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Tim Cook Talks About Encryption, Right to Privacy, Public Safety, and DOJ (time.com)
TIME reporters sat down with Apple CEO, Tim Cook, to talk about encryption, public safety, and right to privacy among other subjects. The wide-ranging interview captures Cook's discomfort with how his company has been treated by the Department of Justice. Following are some interesting excerpts from the interview: The thing that is different to me about Messages versus your banking institution is, the part of you doing business with the bank, they need to record what you deposited, what your withdrawals are, what your checks that have cleared. So they need all of this information. That content they need to possess, because they report it back to you. That's the business they're in. Take the message. My business is not reading your messages. I don't have a business doing that. And it's against my values to do that. I don't want to read your private stuff. So I'm just the guy toting your mail over. That's what I'm doing. So if I'm expected to keep your messages, and everybody else's, then there should be a law that says, you need to keep all of these. [...] Law enforcement should not be whining about iPhones; it should be rolling around in all the other free information that criminals and terrorists are spewing through social networks and Nest thermostats, surveillance cameras and Hello Barbies. [...] Going dark -- this is a crock. No one's going dark.
The DOJ obsessing over the locked phone of a dead shooter in the guise of protecting America, while being totally silent about the insane privacy violations of Windows 10, seems rather hypocritical.
The "going dark" theory doesn't seem to hold water. There is vastly more information available now, in a very "hoover-able" (able to be sucked up) fashion, than ever before.
The law enforcement community in the US complained that with the digitization of telephone service, they would not be able to tap phones when needed - so they got a law that requires all phone switches be remotely "tappable" and voila, better access than ever before by law enforcement. We have all taken to using mobile phones, smart phones, and e-mail; all of which places all kinds of information in an electronic form that can be easily captured when before it was in ephemeral conversations and/or a million pieces of paper that couldn't be easily trolled through in a million years.
Sure, there has been a change in how law enforcement gathers information, with some ways going away, but new ways being made available. Overall it seems to me (without being in any way an expert) that there is probably a substantially larger amount of information available more easily today than 30 years ago before the explosion in personal digital communications. Encryption may impede some access, but overall it seems like a net gain.
Having said that, it doesn't necessarily make it a simple job to get the goods on someone to have all of the information available. It still has to be analyzed, assessed, and linked together with all of the other bits in order to be useful in an investigation. Its easy to see why law enforcement wants to make this process as easy as possible. But that's why we have constitutional protections - to help lay out the ground rules for finding a balance. I'm not surprised that there are some in the law enforcement community leaning on the scales as hard as they can, probably with the hopes of making sure the balance tips just a little bit more towards making their jobs easier.
John Oliver with his commentary on the matter. Funny and fairly balanced.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
It's not just because their customers want access to their banking history but because there are federal laws such as the Bank Secrecy Act (https://www.fdic.gov/regulations/safety/manual/section8-1.pdf) that require banks to keep banking information to aid in the governments monitoring of criminal activity and money laundering. If the federal government can compel banks to keep this information I'm not sure what prevents them from compelling Apple as well. This is not to say that I support the government's position on this - I'm wholly in Apple's corner. But Cook's analogy to the banking industry is actually a case against Apple rather than one that supports it.
Going dark -- this is a crock. No one's going dark.
This is key. Their main argument is bullshit. They are not going dark. If anything, they have massively more surveillance than they did, let's say, 50 years ago. Or 30 years. Or virtually any time.
20 years ago, what chances did police have to get a recording or transcript of a conversation between criminals one month after the fact? Unless they already were watching and wiretapping them, almost none. Today, chances are quite good that you will find some e-mails, chat log or other exchange.
10 years ago, what chances did police have to find out where someone was on a given day one year later? Unless they were already shadowing him, almost none. Today, he checked in on Facebook or Foursquare or his phone location data gives him away.
Maybe there was a high point a few years ago, when most of what we have today was already there, but encryption was lagging behind. Maybe compared to that short golden period they now see less - but it is still vastly more than ever before in the history of police work.
And when someone lies to get something, you already know they can't be trusted, so giving them something that can potentially be abused would be really, really, very, very stupid.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
He's not going to protect us, he's going to protect himself, his company, his values. That protects others who share his values.
No need to run off the rails because he isn't Harry Potter.
Exactly. The last point is important. The FBI and local law enforcement fucked up the evidence. This is the equivalent of not properly locking down a crime scene and all the fingerprints being smudged out, and then blaming the owner of the building where the crime scene was located.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I generally dislike Apple because they're so damn expensive for what you get hardware-wise
Had it occurred to you that they're more expensive exactly because they're not making a profit off mining your data?
"My business is not reading your mails"
Nope, because you make craptons of cash selling hardware.
I was going to say the usual "overpriced" hardware but...what price your privacy?
My wife and I are happy with android, but we upgrade regularly.
With the effective demise of blackberry, soon might be Apple is only option
Or, even better, had the County employee(s) in charge of managing the phones done their job and put MDM software on the phone, this wouldn't be an issue. The County could have been given the court order to unlock the phone and ten seconds later told the FBI, "Here ya go."
As I have said in previous posts, I did this for a government agency I worked for. I was the one put in charge to develop the procedures to secure the phone, including turning off Siri and cloud backup (the users were told no documents were to be put on the phone). Without exception every iPhone we got had MDM software put on it despite the whining from some about being tracked. As I told one guy, "We're not tracking you, we're tracking the phone. We don't care about you. We care about our equipment."
On a few occasions I was asked by a user to unlock their phone because they forgot their passcode so I know how easy this procedure is. As I said above, it is literally ten seconds to unlock the phone with this software installed.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
He's not going to protect us, he's going to protect himself, his company, his values.
I find this funny, he will argue his point publicly and loudly because at the moment it protects his company image and is what the customers want. If he looses apparently the iPhone is so secure that not even the FBI can hack it without the help of the geniuses that made it, which still works out for the company image, just not as well as if he wins.
It would however be funny if the all of the sudden they dropped the issue by saying "Never mind, it was easier to hack than we thought.".
I think "going dark" is actually about "we need to see everything", i.e. not about enforcing laws at all, but about creating strong chilling effects. There is a special kind of despicable human being that cannot stand others having independent "unauthorized" thoughts and, worse, putting them in writing. Traditionally, an all-seeing, all-knowing God took care of that. These days not even most religious people fall for the idea that "God" would enforce the agenda of all-too-flawed worldly "authorities", so they are now trying to enforce that "you cannot hide your thoughts" by technological means to make people self-censor and self-oppress.
For the case at hand, this means this is not about the phone at all and not about the firmware Apple is requested to write. It is about that said despicable individuals cannot deal with being told "no" when they want to demonstrate that nobody is safe from them. While I am sure not all of the FBI and DoJ is like that, the current "leaders" there have the mind-set of the Inquisition and the GeStaPo and are a huge threat to free society.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Police work _must_ be hard. They _must_ be limited in what they can do. It is not and has never be the task of the police to catch every criminal. It is their task to keep the problem enough under control so society continues to function. As soon as police work becomes too easy, they expand into areas they were never supposed to go and control everything. Police-persons just cannot help themselves, that is their mind-set. The result of a failure to strongly limit the powers of the police is a police-state and that almost universally evolves to full-blown fascism over time.
Don't get me wrong, we need them. There are enough bad actors that need to be kept under control. But the police itself immediately becomes such a bad actor if not controlled tightly. Handing them the rains is about as stupid as handing it to the military or to the big corporations: They all place their own agenda far before the welfare of society.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.