there is no law that says the specific employees must rewrite the phone. Only an obligation that the company do so. Employees are free to quit at any time.
Employees are free to refuse any orders from their employee at any time without quitting. An employer can never force an employee to do anything. Sometimes this will have the consequence of being fired. Sometimes it won't.
You may have an employee who is so good at what they are doing well that you want to keep them even if they are sometimes inconvenient. Sometimes you have an employee where you know he or she will have a good reason if they refuse to do as they are told, and you know from experience that it's better to listen to them. You may have an employee refusing something illegal and firing them might get you into double trouble. In this case, why would Apple fire anyone? These people are not refusing anything that Apple actually _wants_ them to do.
Total BS back to you. These guys don't actually have to quit at all. They just have to say to their manager "no, I'm not going to do this".
In most situations, a refusal to do as you are told might get you fired. In this situation, however, they would have an employer who was told to order them to do the job. Their employer doesn't actually want them to do it. So the employer has no reason to even consider firing them.
I wonder... does Apple actually overwrite the existing credential record when a password is changed, or do they create a new record and mark the old one as invalid? If they do the latter, they can roll back to the old password and allow the backup to take place. The FBI should, perhaps, ask about this.
There is no "credential record".
All the data on an iPhone is encrypted. There is a master key that can unlock all the encryption keys that are used. That master key is not stored anywhere. Instead, it is calculated from three components: A device key, stored on the flash drive, and easily readable. Another key stored in the CPU, not known to anyone, and not accessible to anyone. And your passcode. If you have the device key, the right CPU, and the correct passcode, then the masterkey can be calculated.
If you want to change the passcode, then you need the old and the new passcode. With the old passcode, you calculate the old master key. With the new passcode, you calculate a new master key. Then you take all the keys on the device which are encrypted with the old master key, decrypt them with the old master key, and write them back encrypted with the new master key. You then forget the master key and the new passcode.
If you are talking about the iCloud password, there is no record of that either. Not of the old password, not of the new password.
I think it's not so much the better lawyers, but the better case. If you remember SCO vs. IBM, I thought SCO's lawyers were quite terrific. Considering that they had absolutely no case.
Simple. Alice and Bob must both start by throwing coins until they have a head. They then both have a 50% chance of finishing in the next throw. However, if the next throw is the wrong case, then Alice, who wanted head/tail, has head/head so she has another 50% chance in her next throw. Bob however, who is waiting for head/head, has head/tail so he first has to throw coins again until he gets head before he has another chance of finishing.
I can tell you that it's not crazy, the information has simply been occulted ("occult" means to hide). Why do you think RSA selects two consecutive prime numbers? The answer is known to the NSA, and now you do too.
Two consecutive prime numbers? That would be totally rubbish and easy to crack. Give me the product pq of two consecutive primes. Unless the product is 6, p and q are both odd. Let x be the average of p and x, then x is an integer, and p = x - y and q = x + y for some integer y. Therefore pq = (x - y)(x + y) = x^2 - y^2. I calculate the square root of pq and round it up to the nearest integer, and I get x. I calculate x^2 - pq and get y^2. I calculate the square root and get y, From x and y I get p and q. Really trivial.
In reality you make sure that p / q is not close to a rational number with small numerator and denominator, and you make especially sure that the ratio isn't 1, that is the numbers are not close together.
They looked at prime numbers up to a billion. In that range, about one in 20.7 numbers are prime. But if we look only at numbers ending in 1, 3, 7 and 9, about one in 8.3 are prime.
If p ends in 9, then the chance that the next number ending in 1, 3, 7, 9 etc. is a prime is one in 8.3 or about 12.06% for each of these numbers. But the probability that each of them is _the next prime_ changes: p + 2 has a chance of 12.06% of being the next prime. p + 4 has a chance of (0.8794 * 12.06) = 10.61% of being the next prime. p + 6 ends in 5; p + 8 has a chance of (0.8794^2 * 12.06) = 9.33% of being the next prime, and for p + 10 the chance is (0.8794^3 * 12.06) = 8.20%.
Not that bullshit again. If you remove the flash memory, you separate it from one of the 256 bit keys required for decryption which is locked inside the CPU.
By breaking or circumventing the encryption you make the encryption (security) immediately worthless on every iPhone in the process.
Not quite. Nobody can break _the encryption_ of the iPhone. What the FBI wants Apple to do is to disable a feature where trying to brute force the passcode erases the phone after ten wrong attempts.
