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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.
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
(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.)
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