9 ms·

Why Apple's fight with the FBI could have reverberations in China

130 points by peterkelly 11y ago

tomschlick 11y ago
The government caused all of this. First they collect the communications of essentially the entire planet (including citizens) and now they act like a victim when consumers want data privacy. I feel like they are using this case as the poster child even though they don't expect to actually get anything meaningful from the phone. Especially since this was a work phone and the guy's personal phone had been destroyed beyond repair. To me that says anything meaningful would have been on that destroyed device.
- vonklaus 11y ago
  The Verge podcast walt-ctrl-delete was talking about this. Nilay Patel, editor at the verge, raised a pretty interesting point which was Supreme Court cases are often picked. Actors can pick what case they want to appeal or prosecute. They pick the case with the best facts and the right time and try to maximize their chance a decision will be written into law. Roe v. Wade was brought up, although I don't know enough about the case to argue, but it was an example they referenced. This is a good case for the Gov't. You have 2 people ruthlessly kill a bunch of civilians and they are already both dead. They can't testify and it is fairly likely the data on the phone is meaningless. So the government can make a strong case, their are really no known parties who are alive and have intimate knowledge of the attackers, and Apple can be represented as being "pro terror". So you raise a good point. Caveat, I would change "The government" to Governments as the U.S. is certainly violating the U.S. constitution but also certainly not the only government involved.
  - danso 11y ago
    This is the case with most court cases in which social reform is desired...you don't want to risk your case losing because of obvious flaws, because the case will be used as precedent for future cases...nevermind that the court tends to not revisit the same issues, over and over, in a short time span. One of the more recent famous ones I can think of was DC vs Heller (2008), which ruled that the 2nd Amendment applies to D.C. and other federal enclaves, which challenged D.C.'s strict gun control laws. From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller > In 2002, Robert A. Levy, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, began vetting plaintiffs with Clark M. Neily III for a planned Second Amendment lawsuit that he would personally finance. Although he himself had never owned a gun, as a Constitutional scholar he had an academic interest in the subject and wanted to model his campaign after the legal strategies of Thurgood Marshall, who had successfully led the challenges that overturned school segregation It's not just court battles, but grassroots movements, too. Rosa Parks was not the first person to fight back against Montgomery's bus seating, but she was the one whom civil rights leaders thought would be the best person to rally around when organizing the boycott and pursuing a court case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks > NAACP organizers believed that Parks was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws, although eventually her case became bogged down in the state courts while the Browder v. Gayle case succeeded
  - rpgmaker 11y ago
    > Actors can pick what case they want to appeal or prosecute. They pick the case with the best facts and the right time and try to maximize their chance a decision will be written into law. Looking at it from that perspective, would it have been better if Apple had picked another case to make its stand?
    - dantiberian 11y ago
      This is the point Ben Thompson has been talking about recently. https://stratechery.com/2016/apple-versus-the-fbi-understanding-iphone-encryption-the-risks-for-apple-and-encryption/ https://stratechery.com/2016/apple-versus-the-fbi-understand...
- txru 11y ago
  Devil's advocate: Consumer preferences or the fact that it was a work phone don't matter, as long as a warrant has been attained. This case is a constitutional matter from the beginning-- the Federal government does possess the ability to search a citizen's belongings and communications, given that it has a proper warrant. The Fourth Amendment checks this power. So, if a Federal judge has issued a warrant, and it is possible, even if difficult, to serve that warrant, the government does have the authority to make that material available to the court. What I'm getting at is that encryption can make subpoenas and serving warrants impossible for the courts, and that's something that I understand the government being concerned about. Could this be a power play to establish a precedent, and say the party withholding is aiding terrorism? Probably. Despite that, I understand the government's case.
  - zepto 11y ago
    You could equally argue that reducing security is aiding terrorism by enabling a class of cyberattacks that wouldn't otherwise be possible.
  - bad_user 11y ago
    They are coercing companies into using their resources to produce software and introduce backdoors that can hurt honest customers. And this will hurt companies like Apple, since security is something they sell. In regards to subpoenas, can the government read your mind? Should they be able to? Well, our devices are an extension of our mind and if you make the case that the government should have access, that's a slippery slope imho. Furthermore, this will only work against small time criminals. Crime syndicates on the other hand have the resources to acquire knowledge and protect themselves. There's always the analogue loophole and some would argue that such tactics do nothing but to misuse resources, instead of good old detective work, ultimately hurting the honest taxpayers.
    - qiqing 11y ago
      On that note, if the government has a warrant, should they be allowed to use EEG to get your phone's PIN code regardless of your consent? https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity12/technical-sessions/presentation/martinovic https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity12/technical...
- AJ007 11y ago
  There is an incredibly strong national interest to build and maintain the most secure systems possible. Whether it is banking communications or nuclear reactor controls, the integrity of these systems needs to be treated as a critical asset of both economic and physical security. This is damn hard enough to maintain as is and is completely taken for granted by most of the population who do not need to think about hackers on a daily basis.
- newman314 11y ago
  Hijacking top comment here but the latest news is that the passcode changed while in government custody. Also mentioned in the same TechCrunch article is that Apple had provided the iCloud backups. Which begs the question, are local backups of the iPhone crackable too? If so, the mere presence of having iCloud or local backups means that the government have a way in. So not the latest info but some.
  - ddinh 11y ago
    For local backups, Apple says [1] that "There is no way to recover your information or turn off Encrypt Backup if you lose or forget the password." so I'm inclined to thinking it's done with a secure symmetric encryption scheme with the key held by the user. If that's the case, since iTunes prompts you for a separate backup password (only used when restoring a backup), a security-conscious user would probably make that password sufficiently long as to be impossible to brute-force, regardless of any help from Apple. [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205220 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205220
mc32 11y ago
No country needs another's precedent to proceed with their own laws based on their own basic laws. They are not "waiting to see how country X handles this". If they want to they will. They have large enough markets to force or persuade companies to comply. China is not waiting to see if the US will censor news outlets to see if they can censor journalists. They'll just go do it. They'll do it like India did to BBM a few years ago, if they so wish. They don't need the imprimatur or precedent from anyone else.
