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Snowden: FBI's Claim It Can't Unlock The San Bernardino iPhone Is 'Bullshit' (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Edward Snowden, the whistleblower whose NSA revelations sparked a debate on mass surveillance, has waded into the arguments over the FBI's attempt to force Apple to help it unlock the iPhone 5C of one of the San Bernardino shooters. The FBI says that only Apple can deactivate certain passcode protections on the iPhone, which will allow law enforcement to guess the passcode by using brute-force. Talking via video link from Moscow to the Common Cause Blueprint for a Great Democracy conference, Snowden said: "The FBI says Apple has the 'exclusive technical means' to unlock the phone. Respectfully, that's bullshit." Snowden then went on to tweet his support for an American Civil Liberties Union report saying that the FBI's claims in the case are fraudulent. Apple's clash with the FBI comes to a head in California this month when the two will meet in federal court to debate whether the smartphone manufacturer should be required to weaken security settings on the iPhone of the shooter.
If the NSA can do it, it would probably not be allowed as evidence in court. If the FBI did it, maybe it would.
This all boils down to legal precedent.
Always has been.
Assuming the FBI is privy to the NSA's capabilities.
This is a terrorism case, so the FBI and the NSA are supposed to cooperate.
I keep hearing this but what does it matter? The government does whatever it pleases without consequence. The NSA admitted to illegally spying on members of congress. Nobody was fired or even given a letter of reprimand.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
If the NSA can do it, it would probably not be allowed as evidence in court. If the FBI did it, maybe it would.
Which of the dead shooters are we taking to court?
The government deals with the consequences of their actions all the time. The whole Apple-FBI conflict is happening out in the open for every one to see. No classified FISA involvement or equally classified NSL's being used to force Apple into doing anything. The government is following the law and as a consequence they have already lost some high profile court proceedings over their similar requests. I predict they will lose the current FBI-Apple case as well. On the other hand the NSA serves a whole different purpose than the FBI and it's efforts are concentrated in the realm of foreign espionage which is the organizations mandate. And the only law the NSA follows on it's foreign activities is don't get caught. This is standard operating procedure for every foreign state espionage service around the world. You cannot condemn the NSA without factoring in the fact that there are some very powerful and well funded state security agencies in the world whose entire purpose is to conduct espionage operations against the US. US industrial, military, and political structures are constantly being targeted by both allies and enemies. Then you also have the non-state actors actively looking for ways to attack the US or anything associated with the US. However with all the hyperbolic statements being tossed around you would think that the US is the only country on the planet who conducts espionage operations around the world.
The government has a very long history that shows that they are no more credible than Snowden. The entire kabuki is to convince the public that encryption is an evil tool of terrorists, and it's working.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
(Note that Microsoft has already been forced to give its source code to the Russian security services, and it seems likely that Apple has succumbed to similar pressures.)
This is domestic terrorism, there is slight evidence that there was any foreign involvement or planning. The FBI needs to make the case that there is a need for cooperation. With this phone however there is not very much probable cause to assume there is any evidence of value on that phone. The FBI wishes such data exists of course, which would allow them to open up *new* investigations only, but their real motivation is not in finding any foreign mastermind of the shootings but instead they want to crack open that door with Apple to enable relatively mundane phone cracking in the future for low level cases (drug crimes, financial crimes, etc).
The FBI *claims* it's a one time only request and we should accept their word on this, except that their word has proven to be unreliable in the past and they certainly can not make this one-time-only pinkie promise on behalf of the entire US goverment or all governments around the world. Once Apple caves in then we already know there is a New York DA highly interested in getting Apple's help fishing through a few buckets full of phones. The courts rely on precedence and this would set a very large precedent for future requests.
Apple is correct in taking this case all the way to the supreme court if they have to. It is their right to do so, and they are in no way unpatriotic for asserting their rights.
The NSA is supposed to deal with foreign intelligence only. The FBI is supposed to deal with domestic criminal investigations only. The fact that both agencies have been trying to expand their reach so that there is functional overlap is evidence that the two agencies are not sharing their secrets with each other so readily.
This is also a domestic terrorism case with no evidence that there is any foreign involvement except for the gut feeling that all terrorism comes from a secret mastermind hidden on a island somewhere off the shore of New Jersey. We know who the shooters were. We know who they called and when, from both the work phone in question and the other phones that were actively used by the shooters. The case is essentially closed, and would be closed if it weren't for politics. The NSA is not going to open its kimono wide to the FBI for a simple case like this one. Cooperation or no, the need to know process is still in effect.
The ACLU misses one point:
The FBI does not know if the erase feature is enabled. The court should force them to run through the desoldering routine at least once to figure out if maybe they don't even need Apple to disable this feature.
That they didn't try, that they go to court without being sure, tells the whole story. If this were about breaking into the phone, they would have tried this, in the time that has passed with court cases they would already be sure if they need Apple at all or not, and if it turns out that not, they probably would have already broken into the phone.
ACLU is right, but they still miss just how malicious the FBI is.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org