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Slashdot Asks: Should FBI Reveal to Apple How to Unlock Terrorist's iPhone? (latimes.com)
After reports that the FBI managed to unlock an iPhone 5c belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters without the help of Apple, Apple is now the one that needs the FBI's assistance. "The responsible thing for the government to do is privately disclose the vulnerability to Apple so they can continue hardening security on their devices," said Justin Olsson, product counsel at security software maker AVG Technologies. However, many experts in the field believe that the government isn't legally obligated to provide the information to Apple. As mentioned in Los Angeles Times, this creates a new ethical dilemma: Should tech companies be made aware of flaws in their products, or should law enforcement be able to deploy those bugs as crime-fighting tools?
They didn't hack the phone - they're just trying to save face by saying they don't need Apple's help anymore.
Obviously the FBI should keep quiet.
That way they can hack the phones of government officials with impunity.
0000
the FBI says to Apple: "we paid XYZ to do it". FBI off the hook, and XYZ company charges Apple $2B for the answer. profit!
Shouldn't Apple be chasing after them for circumventing the encryption and digital rights management system on the phone? Its what they do to people coming up with jailbreaks... why would this be diffrent?
Who needs WiFi when we can have Packet Over Sheep! http://datacomm.org/PoS-InternetDraft.txt
If the FBI does not reveal the hack so they can hack other phones, well that means the bad guys can also continue using that hack. After all we know that there are now at least 3 organizations who can access a locked iPhone 5c without the owner's password.
...or should law enforcement be able to deploy those bugs as crime-fighting tools?
Um, no, law enforcement doesn't get to skirt around due-process just because it's inconvenient.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Apple probably already knows, or could know in a day or less, and in either case the next version of the iPhone will probably be made immune to it.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
O wait....we have already bent over. It is too late folks. No one cares what you think anymore. The system is established. Only blood will wash it away. Enjoy.
Well, actually, we don't need to leave it to a bunch of internet commenters to decide this issue -- there is an actual process described as "equities review" which the Executive Branch is responsible for, when a cyber vulnerability is known, but not yet disclosed to the public:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/blo...>href=https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/04/28/heartbleed-understanding-when-we-disclose-cyber-vulnerabilities
The considerations described here (in whether to reveal or keep secret a vulnerability) cover:
-- How much is the vulnerable system used in the core internet infrastructure, in other critical infrastructure systems, in the U.S. economy, and/or in national security systems?
-- Does the vulnerability, if left unpatched, impose significant risk?
-- How much harm could an adversary nation or criminal group do with knowledge of this vulnerability?
-- How likely is it that we would know if someone else was exploiting it?
-- How badly do we need the intelligence we think we can get from exploiting the vulnerability?
-- Are there other ways we can get it?
-- Could we utilize the vulnerability for a short period of time before we disclose it?
-- How likely is it that someone else will discover the vulnerability?
-- Can the vulnerability be patched or otherwise mitigated?
In this case, I might argue that this is becoming so well known (though the technical specifics have not been revealed), that the FBI/US had better tell Apple to make sure that other users of the affected phones can be secured -- while the intelligence value of the exploit is rapidly decreasing due to its publicity.
Should FBI Reveal to Apple How to Unlock Terrorist's iPhone?
Not to Apple specifically, but in future court cases if they want to use any evidence gained in a court of law, they should be required to divulge how they broke in. How can the defense be sure the data is legit otherwise?
Apple already knows it's hackable, that's why the 5S and newer have Secure Enclave.
Still, they should make the FBI rue the day they tried to destroy Apple's market, however they can. Revealing the San Bernadito phone as a ploy is the minimum they should pursue.
Yet, ultimately I hope Apple loses an inquiry about this break because it's better for all of us if they see the unconstitutional law enforcement agencies as adversaries.
There, now I've disagreed with both camps.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The choice is between helping Apple secure the phones of millions of Americans against phone-thieves, identity-thieves, virus, mal-ware and ransom-ware writers or continuing to leave their citizens vulnerable to the above so that the government can spy on it's own people.
I know what choice I think they should make.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
Wasn't this a 3rd party hack? Who says the FBI knows how they did it in the first place?