If that feature is disabled, you can brute force the phone at a maximum rate of one key every 80 milliseconds. Which means 4 digit passcode security is broken (takes 15 minutes to brute force). 6 digit passcode takes two weeks to crack. 8 digit passcode takes two years to crack. 8 random lowercase letters takes 529 years. 8 random lowercase or uppercase letters takes 135,000 years.
He was in charge when most of the current Prism bullshit got put into place. You really think that is a good idea.
He was also in charge when the decision against the Clipper chip was made.
The guy has one interest: National security. He doesn't care about privacy, about finding some kidnapper, anything like that. Just national security.
So he tells everyone who wants to hear that what the FBI wants Apple to do is damaging national security. As I said, the guy doesn't do "think of the children", he does national security.
I thought certs where going to protect us from this mess. It is nice that Apple yanked this cert, but what is to stop another cert from being bought and used to do the same damn thing?
Apple revoked the cert, and now the threat is gone. So the fact that the software was signed protected you.
You can't buy these certificates. You have to get one from Apple, who will hopefully check out the company. In this case the company that Apple checked was careless and I hope they'll pay the price for that.
Source code was one particular example of tech companies complying with PRC. I am sure that there are other ways that tech companies are complying with PRC. After all PRC is big market.
Companies provided source code _for a security audit_. What about Linux? The PRC has access to the source code of Linux as well. Because it's Open Source.
Apple admit it. The government owns the phone in the first place, and the people whose privacy is being violated are dead and evil. Let the government win this one because Apple has no chance of winning it. Pick a different case.
Clever guy. Absolutely, the government owns this phone. The people whose privacy would be violated are dead and evil. The government is free to examine this phone in any way they like. Apple isn't stopping them.
But then it's not Apple's phone. Apple is not involved in this case. It has no reason to do anything. If my phone is locked and I forgot the passcode and I'm not even a terrorist, Apple won't help me unlocking the phone. Why should they do it now? It's not their phone, none of their business. They sold the phone. To the government. Once it was sold, it wasn't Apple's responsibility anymore but the governments.
It's a shame Homeland Security has gone so far the wrong way. Part of the NSA's purview is to help IMPROVE our domestic security against attack and interception by foreign governments. Under a cloud of public suspicion, they improved DES back in the early days of encryption. They added trusted features to linux and released SELinux to the public. etc. Now they're all about destroying what they used to build, as they have decided their own power to domestically spy is more important than the security of the nation against foreign adversaries. I suppose without a strong and looming existential threat from a nation-state like the USSR, we all too quickly forget our own disturbing history of government abuse, and lose our sense of priorities.
Just saying: It's the FBI, and not the NSA. I don't know about the current NSA, but the former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden has said publicly that unbreakable encryption is an overall advantage for the national security of the USA.
I'm certainly not an Apple fanboy. But apparently Apple didn't break any law. Perhaps it would actually break a law by complying to the request.
What actually happened: The FBI went to judge with an ex parte motion to order Apple to help unlocking the phone. "Ex parte" motion means that Apple was not heard by the judge before the judge issued the motion. Obviously in such a case Apple has the right to tell the judge why that motion shouldn't be issued and to reconsider.
Apparently this idiot thinks that Apple should be punished for doing something that any sane person would think they are entitled to. Have their side of the story heard before the judge makes a decision. In other words, the man shows an utter and despicable disrespect for law and order.
There's another even more disturbing aspect to this: If Apple refuses to do as the FBI wants to tell them, wouldn't you think they might have a reason for that? Wouldn't you check what these reasons might be?
In all these discussions, what I have never seen anyone saying is "We want this phone unlocked; we listened to the reasons why Apple doesn't want to help, but here are reasons why unlocking the phone is more important than Apple's objection".
running by people unloading luggage at a train station or airport out of the trunk of a self-driving car, and yelling really load, "DRIVE HOME"
... which would be covered by exactly the same laws as car theft, with the difference that the car wouldn't take your instructions unless it has your ugly mug on camera, and your voice recorded, so being caught and convicted is just about unavoidable.
This is one reason why the current well publicized FBI/Apple court order debate is stupid- if the government hadn't screwed up, they wouldn't need Apple's help to get into the phone they had issued. Given that the government screws up something simple like this, why should we believe they won't screw up at safeguarding the special software they want.
