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FBI Telling Congress How It Hacked iPhone (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: According to a new report in National Journal, the FBI has already briefed Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) on the methods used to break into the iPhone at the center of Apple's recent legal fight. Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) is also scheduled to be briefed on the topic in the days to come. [Feinstein and Burr are both working on a new bill to limit the use of encryption in consumer technology, expected to be made public in the weeks to come.] The disclosures come amid widespread calls for the attack to be made public, particularly from privacy and technology groups. However the FBI's new method works, the ability to unlock an iPhone without knowing its passcode represents a significant break in Apple's security measures, one Apple would surely like to protect against if it hasn't already. Just days after the FBI broke into the terrorist's iPhone, the FBI told law enforcement agencies it would assist them with unlocking phones and other electronic devices. We still do not know how the iPhone was hacked, nor do we know how many iPhones may be able to be unlocked from the hack. The FBI did tell USA Today the hack has not been used in any other case beyond San Bernardino.
or are we just believing the FBI said it was?
or wasn't there some law about circumventing security measures on a computer device?
What info did the FBI get off the phone? I think it's generally considered that time was a crucial element in getting any meaningful info from the phone, and perhaps days or hours after the event, anything in there would be useless.
I'm not sure anyone has yet to convince me that more encryption = more terrorism.
I studied cryptography in college in the 1980s - and all the same old methods still work, maybe the keys need to be a little longer today, but symmetric, asymmetric, time locks, etc, all still apply.
So, are we going to stop teaching encryption methods in school? How about burning the textbooks, making it illegal to post on the internet, flagging people who talk about it or search for it? Every semester institutions of higher learning are training our youth in the dangerous art of secure communication, when will it stop?
A politician who is against the ownership of guns that relies on armed protection (assuming that is even a choice they can make...) is not a hypocrite. The fact that they need those guards supports their message.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
If encryption is a "munition" then this is not just a First Amendment issue, the Second Amendment also applies.
Along that same train of thought, anyone besides me remember those Apple commercials touting that the then new PowerMac was considered a weapon? That same law that considers encryption a weapon also controls what kind of computers we can export. That's because computers are weapons too, I guess.
They want to ban "undetectable" plastic guns, and the 3D printers that can create them. Then they tell us we can't even share the design files for the 3D printed guns. Can't have encryption that they cannot break, which I assume is so we can't share these gun designs without them knowing. Or even order a pizza without them knowing.
What are these people so afraid of?
Perhaps they fear us "peasants" might revolt.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
I could have said that more concisely as:
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My last two employers needed me to use Outlook and Photoshop.
My personal workflow uses bash, perl, grep, awk, and make.
All of those required tools work great on my Mac, even after I've dropped it on the concrete.
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Mac is full-fledged certified UNIX, and it's corporate helpdesk approved. Where else are you going find that combination ?
My MacBook Pro does run Linux, Windows, and FreeBSD virtual machines all the time too, though. I click whichever OS is suited to the moment. Last week, in 18 hours, we found thousands of vulnerabilities in 14 machines running those operating systems plus Cisco, so I know none are bulletproof, but I also know some are much more secure than others. (Out full vulnerability report for 14 targets was over 1600 pages long - for the exposures we found in 18 hours).
The US government should realize by now that Islamic State and other terrorist groups (and increasingly even small cells or lone-wolf attackers like the ones in San Bernadino) already have (and are using) encryption software that even the NSA cant currently break and that further restrictions on cryptography wont make it any easier to catch the bad guys despite the rhetoric of the FBI, NSA and others.
That said, the whole "terrorists around every corner" angle is just a cover story to disguise the fact that the "5 eyes" governments have created a worldwide surveillance network far moire powerful than anything that has come before it and is willing to do anything they can to prevent that surveillance network going dark and cutting off their access to the world's data.
I remember a time when the US had all the good encryption and wasn't allowed to export it. Now the rest of the world will have good encryption and the US won't be allowed to import it.
To me the point is the fact that she availed herself of the opportunity (to arm herself for self defense) at some point in the past when she felt she needed to, but she would now deny to others the ability to make that same choice to protect themselves. She *may* believe that it is overall for the better, but her current context under which she is reaching that conclusion is nothing like her context previously, and that (to me) makes her conclusion suspect. Strip her of her wealth and power, and all protections not available to the average citizen, place her in a more dangerous home environment, then see how whether she quickly changes her mind again.