Ok let's reword this :
Is the potential lost of privacy of everyone worth the potential lives of a few.
To the opposite of many people here, I value human lives a lot and each preventable death is a death too many. So if helping the FBI could save even one person, in my eyes it'll be worth it.
OTOH, repressive regimes might also use it to find, tordure, and dissenters.
Meanwhile, the cnyical half of my brain is waiting for the FBI to tell us how many thousands of lives this saved.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The *reality* of who the FBI actually are - the people in your community - who you don't know about - who work there - is that they are basically a secret mafia, usually very connected to your local law enforcement and oligarchy that runs your city - and they have super powers that you cannot even imagine to be able to raid and invade anyone's life at will. They are a separate class and truly a branch of the oligarchy, and in ways far more frightening than the mafia/thug class associated historically with other regimes because their powers and secrecy go way beyond - whereas with the former historical ones they tended to be more overtly violent thugs.
The very existence of FBI - and in fact also police in the United States - is a violation of the pact between people and government, and a clear sign that this is a de facto oligarchy, and that just because its an *oligarchy* and not some other type of fascist regime, is no less human-rights violating and dictatorial than any other.
That said, the conduct of the NSA and other federal agencies is totally reprehensible. From the viewpoint of basic human decency, if you happen to notice a problem with your neighbor - perhaps something unusual or wrong with their house or any of their possessions - it is universally understood that you should tell them about it.
The analogy with our federal government is that they are like the most shitty, disgusting neighbor who knows all these things are wrong with their neighbor's house and they are actually glad for it and refuse to tell the neighbor about it because they view those vulnerabilities as an advantage or asset to be potentially exploited. That is the EXACT OPPOSITE of how they should be acting and is more than justification for their complete and immediate disbandment and a major reform of our federal, state, and local governments from the ground up.
Wake up people.
The level of delusion, apathy, and disregard one sees in Silicon Valley is truly appalling given the seriousness of our situation in America. Our elections are a complete joke. Our entire system is becoming more and more a farce based not on the basic concept of rule of law but rather groups of thugs - usually identified as liberal - who see their jobs as entailing the constant breaking and bending of rules for one selected class or another.
Does the FBI care more about fighting crime or reducing crime? There is a common tendency to for people and organizations to try to increase their own importance. So maybe the FBI could help to prevent X amount of crime (in the form of hacking, fraud, etc) from ever happening by helping Apple fix some security flaws. But maybe they will get more credit for allowing this vulnerability to remain and exploiting the vulnerability to catch a few more criminals. It's harder to appreciate crime prevention than punishment of criminals after the fact.
If someone invented a magic security system for houses that eliminated home invasions, this might actually be bad for the prestige of law enforcement. While it will probably reduce crime (one of the purposes of law enforcement), it reduces the reliance of the population on law enforcement and therefore decreases their importance. A flaw in the security system would create the opportunity for more people to be criminals and more opportunity for law enforcement to come to the rescue. If law enforcement can in addition actually exploit this weakness to catch a few more criminals then even better.
If the damage done by leaving the hole open exceeds the damage prevented by leaving the hole open, then it is better for society to have the hole closed, but it is not necessarily better for the FBI to have the hole closed. They won't get the blame for damage caused by an security hole unknown to the public, and they won't get any credit for the damage prevented by closing it.
It would be nice if everyone (especially public officials) did what was best for society rather than what was best for themselves, but this is a rather hard standard to hold human beings to.
I suspect it would be better for society to have the hole closed, but I wouldn't expect the FBI to have the kind of deep dedication to the improvement of society necessary to see that. Maybe it will be easier for them to see if they somehow become the victim (e.g. a scandal resulting from the FBI director's iphone getting hacked, etc).
Take for example Nancy Pelosi. She was all for government surveillance. It was only until she became one of the targets of government surveillance, that she was able to be outraged.
The FBI should be disbanded.
Considering the anti-democratic and privacy violating practices the FBI has been involved throughout its history, I can easily concur.
-SR
Stop pretending the FBI didn't already have the crack before they brought Apple to court. They were just looking for a legal precedent.
Second, stop pretending that Apple doesn't know how to crack your phone. This entire story was nothing but theater.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So, you think the national speed limit should be 35 mph?
