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Obama: Government Can't Let Smartphones Be 'Black Boxes' (bloomberg.com)
JoeyRox writes: President Obama said Friday that smartphones -- like the iPhone the FBI is trying to force Apple to help it hack -- can't be allowed to be "black boxes," inaccessible to the government. He believes technology companies should work with the government on encryption rather than leaving the issue for Congress to decide. He went on to say, "If your argument is strong encryption no matter what, and we can and should create black boxes, that I think does not strike the kind of balance we have lived with for 200, 300 years, and it's fetishizing our phones above every other value." Obama's appearance on Friday at the event known as SXSW, the first by a sitting president, comes as the FBI tries to force Apple to help investigators access an iPhone used by one of the assailants in December's deadly San Bernardino, California, terror attack. "The question we now have to ask is, if technologically it is possible to make an impenetrable device or system, where the encryption is so strong there's no key, there's no door at all, then how do we apprehend the child pornographer? How do we solve or disrupt a terrorist plot?" Obama said. "If in fact you can't crack that at all, government can't get in, then everybody's walking around with a Swiss bank account in their pocket." He said compromise is possible and the technology industry must help design it.
Obama is not a constitutional lawyer. He edited the Harvard Law review but contributed no articles and had no profile or discernible influence.
Yup, the Freedom of Information Act and all the millions the government spends to limit your access.
FTFY
The phone was issued to him by his employer, the County of San Bernardino. The government owns the phone. I presume they've surrendered it to the FBI voluntarily.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
If we give the government a back door to our data, it's only a matter of months before criminals and other nation states have that key.
I'm not even concerned about that. If the US Government has the key, that alone is bad enough. This is the same government that has systematically attacked developers as a group. Not terrorists. Software developers. They've launched the digital equivalent of a drone strike on users of this very site. They've developed malware that looks like developer tools. Coincidently, just such malware showed up to attack Chinese developers.
I am just gob smacked that Obama can show up at SXSW for any other reason than to apologize to us. He wants us to dig our own mass graves. Here is your shovel developer. Start digging.
If we give the government a back door to our data, it's only a matter of months before criminals and other nation states have that key.
If we give the government a back door to our data, it's only a matter of months before *OTHER* criminals and other nation states have that key.
FTFY
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Let's not have all these technological black boxes where the government can't see what's inside. We need to get to the bottom of this. People's lives are at stake! The FBI must investigate, leave no byte unexposed.
Wait...
You mean we aren't talking about the Clintons' e-mail server? Because all this talk of encrypted sensitive data, threats to our security, and what not I thought for certain this was about the former Secretary Clinton not letting the FBI look at her old e-mails, those created while she was under the employment of the federal government.
Sure, let's talk about what secrets the people can keep from the government but not about what secrets the government wants to keep from the people.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
They could, except the FBI screwed up and changed the cloud password for the phone (locking themselves out of it in an attempt to keep anyone else out of it) and while the County paid for the employer option of being able to reset the PIN on their owned phones, they never actually got around to installing it on their employee's phones. Now they want Apple to bail them out of their mistakes by creating a special version of their phone OS which drops all the PIN code brute force protection.
And they wonder why some of us don't trust the competency of the government to hold and protect special access to every encrypted device we own.... after all, its not like they've had their own top secret personnel vetting files breached and exposed, right? What could possibly go wrong...
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.