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The Law Is Clear: the FBI Cannot Make Apple Rewrite Its OS (backchannel.com)
An anonymous reader cites a post by Susan Crawford, Harvard Law Professor and former Obama Special Assistant: From her column at Backchannel, "Barack Obama has a fine legal mind. But he may not have been using it when he talked about encryption last week. [...] The problem for the president is that when it comes to the specific battle going on right now between Apple and the FBI, the law is clear: twenty years ago, Congress passed a statute, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) that does not allow the government to tell manufacturers how to design or configure a phone or software used by that phone -- including security software used by that phone.
The problem with this whole debate, is assuming making a system that is secure is beyond the means of mortal men. And will need a big organization to make such a system.
The truth is. If Apple are shown to be insecure, the bad guys will not use apple, they may make their own OS, which doesn't have the back doors. It may not be a fancy but secure for what is needed.
So Apple is loosing business, and the bad guys are still going under the radar.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
...can do what ever the hell he pleases. It isn't the first time he basically said screw the laws and precedents and tried to ram rod his way down everyone's throats.
The USA is in perpetual war and illegal acts are justified by the wartime status, terrorism, the children, etc.
Give them another week or to... they'll butcher the law, renege the whole thing. Make modifications so that they can do whatever the fuck they want... and there's nothing any of us can do about it. We pay them taxes, they use that money in return to fuck us over again.
When has this, or the previous, administration really cared about what the law says when the law disagrees with what the administration wants to accomplish?
"Barack Obama has a fine legal mind."
To be blunt, this is unsubstantiated. For someone who has as many degrees and has held as many academic positions as Obama has, his scholarly writings are strangely absent.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
The default status is that the people have the right to do, or not to do, anything. The government has no rights, except as stated in the Constitution.
Therefore, passing a law preventing the government from doing something is oxymoronic. The government cannot force Apple to do anything - no legislation required. Any attempt to compel Apple must pass constitutional muster.
I get annoyed when the media reports something like "a law to legalize marijuana", or "a law to legalize abortion", or " a law to legalize gun ownership." The correct framing is "a law prohibiting...has been repealed/found unconstitutional."
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
You haven't been reading the news. The FBI says that it wants certain security measures removed from one particular phone. It wants Apple to write a modified version of iOS to be used only by the FBI in a secured environment to flash the iOS of this one phone, so the FBI can brute force the password (and use software to assist) without risking the encryption key being destroyed (there is a possibility that a feature on the phone is turned on that would disable unlocking of the phone altogether after 10 wrong guesses (though there are methods around this as well, but still it would be slow)).
That is what the DOJ said anyway. But then other district attorneys said that they are in the same situation with something like 112 other iPhones. They said this to support the DOJ's need for the modified software, but obviously it damaged the government's argument that this is a one time thing.
This is very different from Apple's earlier assistance to the government because this is the first time the DOJ has demanded that Apple actually create a modified, inherently less secure version of iOS. Apple would have to actually pay engineers to write code to create a version of iOS that must, must, must not ever be released to the public. It would have to be used only in a contained environment on Apple's campus not connected to the outside world--which Apple would have to build just for this purpose. Otherwise it would have to rely on the government to not accidentally release the modified iOS to bad actors.
The government is trying to use something called the "All Writs Act" to say that it can basically force anyone to do anything.
LOLWUT? There is no such thing as "pick and choose". The law is explicit:
https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...
The FBI is in check. Find some other law that authorizes law enforcement agencies to tell Apple how to make a phone.
Actually, with facetime & imessage, they are a communications carrier.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
You packed a lot of wrong into such a small post.
Unfortunately Apple isn't a 'communications carrier'.
The CALEA subchapter in question that prohibits the feds from mandating a particular design explicitly mentions manufacturers (quoting the relevant bit: "This subchapter does not authorize any law enforcement agency [...] to require any specific design of equipment, facilities, services, features, or system configurations to be adopted by [...] any manufacturer of telecommunications equipment [...]"), which would refer to Apple in this case, since cell phones are considered telecommunications devices. Neither the summary nor the article mention anything about CALEA being limited to just carriers, nor is that the case, since it applies to manufacturers, support service providers, and communications service providers, among others, so I have no clue where you got the incorrect notion that it only applied to carriers.