That would save lots of lives.
Or making cigarettes and alcohol completely illegal.
Again, life is precious, gotta save every last one of them.
"Every sperm is sacred ... "
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
DMCA the FBI can get around that and all it will take is patriot act 2 to fix it.
Meanwhile, the cynical half of my brain is waiting for the FBI to tell us how many thousands of lives this saved.
Well, that's the heart of the question isn't?
Here on /. we seem to focus a lot on the negative from the FBI, the NSA and the likes (unsurprising considering the only tech news about them are, most of the time, about privacy void on their part). But I actually wonder how much good they do. How many lives they directly and indirectly saved. And I guess keeping their accomplishment secret is part of their work.
It's in my nature, but I want to think those people too take their job to heart.
Elok
So, you think the national speed limit should be 35 mph?
That would save lots of lives.
Or making cigarettes and alcohol completely illegal.
Again, life is precious, gotta save every last one of them.
"Every sperm is sacred ... "
I don't see how you could make this comparaison.
In all of your exemple, it's mostly about adult willingly deciding to take those risk. Nobody is stopping you from not smoking, drinking alcohol, driving safely to extent your life expectancy. The way you say it, why should we have a speed limit at all? Your exemples are basically a critic of all safety laws.
In this exemple, we're talking about potentially stopping terrorist attack (And I'm talking in general, from what I heard from this specific case, the iPhone was a work phone with about zero change to have any useful data).
Elok
Now can some like the fbi have a fake cell tower and use Emergency Call mode to bypass some security? Use it to reset a timeout on password guesses
Yesterday's flavor was indignance, so today's is defeatism? Does switching it up make your boss happy?
If we did that, this "BeauHD" individual would likely be out of a job...
If you become aware of a means of breaching the security of this device that you own, you are required to reveal it to Apple. Get all other mobile firm companies to add the term to the contract. Then they either have to stop operating mobiles, or hand it over.
Phone companies do not need this information. The reason is that whatever software ordinary people can get access to, it is definitely several iterations too old software. Finding problems from stuff that was created 3 years ago is simply not useful activity. The hardening of the software needs to happen with the bleeding edge software that only the companies themselves have access to. Thus end users reporting vulnerabilities to phone companies is completely useless activity. They're way too late in their reporting. Worse, while reporting the problems, they might reveal them to the criminals too, and there might be millions of devices on the open with the existing vulnerabilties in it. Fixing just newest versions of the software simply wouldn't work either, if criminals gets access to the information. Automatic updates are helping a little, and can solve some of the problems, but basically requires that phone companies are actively updating versions of the software that are like 4 years old. This takes significant amount of effort to keep old software versions updated. But the basic problem is that the information is coming in way too late.
From an external view point the Federal Bureau of Investigation is the only real US police force. County mounties, the law en-FORCE-rs are all too often out of control, trigger happy, lard arse morons. Seriously, all local law enforcement should be disbanded in favour of state based policing overseen by Federal investigators to ensure more uniform policing across a state and equal access to investigatory powers and police oversight across the state. Sure the FBI fucks up on occasion and most of that is caused by ill-informed political appointees seeking to politicise the offices of the FBI, really dangerous and crazy stuff that should be exposed and prosecuted.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
there is an actual process described as "equities review" which the Executive Branch is responsible for
Since the FBI is a part of the Executive Branch that is pretty much textbook conflict of interest in this instance. The FBI obviously prefers to keep the ability to circumvent encryption without respect to whether this is either a good idea.
In all of your exemple, it's mostly about adult willingly deciding to take those risk.
No different here. I'm well aware I could be killed by a drunk driver tomorrow (FAR more likely than a terrorist incidentally) and yet I think it would be inappropriate of us to ban alchohol. In fact we tried that and it didn't go well...
In this exemple, we're talking about potentially stopping terrorist attack
I'm an adult willing to take the risk of a terrorist attack in order to protect my civil rights. I value my civil rights more than I fear any terrorist or terrorist group. If that makes the FBI have to work harder to convict a criminal then so be it.