- glhaynes 11y ago
  Sure, technically, they can pass whatever laws they want as a sovereign nation. This would make it less costly from a "political capital" standpoint, though, and thus presumably more likely for them to do it. FTA: The White House has told Beijing that it has major concerns about its new counterterrorism law, a somewhat vague piece of legislation that may require American companies to hand over encryption keys and provide backdoor access to their computer systems. “This is something that I’ve raised directly with President Xi,” President Obama told Reuters last year. “We have made it very clear to them that this is something they are going to have to change if they are to do business with the United States.” Those demands will be harder to make if the federal government succeeds in getting Apple to give up its fight, according to one of the Senate’s leading voices on technology policy.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - mc32 11y ago
    That probably explains their acquiescing to American concerns about human rights, torture, press and reproductive freedoms as well as their speedy roughshod trials of dissidents and others. I really don't see them persuaded by that logic. They'll do what they want to do regardless so long as its impact on their economy is minimal.
- chiph 11y ago
  And yet within the US, legislation originating in California is often used as a model by other states when writing their own statues. No one is forcing Rhode Island (way over on the other side of the continent) to do this, but they do because it's easier to copy/modify/paste.
rrggrr 11y ago
tl;dr - USGOV master access to Apple's encryption gives repressive regimes the moral and political cover to publicly conduct the same surveillance they are already doing, but also to make similar demands of US Manufacturers. It will provide some competitive advantage to a hardware manufacturer from a country who refuses to backdoor their equipment, but not in markets where decryption keys will be required (eg. US)
SFjulie1 11y ago
Argh I guessed the OP meant repercussion 1) unintented consequences and 2) re emission of percursion ~= reverberation While reverberation is kind of just the echo of a vibration.
- spectralwarp 11y ago
  Reverberation: 2.b. An echolike force or effect; a repercussion: Reverberations from the stock market crash were still being felt months later. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/reverberation http://www.thefreedictionary.com/reverberation
  - SFjulie1 11y ago
    I guess the unintended consequences rather than the physics matter. Okay, it is a question of taste. But my proposition works in more than one language (latin included). ;)
teacup50 11y ago
Or, China could acquire Apple's signing keys and/or source code through espionage, and then unlock any device -- now, or at any point in the future. We already know this occurs: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/technology/20google.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/technology/20google.html The backdoor already exists; Apple is just being forced to admit that they designed their security (in this case, the security of the KDF-performing hardware) around the idea that Apple can neither be coerced, corrupted, nor compromised. Pin numbers are weak passwords, and Apple built tamper-resistant hardware to provide a physical solution to this inherent weakness in the keying process. They also left a door open for themselves to subvert this physical solution in the 5c, and also in later devices with Secure Enclave. If they hadn't left that back door in place, then the FBI would have nothing to ask for, and Apple wouldn't be an extremely high value target for authorities in states like China. They did leave that door open, however, and whether or not the FBI compels Apple to use it now limited bearing whatsoever on the risk going forward.
- criddell 11y ago
  What exactly is the back door that was left in place? Making the secure enclave firmware writable?
  - teacup50 11y ago
    Correct; more specifically, leaving the KDF retry enforcement behavior writable on locked devices, and in the case of secure enclave, possibly exposing fingerprint-protected keys themselves to Apple-signed updated firmware.
    - pcwalton 11y ago
      Do you have a source that confirms this? So far everything that I've seen, including the story on Hacker News [1], indicates that we don't know whether the Secure Enclave code can be updated without already knowing the key. [1]: https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2016-02-19-what-is-the-secure-enclave.html https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2016-02-19-what-is-...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
tracker1 11y ago
I think the article's premise is right... whenever I see the U.S. Government encroach like this, or try to undermine domestic security, I always want to ask those Senators, and other government representatives if they'd be okay with China, Russia, Iran and the like also having these tools... because they rarely stay secret when they're created.
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  Those same government representatives don't see any problem with asymmetry between governments, because of course a good American company should respect the American government (or more to the point, is subject to US jurisdiction).
  - tracker1 11y ago
    It's not about the U.S. having tools other countries don't have.... when it comes to something like this, if created, it's a matter of when they have them. Strong security is strong security... creating artificial back doors, regardless of intent, weakens security... We already have a three letter agency whose job it is to crack these things, why isn't the FBI making these demands to the NSA to build?
micwawa 11y ago
I gotta say, for someone who is very much pro-TPP, Ron Wyden seems suddenly concerned about entities overseas using legal power to push around US businesses.
rogeryu 11y ago
Great to see that China requested Apple to prove that the US government could not snoop data on their iPhones, while at the same time the US government is scared that China gets encryption keys. This sums it all up!
bawana 11y ago
I thought Apple was an Irish company (like Google,Pfizer Tyco, etc all those companies that have done tax inversions). How can they be compelled to follow US law? Just because they have an office here?? What if they moved ALL THEIR JOBS to Canada and Mexico? Would the CIA then have the right to engage them because they were foreign? Would drones accidentally crash into their headquarters? Or is the CIA going to start a campaign against Apple? This looks a lot like cancer when the body attacks itself. Though I agree with the sentiment that terrorist behavior is abhorrent, we cannot allow the terrorists to win by succumbing to the pressures they create. I understand the need for improved intelligence to predict and prevent future incidents, and I think there is no better example for the value of human intelligence (humint). Rather than engaging in the dirty business of scouring everyone's dirty laundry, I think the gov should crowdsource this effort. The gov's role should be in developing infrafrastructure, methods and plans on how to assess, verify and value the information they receive-rather than pursue the acquisition of data themselves. Ultimately it's still the same problem they have with their own agents-how do you know the information you are getting is true? Wasn't the search for WMDs in Iraq an example of unverified intel acquired by our own agencies? As Snowden pointed out, no one lives in a vacuum. The gov has the metadata of every tel no and IP address that phone connected to. Those are probably much lower hanging fruit. The individuals that own those devices may be couriers, innocent bystanders or unrelated websites. But that is the job of the agency-to rank these leads, pursue them and prosecute the highest risk ones.

