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FBI Should Try To Unlock iPhone Without Apple's Help, Lawmaker Says (csoonline.com)

Posted by timothy on from the seems-reasonable dept.

itwbennett writes: Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican and former car-alarm entrepreneur, has suggested that the FBI try unlocking mass shooter Syed Rizwan Farook by copying the hard drive and running password attempts until they find the correct password. Bruce Sewell, Apple's senior vice president and general counsel, said during a congressional hearing that, although the company doesn't know the condition of the shooter's iPhone, Issa's approach may work.

10 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. Seems like... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Someone is confusing the iPhone with the iPod Classic.

  2. This guy over here.... by wkwilley2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    This guy's so far behind the times, he thinks an Iphone has a hard drive in it.

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    Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
    1. Re:This guy over here.... by theCzechGuy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      He's still ahead of FBI.

    2. Re:This guy over here.... by DigiShaman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'll give the benefit of the doubt that he's using the word hard drive interchangeably with storage. Now, if he actually thought he could pull the platters apart vs pulling data off with a cable or a manual flash chip migration to a breadboard, then yes, he's a fucking moron.

      --
      Life is not for the lazy.
    3. Re:This guy over here.... by halivar · · Score: 5, Insightful

      He called it a hard-drive, not a hard-disk. Honestly, we're splitting hairs about shit literally no one that does not frequent technology blogs gives a crap about. This is especially true because the HDD/SSD distinction has no bearing on the merits of his suggestion.

    4. Re:This guy over here.... by mrchaotica · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Are they actually serious? I assumed this was the way that it was always done; for as long as I can remember it's always been pointed out that self-destruct traps are essentially pointless as no serious attacker would be so grossly incompetent that they'd try to break into the original.

      The difference is that on iPhones, Apple has managed to design the system in such a way that breaking into the original is the only practical choice. I mean, they can make a copy, but that means they have to copy the code hard-wired into the encryption chip, not just the data in the flash. To copy that chip, they have to very carefully physically disassemble it with acid and lasers, and then examine the circuits with an electron microscope.

      And if they care that damn much then that's exactly what they should do, not force Apple to create a tool to allow the FBI subvert everybody else's security at-will.

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      "[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz

  3. Re:It's not about the phone... or the crime by halivar · · Score: 3, Insightful

    In this case, the suggestion is (perhaps accidentally) correct in that it is the FBI's job to discover evidence in their own possession, not Apple's. The burden of cracking the phone should be on the agency.

  4. They should do it, but they haven't. Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The answer is easy. They are not interested in the contents of the terrorist's phone as much as they want a magic key that will unlock anyone's iPhone anywhere. The NSA already has all the metadata from this phone recorded anyway, so the whole alarmist search for the phone's contents is a front for the government's overweening desire to pry into everyone's life.

  5. this whole thing is fishy to me by argStyopa · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What I fundamentally don't understand is this:

    EITHER
    a) if this is GENUINELY a mattter of national security, the FBI could actually hand the phone to the NSA and get the information in about 30 seconds but for some reason isn't doing so, or
    b) the NSA's upteen-gajillion-dollar "black" budget has pretty much enabled them to record/analyze/store only the utterly banal unencrypted conversations that you could hear just sitting and listening to the guy next to you at the coffeeshop, ie almost entirely wasted on stupid crap.

    I don't see really any other alternative.

    I'd expect, for example, that Russian and Chinese government communications are ROUTINELY of a higher level of encryption than the bloody iPhone you can buy at the mall, and yet the NSA's *job* is to listen in on that stuff and they claim that they're pretty damned good at it?

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    -Styopa
  6. Re: yes they should by TWX · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Now you're just being pedantic.

    The FBI should copy the contents of the storage medium to another storage medium and attempt to brute-force it. That's what the lawmaker is saying in a nutshell. This lawmaker is actually making our case, that it's not Apple or any other vendor's job to break their own security, that it's the investigating agency's job to essentially prove its case by doing that work itself. Stop attacking the person actually trying to help by nitpicking what they say.

    --
    Do not look into laser with remaining eye.