Perhaps I've gone crazy but I'd swear I saw an article online a few days ago, right after the announcement that a third party had assisted the FBI, to the effect that the way it was done was by imaging the phone and using virtual copies of the image to run the passcode combinations until they hit the right one, which was then used on the actual, physical phone. Am I crazy?
If you keep data on a phone that can be unlocked with a key that the phone is able to check then that data is not secure, it is just very hard to get at. Why? Because the laws of physics do not allow the integrated circuits to be magical black boxes that cannot be monitored, copied and emulated. It is that simple. If you need a 100% secure phone it has to keep all of it's data in the cloud and even then only certain uncommon types of encryption are guaranteed to never be circumvented. This is important as the data could be intercepted and decrypted in the future when technology improves enough to allow it. i.e. Quantum computing.
So can you build a 100% secure phone, yes, but can you actually buy one? No. Will you ever be able to buy one, as a civilian? I doubt it. So is that a bad thing? Well that depends on how justified your fear of your particular government is. 20 years from now I'd be more worried by what a rouge AI may do with my data than any bunch of humans may do now.
I think the government should be allowed to develop whatever they want. They do not need to
disclose it. However, to APPLY it should take a court order.
By the same token, private individuals and companies are entitled to encrypt whatever they
want.
The text of the DMCA explicitly exempts law enforcement. You didn't really think the rules would apply to the rulers, did you?
"If there was a gay Afro-Puertorican Linux distribution, I'd give it a try" ~lucm
Good intelligence officers have never revealed sources or methods, and never will.
What would be new is if this principle weren't applied to the method used to crack the iPhone that San Bernardino County issued to the terrorist.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
First, in answer to the actual question, I don't think the FBI should be required to tell Apple how they're doing it--mostly because they're not doing it. Some other company is doing it. So, as another poster put it, if the FBI can be forced, the answer is, "We hired XYZ company to do it. Talk to them and leave us out of it."
I value human lives a lot and each preventable death is a death too many.
Which is not a bad way to feel. The problem is with that word: "preventable."
"Preventable" is usually assessed in hindsight. "Oh, if only we'd known, we could have prevented this." Yes, if you knew everything that was going to happen, you could prevent a lot of bad things from happening. Unfortunately, outside of fiction, it's rare that we know anything. And therein lies the problem.
Imagine that the police suspect I am the culprit in a string of bank robberies. If that is true, then my phone/computer/tablet may have information that would lead to my arrest and conviction. Of course, my phone/computer/tablet may not have that information and I may still be guilty. Or it may not have that information and I may be still be innocent. Is giving up your privacy worth catching a possible bank robber?
Well, it's not like I'm murdering people. I'm taking money from a corporation. But, let's be honest here, people have been known to be killed in bank robberies. So by stopping me from robbing banks, you could possibly be preventing somebody from being killed down the line. Or not, depending on whether I am the bank robber and whether or not I have incriminating evidence on my phone/computer/tablet.
As you can see, it's starting to get a bit hazy. There's lots of ifs, maybes, and possiblies in those paragraphs.
In the world of fiction, we usually know who the bad guy is and it's a race to see if the good guy figures out the bad guy's dastardly scheme before the bad guy can do it. We cheer for the brave cop who knows who the bad guy is and has to take the law into his own hands when the police department can't seem to understand how dangerous this guy is and how we need to take care of him right now. Of course, in fiction, the hero is always right, the bad guy is usually killed, and the attractive woman is rescued.
The real world has quite a bit more grey than most fiction.
An interesting argument. Just one little thing.
Imagine that the police suspect I am the culprit in a string of bank robberies. If that is true, then my phone/computer/tablet may have information that would lead to my arrest and conviction. Of course, my phone/computer/tablet may not have that information and I may still be guilty. Or it may not have that information and I may be still be innocent. Is giving up your privacy worth catching a possible bank robber?
Here's where I find there's a major difference.
AFAIK, "One of the most sacred principles in the American criminal justice system, holding that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty!"
So, until proven guilty, I don't think we should hack into your phone. But, if you are proven guilty, I think the police should have the right to build a case to get a warren from a judge to hack into your phone if there's solid evidence that the said phone could hold information to block another bank robberies.
