Slashdot Mirror
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.
The queen of "laws for thee, but not for me."
Guns? Why, those should be illegal! But I'm going to need some armed guards for myself, of course.
Encryption? Consumers can't be allowed to have that! Now how do I configure my secure Senate email account?
What a hypocritical cunt.
so we can't even talk about anything further.
who is going to tell us the honest truth? all we get is the dishonest truth from every 'official' that speaks up about this.
disinformation and even more disinformation. you'd be nuts to take anything on face value, given what's at stake.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
More alarming than the hack is the following bit in TFS:
The "hack", as I understand, was on an 5C, which is weak by comparison to the 5S and beyond. Non-event.
But the bit I quoted? Really? Limit what encryption consumers can have? I find that more alarming than "old-ass insecure phone got cracked."
I hope this dies a flaming painful death before it goes anywhere.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Diane Fienstein was born in the wrong country
She fits much more snugly in a fascist state
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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.
As with most theoretical ethics problems, it only seems as if there is a conflict because the proposed scenario is too vague. This is why I find philosophy irritating sometimes, once you define enough details (as you would have in a real world scenario) you'll often find that the "right" thing to do is less ambiguous than it seems.
How do we know there is a nuke that is about to go off at all, if we don't know where it is? How did we locate the person who delivered the bomb in the first place? We were tracking them closely enough to know that they planted the bomb, but not closely enough to know where? How do we know that the location and the disarming codes are on the iPhone at all? What kind of guarantees do we have that if we do get into the iPhone we can stop the bomb going off in time anyway?
If we have a 100%, no bones about it, guarantee that gaining access to this one particular iPhone will prevent a nuke going off somewhere, then by all means, break into this particular iPhone. But you'll never have that kind of guarantee, so people will always argue that we need to be able to get into all the iPhones just in case.
This is always the problem with this kind of reasoning, it leads inexorably to mass surveillance: "We have to watch everybody because somebody, somewhere, at some time will do something dangerous, and this is the only way to stop them." How about: most people are good, so let them be free.
I'd rather die in a nuclear blast in a free country, than live a long life in a police state. The real fight is not to prevent deaths due to terrorism, the real fight is to prevent terrorists from changing who we are. They can only win that fight if we let them.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.