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FBI Looks Into Unlocking Minnesota Mall Stabber's iPhone (cnet.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: The Minnesota man suspected of stabbing 10 people in a mall before police fatally shot him left behind his iPhone. Now, FBI agents are looking into unlocking his iPhone as part of the investigation. The FBI says Dahir Adan, 20, attacked several shoppers on September 17 in a frenzy, asking his victims if they were Muslim before he stabbed them. ISIS claimed responsibility for attack shortly after. FBI director James Comey told the House Judiciary Committee his agency is reviewing Adan's electronic devices -- but is having issues getting into his iPhone. The device remains locked, as agents are "exploring technical and legal options," Minneapolis FBI spokesman Jeff Van Nest said. He declined to specify what model the iPhone was.
ISIS took credit for my stubbed toe last week and these god damn dipshits eat it up ever time. Thanks for being a bunch of fucking gullible retards, America. Begin so incapable of generating even a modicum of rational thought, you deserve every single bad thing that happens to you. Smarten up, you stupid assholes.
Can we start using background checks for knife purchases. How many more incidents like this one before America gets smart and passes sensible knife laws.
Every terrorist that has been killed has had an iPhone. The only logical conclusion is that iPhones make you a terrorist.
Said right does not require a safe manufacturer to build backdoors into their safes, nor alter the complexity of math.
Easier said than done. The contents of a letter remain secret because people treat it that way. The contents of a safe remain secret because people treat it that way... and have a physical impediment to easy access. The contents of an encrypted device remain secret because the system is designed not to be easily be openable by anyone other than those the legitimate owner has chosen thanks to lots of math.
Currently, there is no legal requirement for a company like Apple to have a way that they & only can unlock a phone, in fact they've purposely engineered ways to make it more difficult.
It's easy to say "but in the case of terrorism, we should have the right to compel them!" ok... where do you want that right to end? Are you & Apple ready for divorcing spouses to be going to court to order the seizing of their spouses cell phone and ordering Apple to decrypt it to prove infidelity?
Such an ability also lowers the bar not only for law enforcement to legitimately investigate (via search warrant) suspects, but also the ability to plenty of others in law enforcement & government to go fishing.
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The current U.S. administration has said (at least in internal documents) that all conservative Christians are potential terrorists and are a bigger threat to security in the U.S. than ISIS. Since this policy has gone uncontested for at least 6 years despite all evidence and statistics to the contrary, I guess all the bureaucrats don't have a problem with this. If we say that encryption must have back doors "because terrorists" then aren't we saying that any group that is out of favor politically should loose their 4th & 5th amendment rights?
Giving any government backdoor keys will always be bad.
What about physical access to device. Should the device contain the decryption key, so that it could be decrypted if the flash chip is removed?
Disassembly that might take a tech an hour or two?
I ask not for government but for other third parties. If you die should your spouse gave legal right to access your phone and encrypted storages?
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
There are workarounds... the most recent notable example/request being requiring Apple to push a one time update to the San Bernardino terrorists device which would remove the pin lockout counter so that the FBI could try every single combo without fear of wiping the device.
This idea runs into legal issues as given such an update would be required to be signed by Apple (so that the device trusts the update), it constitute government compelled speech... which the first amendment tends to prevent.
The bugger is that there is always a way, it's just a matter as to how much time/money/leverage is available.
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There also has to be a limit to how much work the government can compel people to do for free to help them uncover evidence. Creating, testing and pushing an OS update is pushing it in my mind.
Otherwise, why bother paying for infrastructure projects? Just start pressing people into evidence-discovering gangs: "You, you and you. We think there's a corpse buried somewhere under here, start digging. You brought your own shovel, right?"
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
The device always contains a decryption key... it's just a matter of how hard it is to get to... and it may not actually be located in flash memory.
Disassembly yes, retrieval, no.
What do you know about focused ion beam hacking? http://semiengineering.com/eve...
Short version: A reverse engineer can take a dozen or two chips of the same kind, slowly grind them down layer by later, selecting the best example of each level, then continue the process. Once you've gone through all of the layers you can actually construct a pretty accurate design of the internals. From there, you can use a FIB and some probes to actually get access to the inner workings of the chip.