If this was a viable out then Apple would have used it. It isn't.
You are talking out of your ass, since this is exactly the line of argumentation Apple has been using in its briefs for the last several weeks. Here's Apple's latest brief, where they explicitly mention CALEA and its relevance to applying the All Writs Act. Where do you think this law professor got the idea? It's been the core of Apple's argument ever since their initial appeal of the order in February, since it undermines the very foundation on which the FBI is basing its demand. There have been multiple discussions here at Slashdot over this exact topic in the last few weeks alone. Apple has been arguing that the All Writs Act, which the FBI is using in order to conscript Apple's assistance, is inapplicable in situations where Congress has passed laws that provide more specificity. 200 years of legal precedent agree with that understanding. And, contrary to your assertions, CALEA clearly provides a higher degree of specificity that's directly applicable in this case, since it explicitly states that law enforcement cannot make these sorts of demands of manufacturers.
How your comment got +5 Insightful when it is such utter and complete rubbish is beyond me.
I think it's pretty clear that some people in the government care about the law and others don't when it comes to national security. Tom Drake, one of the NSA leakers before Snowden, basically said as much. He said that lots of people inside the NSA had come to him with worries that they might not be following the law and possibly not doing the right thing. I think the same is true of other branches of the government, including Congress and I'm not sure which side will win.
Agreed, two laws can cover the same topic, but that's not what's going on here. In fact, the All Writs Act itself says that writs issued under it must be "agreeable to the usages and principles of law", i.e. that it cannot be used in contradiction to other laws on the books. More or less, the All Writs Act itself was designed such that it could never override a more specific law created to address a topic. It's only ever applicable if nothing else is applicable. In this case, something else is applicable, so the All Writs Act cannot be used.
I'm sure this won't get much visibility, but for what it's worth...
Apple has smart lawyers, which made it odd for me to read when they were basing their primary objection on first amendment grounds, rather than the more obvious undue burden defense (and/or reference to this law, and the lack of statute which would compel them to rewrite the OS). But more recently, the government made their real strategy more clear (ie: rewrite it, or give us the code), which made Apple's strategy make more sense. Although the government cannot necessarily compel Apple to rewrite the OS code, they have much better legal footing to compel Apple to give them the OS code, and presumably could write GovOS themselves fairly trivially.
That's where the freedom of speech argument comes in: although the government can, in effect, steal Apple's code (legally), it's much more clearly established that they cannot compel Apple to "say" that it's coming from Apple (in technical terms, sign the code). Without the code signature, GovOS cannot be pushed onto, or run on, iOS devices. In essence, Apple was countering the more legally persuasive argument that the DOJ was holding back as their would-be trump card, if Apple fought the initial ruling. Well played, indeed.
For the sake of everyone in the US (and not to mention all the principles the country is founded on), I sincerely hope Apple prevails. Their forethought in legal argument gives me some hope that all is not lost, privacy-wise.
I hate this. Not least of which is the lack of scalability. If one's are dots, tens are boxes, and hundreds are cubes, what are thousands? Ten thousands? Millions? When an elementary school kid needs to draw a seven-dimension-hyper-cube to solve his homework, it's a sign that we've needlessly over-complicated things.
My third grader has nightly crying sessions over his math homework. He struggles with basic concepts like multiplication and division. My seventh grader, though, got his beginning math done before Common Core took over and loves math. My wife and I are very active opposing Common Core and high stakes testing. My kids opt out of all of the big standardized tests, Some may claim we're teaching them "if something's hard don't do it," but I say we're teaching them "if someone tells you to do X and you think the reasons for X are horribly wrong, then don't do X just because an authority told you to do so."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Even as a kid decades ago, I taught myself how to add and subtract using what today people would call the common core way.
It made no sense to me, when given the question, what is 999 + 2001 to start the process in the one's column, carrying one, etc. I started with the most significant digit and worked left to right. It scales beautifully, and it gave me a sense of the size of the numbers. If I made a mistake, I'd be off by one or two. I'd love to see the example cited in your post.