If anyone had told them that the guy was going to kill 14 people, sure, they would have done that. But nobody told them. But if you think about it, IF they had the means of unlocking the phone at any time, then surely nobody would be stupid enough to leave incriminating information on their works phone.
And remember, this is one of three phones that the killer had been using, and two phones he smashed up completely before he got killed. So you can guess which phone did _not_ contain anything juicy.
The only effect in the fight of terrorism of enforcing MDM on all employees phones would be that terrorist cannot use a company phone for plotting terrorist acts but that they would be forced to buy their own phones out of their own pocket.
No, they are also asking to allow PIN entry via lightning connector. Apple does not and has never supported that. It is completely new functionality that could not only take a while to write and test, but also affect other areas of the code in unknown ways.
That, I thought, was an amazingly stupid request. The FBI knows that there is a four digit passcode (it's clearly visible on the unlock screen of an iPhone how many digits are needed). If there wasn't the "erase after ten wrong keys" feature, then they could try 10,000 possible passcodes in a day or two. So clearly Apple's help isn't needed for this. So that part of the FBI request should clearly be rejected.
Is it really an issue of constitutional law? I now doubt it, because if Olson and Apple were so confident in their interpretation of the law, i.e. they were sure they had a case, why would they put so much effort into creating this media sideshow? Why are they trying to fight this in the court of public opinion?
Excuse me, but that was started by the FBI. If I British newspaper writes "Apple refuses to unlock TERROR PHONE", then surely you should admit that Apple has the right to do a bit of positive PR on its own.
If unlocking your phone is done by the OS, and Apple can update your OS without your consent, then they can always unlock your phone.
Unlocking the phone requires the passcode. There is absolutely 100% no way to unlock the phone without the passcode. What the FBI wants Apple to do is remove a security feature that erases the phone after ten incorrect attempts. Which would be good enough because the phone uses a 4 digit passcode. With an eight digit passcode, nothing Apple or anyone can do.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The whole case has nothing to do with privacy. There's a legal search warrant to search the phone, and that search warrant wouldn't even be needed, because the owner of the phone agreed to it.
What the whole case is about is that the technology needed to crack this phone can be used by criminals or terrorists to crack any other phone as well.
I used to agree with Apple until the bit of information about this being a government issued phone, not the personal phone of the shooter. As such, there is no privacy issue as anything on it is public information. If the shooter misused his government issued phone for personal business, well, that was his mistake and doesn't change the fact that the contents are subject to open records laws.
There never was a privacy issue. The FBI does have a search warrant. They have the _right_ to gather any evidence they can gather. They don't need permission of the owner of the phone. Apple has handed all information that they had in their possession and did their best to help the FBI getting more information (which didn't work because someone at the FBI messed up).
The one issue is that the same hack that opens up this criminal's phone to the FBI can open _your_ phone to hackers and criminals, can open the phones of politicians to foreign governments, and can open the phones of people fighting terrorism to ISIS operatives. So there is a very good reason for Apple to keep the FBI from making this foolish mistake.
The other issue is that Apple doesn't own this phone. If the owner wants to unlock it, let the owner unlock it. Just the same as what happens if you stupidly forget the passcode for your phone and take it to the Apple Store.
Apple is 100% right to tell the FBI or any other 3 letter agency wanting them to install back doors...
Note that Michael Hayden, former chief of NSA and CIA, is absolutely _for_ secure encryption. Secure encryption protects terrorists, but it also protects average citizens, and it protects government agencies. In Michael Hayden's calculation, the overall effect of secure encryption gives it a 70:30 advantage to the alternative, no encryption. The FBI obviously has a different view; they want to solve crimes, not prevent crimes.
I'm not an iPhone user so I thought I'd ask. Wouldn't Apple have to push out an update to this phone to implement what the FBI wants - unlimited password attempts w/o bricking the phone? If so, can this absolutely be done w/o the owner's consent? It seems that I can disable auto-updates on my Android phone and/or restrict updates to be over WiFi only - both of which would require manual intervention to initiate.
The have the owners consent. San Bernardino County is the owner. The killer was an employee of San Bernardino County, and the phone is his works phone.
The question is: Can Apple, on Apple's premises, with the phone in their hands, with more knowledge of how an iPhone works than anyone else, possibly with tools that nobody outside Apple has, update the firmware of a phone that is locked with an unknown passcode? The answer is: Nobody really knows, and Apple tries very hard not to be forced to find out.
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there is no law that says the specific employees must rewrite the phone. Only an obligation that the company do so. Employees are free to quit at any time.
