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Lawmakers Call FBI's 'Going Dark' Narrative 'Highly Questionable' After Motherboard Shows Cops Can Easily Hack iPhones (vice.com)
Joseph Cox, reporting for Motherboard: This week, Motherboard showed that law enforcement agencies across the country, including a part of the State Department, have bought GrayKey, a relatively cheap technology that can unlock fully up-to-date iPhones. That revelation, cryptographers and technologists said, undermined the FBI's renewed push for backdoors in consumer encryption products. Citing Motherboard's work, on Friday US lawmakers sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, doubting the FBI's narrative around 'going dark', where law enforcement officials say they are increasingly unable to obtain evidence related to crimes due to encryption. Politico was first to report the letter. "According to your testimony and public statements, the FBI encountered 7,800 devices last year that it could not access due to encryption," the letter, signed by 5 Democrat and 5 Republican n House lawmakers, reads. "However, in light of the availability of unlocking tools developed by third-parties and the OIG report's findings that the Bureau was uninterested in seeking available third-party options, these statistics appear highly questionable," it adds, referring to a recent report from the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General. That report found the FBI barely explored its technical options for accessing the San Bernardino iPhone before trying to compel Apple to unlock the device. The lawmaker's letter points to Motherboard's report that the State Department spent around $15,000 on a GrayKey.
The article says Greylock can access "fully up-to-date IPhones".
Can Greylock access Iphones that don't allow automatic updating? If Greylock can't, then Apple has given out an update that allows outsiders to access your IPhone. So much for the Apple claim to be a privacy good-guy. Even more interesting is the possibility that Apple has pushed an OS update to phones which have automatic update turned off, something we usually associate with Microsoft.
Is there anyone out there capable of looking at the stream of bits coming-and-going and reading the flash memory that holds the updated code? And if Apple can push an update, what does that mean for the validity of the phone log when the IPhone shows up as a court exhibit? And do IPhones in Europe and China get the same treatment?
All the hoo ha about backdoors does seem pretty suspicious. It's pretty trivial to write an app that stores things or communicates with unbreakable encryption and is pretty much immune to legislation. Surely smart criminals must do this already. So a backdoor would only be useful for catching dumb ones. Perhaps insisting that a backdoor is needed but does not exist is useful for catching dumb criminals AND not-so-smart ones.
However, in light of the availability of unlocking tools developed by third-parties and the OIG report's findings that the Bureau was uninterested in seeking available third-party options, these statistics appear highly questionable"
FBI: "I wish to plead incompetence."
Ezekiel 23:20
I'd call them more incompetent than anything else. They received tips about the Florida school shooter including his name and what he was going to do and they did nothing. Typical big government.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
The freedoms we enjoy are quite precious, and the sacrifices made to preserve them do not all occur on the field of battle
Which also means that we as a society have to deal with the fallout from such rights. For instance, the fact that it's legal to buy and sell alcohol means that people WILL die as a result of drunk driving, regardless of the laws against that particular act. You can't have one without the other, and if you truly stand for freedom, you accept that. We can take other steps to prevent those deaths, but they'll always be an inherent cost of preserving that right.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
99% of criminals fall into the 'dumb ones' category. They will use whatever is default and even if their interest in something more secure was piqued, they couldn't get the other dumb criminals they talk to about their crimes to go along with it. So whether encryption is unbreakable by default actually does have huge significance to law enforcement. It still should be since that's by far outweighed by the privacy benefit to non-criminals, but as out of touch /. is with normal people, it pales in comparison to how far removed from typical criminals it is, and there seems to be this mistaken belief that the percentage of criminals that will "just" set up a secure alternative to bad defaults is in some way significant.
A conspiracy theory involving dozens of police from several different agencies all knowingly and without knowledge leaking allowing someone to go on a shooting rampage in a highschool is modded +4 Interesting and Insightful? You have got to be kidding me. This is the kind of bullshit they put on InfoWars.
And another big fat [citation needed] on Fast & Furious being motivated by helping gun control (a program, by the way, started under George W. Bush in 2006).
That this isn't modded down or at least Funny makes me more disappointed in the direction the comments section here is heading more than anything else, and there's heavy competition, even though I do agree that violence is way down and our government is becoming a hostile occupying force, not to mention fully support the 2nd.