There are bad math teachers. Perhaps your third grader has one. Perhaps the teacher doesn't have a good grasp on what they're teaching. Perhaps they're like you and don't want to change.
It's possible that kids learn differently and some love math while others don't. Some kids probably grasp the common core method slowly but would have excelled at the old way. Teach them the old way.
And have your kids take "high stakes testing." Only parents think of these tests as high stakes. The kids' lives don't change based on any single test. Even the SAT can be retaken. As for me, I had my kids take the SAT when they were in middle school. They did ok. But they did a lot better the next time, and the time after that.
There are 11 million illegal immigrants in the US. What exactly is your plan to deport them? To round them up? Where are you going to house and feed them while you do? Are you going to build some sort of colossal prison-city?
It's all very well to talk about deportation, but it's not a practical idea at this point, and to even attempt to do so would be both ruinously expensive and necessitate the vast expansion of police numbers and powers. We would destroy our society in this vain and foolhardy attempt.
For my part, I have been an illegal immigrant before, staying on a tourist visa in Central America for several years*. I would still be there today, building a better life for myself, if I could have managed it. I was far from the only gringo there trying to do so. I can say from personal experience that it takes an exceptional kind of person to pack up and leave their entire family and try to settle in a new country, and many American families are also proud to attest to this. As far as I can tell, there is no economic or social argument to be made against the free flow of labor other than simple racism. I see no reason why this latest group of immigrants should not be granted the same opportunities our ancestors were. I believe that it is a moral imperative to do so, as well as patriotic. And not to belabor the point, but there really isn't an alternative: a wall might keep some people out, but the immigrants in the country now are here to stay.
* My reasons were complicated and not worth getting into.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I hate this. Not least of which is the lack of scalability. If one's are dots, tens are boxes, and hundreds are cubes, what are thousands? Ten thousands? Millions? When an elementary school kid needs to draw a seven-dimension-hyper-cube to solve his homework, it's a sign that we've needlessly over-complicated things.
Use straw-men much? I'm not going to argue for or against the "Common Core" (which isn't really what you think it means), but this is one the most ridiculous arguments I've heard against it.
I've personally seen 3 and 4 and 5 year olds in a Montessori school understand "place value" concepts much quicker and easier than most kids get them (1st or 2nd grade) through visual aids like strips and squares and cubes. Also, it leads to an intuitive understanding of, well... "squaring" and "cubing" numbers at an early age. (I think you're off by an order of magnitude, by the way -- cubes should generally represent a thousand at a minimum, i.e., 10 "cubed".)
Nobody's arguing for using a 7-dimensional object to represent 10^7. It's a useful (visual, tactile) analogy for teaching simple place value for SMALL numbers, it gives kids a sense of relative magnitude (otherwise they don't realize how volume can scale quickly when a small surface grows), and it produces an intuitive sense about what more advanced math concepts like exponents will mean down the road. Are you against using the terms "squaring" and "cubing" for exponents 2 and 3 as well?!
My third grader has nightly crying sessions over his math homework. He struggles with basic concepts like multiplication and division. My seventh grader, though, got his beginning math done before Common Core took over and loves math.
Just to be clear, Common Core standards do NOT generally specify that these very specific pedagogical tools must be used. What you're talking about is probably individual decisions by states and perhaps local school districts about how to implement Common Core standards.
My wife and I are very active opposing Common Core and high stakes testing.
I'm with you in opposing the ridiculous amounts of standardized testing imposed on students in most states today. And I think there's potentially a lot wrong with some ways that Common Core standards have been IMPLEMENTED. I'm not quite sure the underlying ideas are as bad as some people would have us believe, however.
Hello. I'm a math teacher, licensed to teach in two states, currently teaching algebra 2 and AP calculus. What are you talking about? I'm familiar with the common core state standards (CCSS). I've never heard of a "common core addition method." Care to enlighten me?
Please give a link to the online version of the CCSS that describes this algorithm. If, instead, you're seeing this algorithm described in some crap textbook your school district got from the lowest bidder, well, that's too bad. The publishers don't have their books vetted by common core. They are completely independent.
"Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens." - Schiller