Employees are free to refuse any orders from their employee at any time without quitting. An employer can never force an employee to do anything. Sometimes this will have the consequence of being fired. Sometimes it won't.
You may have an employee who is so good at what they are doing well that you want to keep them even if they are sometimes inconvenient. Sometimes you have an employee where you know he or she will have a good reason if they refuse to do as they are told, and you know from experience that it's better to listen to them. You may have an employee refusing something illegal and firing them might get you into double trouble. In this case, why would Apple fire anyone? These people are not refusing anything that Apple actually _wants_ them to do.
Total BS back to you. These guys don't actually have to quit at all. They just have to say to their manager "no, I'm not going to do this".
In most situations, a refusal to do as you are told might get you fired. In this situation, however, they would have an employer who was told to order them to do the job. Their employer doesn't actually want them to do it. So the employer has no reason to even consider firing them.
I wonder... does Apple actually overwrite the existing credential record when a password is changed, or do they create a new record and mark the old one as invalid? If they do the latter, they can roll back to the old password and allow the backup to take place. The FBI should, perhaps, ask about this.
There is no "credential record".
All the data on an iPhone is encrypted. There is a master key that can unlock all the encryption keys that are used. That master key is not stored anywhere. Instead, it is calculated from three components: A device key, stored on the flash drive, and easily readable. Another key stored in the CPU, not known to anyone, and not accessible to anyone. And your passcode. If you have the device key, the right CPU, and the correct passcode, then the masterkey can be calculated.
If you want to change the passcode, then you need the old and the new passcode. With the old passcode, you calculate the old master key. With the new passcode, you calculate a new master key. Then you take all the keys on the device which are encrypted with the old master key, decrypt them with the old master key, and write them back encrypted with the new master key. You then forget the master key and the new passcode.
If you are talking about the iCloud password, there is no record of that either. Not of the old password, not of the new password.
I think it's not so much the better lawyers, but the better case. If you remember SCO vs. IBM, I thought SCO's lawyers were quite terrific. Considering that they had absolutely no case.
Simple. Alice and Bob must both start by throwing coins until they have a head. They then both have a 50% chance of finishing in the next throw. However, if the next throw is the wrong case, then Alice, who wanted head/tail, has head/head so she has another 50% chance in her next throw. Bob however, who is waiting for head/head, has head/tail so he first has to throw coins again until he gets head before he has another chance of finishing.
I can tell you that it's not crazy, the information has simply been occulted ("occult" means to hide). Why do you think RSA selects two consecutive prime numbers? The answer is known to the NSA, and now you do too.
Two consecutive prime numbers? That would be totally rubbish and easy to crack. Give me the product pq of two consecutive primes. Unless the product is 6, p and q are both odd. Let x be the average of p and x, then x is an integer, and p = x - y and q = x + y for some integer y. Therefore pq = (x - y)(x + y) = x^2 - y^2. I calculate the square root of pq and round it up to the nearest integer, and I get x. I calculate x^2 - pq and get y^2. I calculate the square root and get y, From x and y I get p and q. Really trivial.
In reality you make sure that p / q is not close to a rational number with small numerator and denominator, and you make especially sure that the ratio isn't 1, that is the numbers are not close together.
This "discovery" is just ridiculously stupid.
They looked at prime numbers up to a billion. In that range, about one in 20.7 numbers are prime. But if we look only at numbers ending in 1, 3, 7 and 9, about one in 8.3 are prime.
If p ends in 9, then the chance that the next number ending in 1, 3, 7, 9 etc. is a prime is one in 8.3 or about 12.06% for each of these numbers. But the probability that each of them is _the next prime_ changes: p + 2 has a chance of 12.06% of being the next prime. p + 4 has a chance of (0.8794 * 12.06) = 10.61% of being the next prime. p + 6 ends in 5; p + 8 has a chance of (0.8794^2 * 12.06) = 9.33% of being the next prime, and for p + 10 the chance is (0.8794^3 * 12.06) = 8.20%.
Not that bullshit again. If you remove the flash memory, you separate it from one of the 256 bit keys required for decryption which is locked inside the CPU.
By breaking or circumventing the encryption you make the encryption (security) immediately worthless on every iPhone in the process.
Not quite. Nobody can break _the encryption_ of the iPhone. What the FBI wants Apple to do is to disable a feature where trying to brute force the passcode erases the phone after ten wrong attempts.