Still, I know there's a major flaw in my logic. Let's take Belgium terrorist attack. We arrested a culprit that could hold information about a potential terrorist attack. They doesn't have the time to wait that the terrorist is declared guilty to act. And it's where common sense should come in. If they found a cellphone in a apartment with explosive and kalashnikovs, they should discard it "to protect civil right"? I mean, they already busted their door open and shoot themthat's quite again civil right in my book don't you think so?
Elok
The FBI is not standing up for anyone's freedom either.
The FBI is the government. Technically the people are the FBI's boss and not vice versa.
Apple owed the FBI nothing, it was not obligated by any law to support the FBI and there was no final appeal to create an obligation. On the other hand, the government of which the FBI is a part have an obligation to defend and support Apple and uphold its rights. Apple was never charged with any crime or even any rumors of criminal activity and yet the government treated it with disdain and hostility.
Because Apple is big enough to actually fight back.
Many companies offer cash bounties in exchange for security bugs. This means hackers can 'sell' their bugs to the manufacture who can then pass it. The hacker gets cash and they get to feel good about what they did; but mostly they get cash. I don't believe apple pays for bugs. If they did this the company might have 'sold' their bug to apple instead of the FBI and any agency/country wanting to access an IPhone.
The FBI is not standing up for anyone's freedom either.
I don't think it's their job to protect the population's freedom. No more than it's the job of a dentist.
Elok
is it really that far fetched for the israeli company to have a bootloader hack or code injection-after-boot-but-before-unlock hack?
because that's all that was needed for hacking the pin protection system on iphone 5C. if you have that, then you can prevent the system from wiping the encryption key after 10 attempts and can attempt the right pin code infinitely.
and apple 99.99999% probably already knows how they did it, so whats there to tell.
and has usa gov been telling such things? no.
fbi is just pissed that beyond 5c they can't do that nor contract anyone to do that so simply. they're longing for the "good old days" when they could just hook it up to an app they bought from some "security" company and have everything and not even bother with a warrant.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I'm sure all they're doing is taking the plastic off of the NV memory part, attaching a probe, and reading out what's there. Those dies are tested that way at the factory: there will be lands on there for a probe. The government can buy a few phones of the same model for experimentation to get it right, then read out the contents of the NV memory of the phone they care about.
Once they have those contents, it's just a matter of brute-force decrypting whatever is in the personal/confidential files. Remember it is the files that are encrypted, not the memory itself. All that is needed is enough processing power to run through all the likely password combinations until they get something that looks like it was humanly input. It's not that difficult if you have the phone in your possession and a supercomputer cluster at your disposal.
Apple should file an FOIA.
The people are "technically" the FBI's "boss" in the same way that you are "technically" the "boss" of your local civil servants. To have a better understanding of the implications of that I suggest you go down to your local Department of Motor Vehicles office, fire station, or police station, and start ordering the employees around using your authority as their "boss". Try rearranging their work, make them pick up the place, maybe clean the windows. (If they don't obey, you might want to consider raising your voice, and maybe threatening their jobs.) Let us know how that works our for you.
You may have a say in selecting their actual boss, the executive (president, governor, mayor, ...), but that authority doesn't pass through the executive to empower you to boss them around.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
holy shit +seventy trillion awesome comment you must be new here etc
The FBI isn't going to shoot a guy five times who's trying to crawl along the floor while begging for his life
No they are not! And no I won't look up the law that says they aren't. Research this for yourself!
Even if it didn't the FBI didn't do the cracking - they hired an Israeli company to do the cracking and Israel never signed on for DMCA.
I'm still not convinced. Drunk driving is illegal after all.
So is terrorism. What's your point? Something being illegal doesn't keep it from happening.
And I agree about protecting your civil rights (After all, it took wars to have them), but saving the civil rights of an actual terrorist....
That's what having rule of law means. It means EVERYBODY gets treated fairly under the law, including terrorists. The Constitution enumerates several rights which are there to protect from the government abusing its power. Frankly for most of us the government is FAR more likely to be a threat to our life and liberty than any terrorist could ever hope to be. Ask any black citizen and they'll tell you that they are far more afraid of the police then they are of a criminal - and with good reason. Even our current president has been harassed by the police for no legitimate reason.
