no choice. Yes, you can use an Open Source OS so at least in theory it's possible to verify the code on your own... but there is so much firmware embedded in each and every chip you get there is no way you're going to be able to verify the phone from top to bottom.
In the end, you have to go by reputation and track records and make an informed decision. In my mind Apple has always been firmly on the side of privacy compared to many other companies.
So I guess the question back to you is: why _not_ trust them? Or, better: who do you trust more?
Since his wife was killed by terrorists on 9/11 he's a good choice to counter the fed's "But we need this because terrorists" argument.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
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.
Apple makes quite a bit of its profits not in the US...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Is it really an issue of constitutional law? I now doubt it, because if Olson and Apple were so confident in their interpretation of the law, i.e. they were sure they had a case, why would they put so much effort into creating this media sideshow? Why are they trying to fight this in the court of public opinion?
Excuse me, but that was started by the FBI. If I British newspaper writes "Apple refuses to unlock TERROR PHONE", then surely you should admit that Apple has the right to do a bit of positive PR on its own.
One correction to that; the hack would only work on an iPhone 5C, and not on the 5S or any newer model.
with enough time and effort you can crack any device. Security has never been about 'perfection'...at any point in the history of mankind. Ever.
The whole point of security is to raise the cost (time, money, political capital in this case) that must be spent to break in. Seeing that the government is basically having to go 15 rounds with Apple to break into the iPhone of a deceased terrorist--that seems like pretty good security to me.
But I understand your confusion--which isn't to say that I'm excusing it, just that I think you're probably generally confused about technology in general.
Apple: if you want to make phones that people can actually trust their data to, not only is the only proper response to FBI orders to unlock phones that "it is technically impossible", you will have to make that believable by having it stick in court. In addition, should also be much more open about the security architecture and software of your phones. Legal posturing and going on 60 Minutes are not convincing.
dont we?
.. gives to charity if it furthers his agenda.