If that feature is disabled, you can brute force the phone at a maximum rate of one key every 80 milliseconds. Which means 4 digit passcode security is broken (takes 15 minutes to brute force). 6 digit passcode takes two weeks to crack. 8 digit passcode takes two years to crack. 8 random lowercase letters takes 529 years. 8 random lowercase or uppercase letters takes 135,000 years.
He was in charge when most of the current Prism bullshit got put into place. You really think that is a good idea.
He was also in charge when the decision against the Clipper chip was made.
The guy has one interest: National security. He doesn't care about privacy, about finding some kidnapper, anything like that. Just national security.
So he tells everyone who wants to hear that what the FBI wants Apple to do is damaging national security. As I said, the guy doesn't do "think of the children", he does national security.
I thought certs where going to protect us from this mess. It is nice that Apple yanked this cert, but what is to stop another cert from being bought and used to do the same damn thing?
Apple revoked the cert, and now the threat is gone. So the fact that the software was signed protected you.
You can't buy these certificates. You have to get one from Apple, who will hopefully check out the company. In this case the company that Apple checked was careless and I hope they'll pay the price for that.
Source code was one particular example of tech companies complying with PRC. I am sure that there are other ways that tech companies are complying with PRC. After all PRC is big market.
Companies provided source code _for a security audit_. What about Linux? The PRC has access to the source code of Linux as well. Because it's Open Source.
Apple admit it. The government owns the phone in the first place, and the people whose privacy is being violated are dead and evil. Let the government win this one because Apple has no chance of winning it. Pick a different case.
Clever guy. Absolutely, the government owns this phone. The people whose privacy would be violated are dead and evil. The government is free to examine this phone in any way they like. Apple isn't stopping them.
But then it's not Apple's phone. Apple is not involved in this case. It has no reason to do anything. If my phone is locked and I forgot the passcode and I'm not even a terrorist, Apple won't help me unlocking the phone. Why should they do it now? It's not their phone, none of their business. They sold the phone. To the government. Once it was sold, it wasn't Apple's responsibility anymore but the governments.
It's a shame Homeland Security has gone so far the wrong way. Part of the NSA's purview is to help IMPROVE our domestic security against attack and interception by foreign governments. Under a cloud of public suspicion, they improved DES back in the early days of encryption. They added trusted features to linux and released SELinux to the public. etc. Now they're all about destroying what they used to build, as they have decided their own power to domestically spy is more important than the security of the nation against foreign adversaries. I suppose without a strong and looming existential threat from a nation-state like the USSR, we all too quickly forget our own disturbing history of government abuse, and lose our sense of priorities.
Just saying: It's the FBI, and not the NSA. I don't know about the current NSA, but the former NSA and CIA chief Michael Hayden has said publicly that unbreakable encryption is an overall advantage for the national security of the USA.
I'm certainly not an Apple fanboy. But apparently Apple didn't break any law. Perhaps it would actually break a law by complying to the request.
What actually happened: The FBI went to judge with an ex parte motion to order Apple to help unlocking the phone. "Ex parte" motion means that Apple was not heard by the judge before the judge issued the motion. Obviously in such a case Apple has the right to tell the judge why that motion shouldn't be issued and to reconsider.
Apparently this idiot thinks that Apple should be punished for doing something that any sane person would think they are entitled to. Have their side of the story heard before the judge makes a decision. In other words, the man shows an utter and despicable disrespect for law and order.
There's another even more disturbing aspect to this: If Apple refuses to do as the FBI wants to tell them, wouldn't you think they might have a reason for that? Wouldn't you check what these reasons might be?
In all these discussions, what I have never seen anyone saying is "We want this phone unlocked; we listened to the reasons why Apple doesn't want to help, but here are reasons why unlocking the phone is more important than Apple's objection".
99 percent of Americans have more legs than average. Really, it's a fact.
running by people unloading luggage at a train station or airport out of the trunk of a self-driving car, and yelling really load, "DRIVE HOME"
... which would be covered by exactly the same laws as car theft, with the difference that the car wouldn't take your instructions unless it has your ugly mug on camera, and your voice recorded, so being caught and convicted is just about unavoidable.
This is one reason why the current well publicized FBI/Apple court order debate is stupid- if the government hadn't screwed up, they wouldn't need Apple's help to get into the phone they had issued. Given that the government screws up something simple like this, why should we believe they won't screw up at safeguarding the special software they want.
