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New York's District Attorney: Roll Back Apple's iPhone Encryption (mashable.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Mashable:
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance said Thursday that he wants Apple's encryption to go back to how it was in early 2014. Back then, police could basically extract any information they wanted after getting a warrant. "Doing nothing about this problem will perpetuate an untenable arms race between private industry and law enforcement," Vance said on Thursday. "Federal legislation is our only chance to lay these arms aside."
Vance said he's got 423 "lawfully-seized Apple devices" that his employees can't do anything with. Forty-two of those devices "pertain to homicide or attempted murder cases" according to the district attorney's office, and a similar number "relate to sex crimes." The argument, of course, is that the district attorney's office would have an easier time solving crimes if they had access to these phones... Apple believes being forced to hack into phones at the government's will is an unreasonable burden.
ZDNet adds that "the call for federal legislation could be given a popular boost by president elect Donald Trump, who previously called for a boycott on Apple products when it refused to help the FBI."
Vance said he's got 423 "lawfully-seized Apple devices" that his employees can't do anything with. Forty-two of those devices "pertain to homicide or attempted murder cases" according to the district attorney's office, and a similar number "relate to sex crimes." The argument, of course, is that the district attorney's office would have an easier time solving crimes if they had access to these phones... Apple believes being forced to hack into phones at the government's will is an unreasonable burden.
ZDNet adds that "the call for federal legislation could be given a popular boost by president elect Donald Trump, who previously called for a boycott on Apple products when it refused to help the FBI."
The Victory Gin is kinda gross but whatever
Forty-two of those devices "pertain to homicide or attempted murder cases" according to the district attorney's office, and a similar number "relate to sex crimes.
So 80% of the phones they want to decrypt aren't related to crimes serious enough to mention.
It's the abuse of rubber-stamping courts that brought the need to do encryption that's inaccessible to the 5-0. Y'alls made your bed, now kip in it.
And then go fuck yourself, Mr. Vance.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
To a large degree, data storage is an extension of what a person knows. Why bother memorizing a phone number when you have hardware to do it? Why bother memorizing a hundred passwords when you have hardware to do it? Even our music collection is on hardware purely because our ability to memorize it is imperfect.
The moment a law is passed that mandates law-enforcement access to our electronic devices, we are giving them access to what we know. Today that may or may not be reasonable. But tomorrow, the day after, or a hundred years from now we will have these devices integral to ourselves. Implants within us, most likely, that augment our memories. It's not unreasonable to predict a (likely distant) future where a device taps our optic nerve and provides us "augmented reality". Can't remember the name of the person you're looking at? The device will do that for you. But it will also be able to record what you see, or hear, for future perfect recall.
So what happens when the iPhone law is applied to internal storage? It's mind-reading. This legislation is one step shy of "police must be allowed to read your mind if it is possible". That disturbs me.
"Oh no... he found the
Nowhere does it say I have to rely on a governmental promise not to do an unreasonable search, it says I have a right to secure myself against such a search.
The proposal goes against the plain meaning of the fourth.
The irony is that years ago the USA has laws against exporting strong encryption, now the move is that domestically you can't have strong encryption but people outside the country can..... One also wonders what the police did before crooks had cell phones they could search? Real detective work perhaps?
All you LEOs, all you DAs, all you politicians, all the way up to POTUS? You can go fuck yourselves. We don't want to live in a world where only the rich, powerful, and the government are the only ones entitled to keep their data safe. We don't give a flying fuck about your obsessive-compulsive need to see everything, know everything, and control everything; go take your meds, go call your therapist, go take a time-out somewhere cool dark and quiet, but get the hell out of our phones, out of our computers, out of our lives! You are not making us 'safe', all you're doing is feeding your own hunger for power, and we're sick and tired of it. STOP!!!
With Trump as president and a republican majority in congress, how much - realistically speaking - do you think privacy will last in the US?
My guess is: not too long.
Here's a prediction: forget Apple, this has all to do with public service and government's power. With all the stuff Trump promised, he'll just lean on the side - as several republican politicians do, and some liberals too - of ignorance, pushing for laws and forcefully having their way regarding encryption, fundamentally weakening security and privacy for all. These people cannot understand the importance of privacy and strong encryption, they'll always dismiss the importance of it by seeing only how criminals can potentially use it, because they are essencially blind on how much their own lives depend on it.
Companies' stances on those will weaken and collapse overtime, cases of abuse of power will rise, and hacker activity will gain new grounds.
Police and government will innevitably end up leaking or being hacked for very sensitive information, information from innocent people that was never meant to go public will, press will come after the government harder than ever, and it'll start an information/cyber civil war as Trump's government already doesn't like the press a whole lot.
Of course, crime and criminal activity won't go down because of that. Even if the US weakens their own stance on privacy and security, that does not mean other countries will follow suit. But businesses and people dependant on services located in the US will be forced to conform.
Banks and other types of secure services will suffer from this because every device now has some sort of backdoor or weakened encryption, private data from people inside the government that was favorable for weakening encryption will leak, but now it's too late to go back - the damage is done.
Private companies that feel threatened by all the measures being taken by the FBI and sanctioned by the government will, with enough pressure, move to countries that understands the importance of privacy and encryption. It'll take a while because it has to reach a point of making economical sense, but it will.
All the morons who were favorable on weakening iPhone and other devices encryption will come crying talking how they didn't know that making security weak for criminals also meant making security weak for everyone else, which in turn just made criminals' lives easier.
But of course, this will only help the fear and paranoia agenda of the current office anyways, so in the next election the candidate who shouts louder will continue winning the races.
It's extremely enticing for law enforcement with such a miopic, poor understanding and complete ignorance of how encryption came to be to dismiss it just so that they can catch more criminals, "terrorists" and whatnot. Short term wins, they are one step ahead, and blahblah. But if we can't have law enforcement thinking on the mid to long term, it can be as damaging as letting vigilante forces control crime in your country.
Power corrupts, and eventually all the data the FBI, NSA and police forces are collecting on innocent civilians will be used for bad - it's probably already happening, we just don't have all the cases in hand to show.
If Mr. Vance has evidence that a phone contains information related to a case, Mr. Vance knows he can get a warrant requiring the owner of the phone to unlock it. If the owner of the phone refuses to comply, Mr. Vance can have that person jailed indefinitely until he does comply.
That's with current law.
But what Mr. Vance really wants is a precedent allowing him to demand access to a phone for which he has no idea whether it contains anything relevant at all. Basically this is the equivalent to allowing police to randomly walk into any house they choose and look around for evidence.
You know the last time this was allowed in America? Before 1776. Back then, British soldiers could routinely enter any colonist's house and look around for pretty much anything, whether or not they had any reason to expect it to be present - they only needed a vaguely written writ of assistance, which conveniently never expired. That's why, since 1792, we've had a fourth amendment attached to that crusty old document known as the United States Constitution.
It's sad... the more you read American history from the time around the revolution, the more you see parallels with what's happening today.
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