Unless of course you're insinuating that allowing the FBI to force Apple for a terrorism will mean that tomorrow they'll hack every single cellphone in the USA.
What it means is that there is a vulnerability. If the FBI can do it, so can others and the other groups are likely to be FAR more motivated to exploit it. The same security that protects the data you don't want criminals to get is what blocks the FBI too. You can't have it both ways. There is no such thing as a backdoor that only works for special groups with a warrant. Furthermore you can be quite sure that any technical flaw in the iPhone security will be repeatedly exploited by the FBI. They have a century long history of not respecting civil rights and due process and I don't see that being any different now.
But if it take a warren for the FBI to crack a phone each time, I think the justice system could handle it (I think I'll regret writing this...).
First off if you think the FBI would wait for a warrant you are being extremely naive. Second, there is no possible way to have an exploit the FBI can crack that others cannot crack as well. Even if we completely trust the FBI (which you shouldn't) there is no crack they can utilize that will not be available to other bad actors. Encryption that can be cracked is functionally identical to having NO encryption. If makes the phone extremely dangerous to rely upon for anything sensitive even if you are doing nothing illegal.
Apple has the money so why not buy Cellebrite (the company that did the work) and take care of that little security vulnerability? Go right to the source and then they have no concerns about ~how~ things are done.
Apple spits in the eye of the FBI and then people expect them to disclose the vulnerability (if that is what it was) to Apple?
Yeah... right.
I think it would be better if Apple spent some of its money on finding the vulnerability themselves.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
>
Imagine that the police suspect I am the culprit in a string of bank robberies. If that is true, then my phone/computer/tablet may have information that would lead to my arrest and conviction. Of course, my phone/computer/tablet may not have that information and I may still be guilty. Or it may not have that information and I may be still be innocent. Is giving up your privacy worth catching a possible bank robber?
It would depend on why the police suspect you are the culprit. If they can convince and independent authority (e.g. a judge) that they have a reasonable suspicion backed up with the evidence behind it then there is a compelling argument to be made for them to access devices that could substantiate the claim that you are behind the robberies.
Of course the action the police want to take should be granted only if the evidence leading to the suspicion is compelling enough. For example the mere fact you were seen near the location of some of the robberies should not be sufficient to grant a warrant for a midnight raid of your property and the seizure of all your worldly possessions, but it may (or may not) be enough for them to obtain your phone records (mainly the location data) to see if you were present at the other robberies too.
I think in this case arguing that the FBI should not be allowed to unlock the phone of someone who was responsible for a crime and died in the act is grossly unwise. But that's just me.
Like most modern libertarian ideas, that one was tried in the late 19th century, and went terribly. You just end up with an army of private contractors who have even less oversight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)
Overheard at the synagogue: "... and I said why sell it once when you can sell it twice? Do these goyim take me for a schlemiel already?"
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Do you really think Apple needs help? Chances are they already know how it was done. I am more concerned about the lack of intelligence that slashdoters - and publishers - are showing!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
And a LEO contractor is LEO. If you disagree then please explain how "the government" does anything if the people it is paying to do things aren't allowed to do government things. It's not like the government is an actual being capable of doing anything; it is an organization of people.
Saying that LEO contractors aren't LEO and are therefore not bound by the DMCA is also saying that LEO contractors are not LEO and are not bound by warrants. It is turtles all the way down and LEO cannot constitutionally and legally buy its way out of the stack.
The problem with this idea is that local law enforcement (the county Sheriff, the highest local law enforcement official) is elected by the people that they are enforcing the law over, making them (and their subordinates) answerable to those citizens. The FBI is not answerable to the common citizen, and can (not that they do, but they can) therefore run roughshod with no immediate chance of consequence.
This is a basic premise of the ideals formed by our forefathers and written in the Constitution: that the citizen has ultimate power over the Government, not the other way around. This premise is carried all the way down from the federal to the local level. State-based policing (as you put it, meaning Federal policing) is exactly the problem in many, many countries. For instance, the final judgement call for a concealed carry permit in many (if not all) counties in the country is the local Sheriff, who may personally know the permit requester, and has the final yea or nay in the process, making it a very informed, local decision, rather than a decision made by some bureaucrat 2,000 miles away. This is government by the people, for the people, as opposed to our federal system that has a difficult time representing everyone and typically ends up typically being very right or left leaning.