If anyone had told them that the guy was going to kill 14 people, sure, they would have done that. But nobody told them. But if you think about it, IF they had the means of unlocking the phone at any time, then surely nobody would be stupid enough to leave incriminating information on their works phone.
And remember, this is one of three phones that the killer had been using, and two phones he smashed up completely before he got killed. So you can guess which phone did _not_ contain anything juicy.
The only effect in the fight of terrorism of enforcing MDM on all employees phones would be that terrorist cannot use a company phone for plotting terrorist acts but that they would be forced to buy their own phones out of their own pocket.
No, they are also asking to allow PIN entry via lightning connector. Apple does not and has never supported that. It is completely new functionality that could not only take a while to write and test, but also affect other areas of the code in unknown ways.
That, I thought, was an amazingly stupid request. The FBI knows that there is a four digit passcode (it's clearly visible on the unlock screen of an iPhone how many digits are needed). If there wasn't the "erase after ten wrong keys" feature, then they could try 10,000 possible passcodes in a day or two. So clearly Apple's help isn't needed for this. So that part of the FBI request should clearly be rejected.
Is it really an issue of constitutional law? I now doubt it, because if Olson and Apple were so confident in their interpretation of the law, i.e. they were sure they had a case, why would they put so much effort into creating this media sideshow? Why are they trying to fight this in the court of public opinion?
Excuse me, but that was started by the FBI. If I British newspaper writes "Apple refuses to unlock TERROR PHONE", then surely you should admit that Apple has the right to do a bit of positive PR on its own.
If unlocking your phone is done by the OS, and Apple can update your OS without your consent, then they can always unlock your phone.
Unlocking the phone requires the passcode. There is absolutely 100% no way to unlock the phone without the passcode. What the FBI wants Apple to do is remove a security feature that erases the phone after ten incorrect attempts. Which would be good enough because the phone uses a 4 digit passcode. With an eight digit passcode, nothing Apple or anyone can do.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The whole case has nothing to do with privacy. There's a legal search warrant to search the phone, and that search warrant wouldn't even be needed, because the owner of the phone agreed to it.
What the whole case is about is that the technology needed to crack this phone can be used by criminals or terrorists to crack any other phone as well.
I used to agree with Apple until the bit of information about this being a government issued phone, not the personal phone of the shooter. As such, there is no privacy issue as anything on it is public information. If the shooter misused his government issued phone for personal business, well, that was his mistake and doesn't change the fact that the contents are subject to open records laws.
There never was a privacy issue. The FBI does have a search warrant. They have the _right_ to gather any evidence they can gather. They don't need permission of the owner of the phone. Apple has handed all information that they had in their possession and did their best to help the FBI getting more information (which didn't work because someone at the FBI messed up).
The one issue is that the same hack that opens up this criminal's phone to the FBI can open _your_ phone to hackers and criminals, can open the phones of politicians to foreign governments, and can open the phones of people fighting terrorism to ISIS operatives. So there is a very good reason for Apple to keep the FBI from making this foolish mistake.
The other issue is that Apple doesn't own this phone. If the owner wants to unlock it, let the owner unlock it. Just the same as what happens if you stupidly forget the passcode for your phone and take it to the Apple Store.
Apple is 100% right to tell the FBI or any other 3 letter agency wanting them to install back doors...
Note that Michael Hayden, former chief of NSA and CIA, is absolutely _for_ secure encryption. Secure encryption protects terrorists, but it also protects average citizens, and it protects government agencies. In Michael Hayden's calculation, the overall effect of secure encryption gives it a 70:30 advantage to the alternative, no encryption. The FBI obviously has a different view; they want to solve crimes, not prevent crimes.
I'm not an iPhone user so I thought I'd ask. Wouldn't Apple have to push out an update to this phone to implement what the FBI wants - unlimited password attempts w/o bricking the phone? If so, can this absolutely be done w/o the owner's consent? It seems that I can disable auto-updates on my Android phone and/or restrict updates to be over WiFi only - both of which would require manual intervention to initiate.
The have the owners consent. San Bernardino County is the owner. The killer was an employee of San Bernardino County, and the phone is his works phone.
The question is: Can Apple, on Apple's premises, with the phone in their hands, with more knowledge of how an iPhone works than anyone else, possibly with tools that nobody outside Apple has, update the firmware of a phone that is locked with an unknown passcode? The answer is: Nobody really knows, and Apple tries very hard not to be forced to find out.