Chip designers for years have to various extents attempted to take steps to prevent this. The one advantage they have is doing so is very difficult & expensive... but a successful hack can more than pay for itself.
Which is a fair point. If your loved one goes missing and leaves their phone behind, unlocking it to find out who they were recently talking with may be difficult if not impossible. If someone dies, your window to use their finger to unlock the device is quite short.
This is only a wider version of a long standing problem... as I don't know many people who make it a point to stash a BitLocker/TrueCrypt/etc keys to a safe spot that will be discoverable upon their disappearance or death, but secure enough that an angry spouse or law enforcement agent wouldn't be able to uncover.
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The bugger is that there is always a way, it's just a matter as to how much time/money/leverage is available.
How much time and money and leverage do you need to decipher a message encrypted with a one time pad that was burned to ash in the explosion?
The Minnesota man suspected of stabbing 10 people in a mall before police fatally shot him left behind his iPhone.
I didn't realize taking it with you was an option.
Today it is about Uncle Sam wanting to know, just as it was long ago just about Uncle Sam being able to send a subpoena to Google or Microsoft for the contents of someones inbox. Once that ability exists, private lawyers will find sympathetic judges who will agree to use it in private legal matters as well.
Don't believe me? Chat with a divorce lawyer sometime as to the weapons one or both members of the case end up using against each other.
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Because of ties to terrorism? ... and having more tools to try to recover data than your local PD?
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Let's not forget how we got here. Once upon a time, phones didn't encrypt and nobody cared. Then we got secret courts with no working knowledge of the word no, an NSA that decided to ignore the bit about only spying on foreigners, an FBI that decided to get into the spy business, LEOs all the way down to the local yokels thinking it's OK to go fishing and read everyone's papers and effects based on less than probable cause as long as it's electronic, and judges bending over backwards to avoid addressing 4th and 5th amendment issues with all of the above.
Now nobody trusts any of them (and with ample good reason) and wants strong encryption on their phones. Address all of the above and we can perhaps talk about finding them some way to get in, but only with a great deal more oversight than they have seen in the last 2 decades. No more taking their word for it, we know that's not worth a damn.
Why should I give up my right to have a secure phone just because some idiot can't keep his sword in his scabbard? It doesn't matter what he's done or if he's alive or dead, I'm not required to have useless encryption on my devices.
Sure, the police have the right to search his stuff all day long. They can disassemble his phone, unsolder the flash chip, clone it, and try PIN after PIN against the image as many times as they want. They can hire Bruce Schneier, they can subpoena Apple, they can send his phone to the NSA, they can even ask Chuck Norris to roundhouse kick it open. They absolutely have the right to try anything to get in to the phone. But they don't have the right to succeed. They don't have the right to make us make this task easier for them.
And despite your most fervent wishing that some middle ground exists somewhere, the fact is no middle ground is possible. This is simple logic we're talking about here -- encrypted data is either secure, or it's broken. It's a boolean, not a tri-state value. And law enforcement and intelligence agencies have proven with every leaked secret that they abuse whatever trust or tools they're given, and the volume of abuse increases over time. They have constantly violated our rights and abused our trust, and every single time they start down that path the leaked data shows they've overextended their reach. It's not only irresponsible to trust them again, it's reckless. We can't trust them with a key escrow system, not even with a court protecting us - they'll just stand up another secret FISA court to get around the rules.
Besides, the existing system worked pretty darn well. Bad guy starts stabbing people, policeman shoots him dead. I don't care what his stupid motives were, because they truly do not matter to anyone. Why should we bother giving his fetid ideas a single extra minute of daylight? Let his defective brain and rancid motives lie buried in the ground with the rest of his corpse in an unmarked grave, and never be shared with the public or media. It's not like learning his motives is useful to anyone. We can't just arrest people who simply share those ideas - people always have the right to think extremely stupid and anti-social thoughts; they just don't have the right to act on them.
John