I think you do not give enough credit to the local law enforcement, and calling them "lard arse morons" shows exactly how far out of touch you are. You've been watching too many movies, and until you live here and work with these ladies and gentlemen, who are as professional and courteous as any Federal official, you can happily keep your silly, uninformed, and childish opinions to yourself.
On the other hand, small groups of people go wacko a lot easier than large groups do. A sheriff and deputies can run roughshod over minority rights as long as the majority doesn't disagree. It's harder (but not impossible) to do that at a higher level.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I think you're taking things too far. The Fourth Amendment has certain requirements for getting a search warrant. If there was good reason to think you were involved in a string of bank robberies, that would be probable cause, and a judge would be justified in signing a warrant to search your phone for information about bank robberies. Current US jurisprudence, from what I've seen, is that you wouldn't be required to unlock the device, but the police would be within their rights to try to get the information once they had the warrant.
"Innocent until proven guilty" doesn't prevent investigation. Being accused of a crime, particularly with good evidence, does have its costs. I don't see any good way of avoiding that, unfortunately.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Apple isn't special. The FBI is making a special demand.
If you're suspected of interplanetary piracy, and both Apple and I have information on you, and the FBI has probable cause, it can get my information and Apple's information. No difference. Now, suppose that both Apple and I can do significant things that are detrimental to our own interests that can provide more information. Neither of us has to do what the FBI wants. No difference.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
It's not a case of it being ruled 'invalid'. It's that the companies refuse to sell unless the governments sign up to the terms. Otherwise - no phones. The idea of the government forcing a company to sell it a product on the government's terms is... interesting.
I don't know for sure, but it's likely that many in the FBI take an oath to protect the Constitution.. That includes the Bill of Rights, which expresses a large part of our freedoms.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I don't know for sure, but it's likely that many in the FBI take an oath to protect the Constitution.. That includes the Bill of Rights, which expresses a large part of our freedoms.
You're talking about protecting the freedom and the population. That other guy talked about standing up for people's freedom. My interpretation is that he expect the FBI to publicly position themselves to defend the freedoms of the population. To take position on debate in the media or something.
Elok
As a big purchaser, government usually looks for discounts - which would be unavailable. All of us who are interested in enforcing the thing will be looking to see if our politicians, police officers, judges, and civil servants have a mobile. The use of a mobile by an investigator in a crime investigation could render a conviction unsustainable, since the police would have been acting illegally.
All a bit unrealistic maybe - or maybe not.
There is no duty to sell to any person regardless of the terms you as vendor are imposing. This is why such clauses would be 'enforceable', not because a court wouldn't enforce them.
If they - and all other tech companies - impose a duty on government purchasers of their products to reveal any security breaches, then if the government fails to do so, it doesn't get any more toys until it conforms to the requirements of the contract.
How about burn dozens of people to death? Would they do that?
It was an accident, of course, not deliberate and not negligent.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
On the other hand, history has shown that local issues are much better dealt with at a local level, rather than having a heavy-handed federal agency handling a situation. And, in reference to your "wacko" comment, most of what has been coming in from the feds in the last 20 years has been wacko, in a local frame-of-mind. The feds do not understand what is happening at the local level, and worse, do not care.
The Constitution expressly gives power to the local level over the federal level on any subject not directly stated in the Constitution. Which has been bastardized and abused to the fullest by the feds in their quest over the last 150 years for power over the populace and states.
I do understand what you are saying, though. The Civil Rights movement and protection of citizens who are being unlawfully persecuted is the classic case brought up in these discussions, and was entirely justified and needed to happen. On a daily basis, in normal situations, it is a bad, bad idea and is completely unconstitutional, and many times escalates to a very deadly outcome. I.E: Waco, Oregon, Miami, Pine Ridge, Ruby Ridge, etc.
Hey.
The F.B.I. asked APPLE for help but they said NO!
With a mighty middle finger i might add!
The F.B.I. found away around it. Get over it.
Checkmate!
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.