130 points by peterkelly 11y ago

The government caused all of this. First they collect the communications of essentially the entire planet (including citizens) and now they act like a victim when consumers want data privacy. I feel like they are using this case as the poster child even though they don't expect to actually get anything meaningful from the phone. Especially since this was a work phone and the guy's personal phone had been destroyed beyond repair. To me that says anything meaningful would have been on that destroyed device.

vonklaus 11y ago
The Verge podcast walt-ctrl-delete was talking about this. Nilay Patel, editor at the verge, raised a pretty interesting point which was Supreme Court cases are often picked. Actors can pick what case they want to appeal or prosecute. They pick the case with the best facts and the right time and try to maximize their chance a decision will be written into law. Roe v. Wade was brought up, although I don't know enough about the case to argue, but it was an example they referenced. This is a good case for the Gov't. You have 2 people ruthlessly kill a bunch of civilians and they are already both dead. They can't testify and it is fairly likely the data on the phone is meaningless. So the government can make a strong case, their are really no known parties who are alive and have intimate knowledge of the attackers, and Apple can be represented as being "pro terror". So you raise a good point. Caveat, I would change "The government" to Governments as the U.S. is certainly violating the U.S. constitution but also certainly not the only government involved.
- danso 11y ago
  This is the case with most court cases in which social reform is desired...you don't want to risk your case losing because of obvious flaws, because the case will be used as precedent for future cases...nevermind that the court tends to not revisit the same issues, over and over, in a short time span. One of the more recent famous ones I can think of was DC vs Heller (2008), which ruled that the 2nd Amendment applies to D.C. and other federal enclaves, which challenged D.C.'s strict gun control laws. From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller > In 2002, Robert A. Levy, a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, began vetting plaintiffs with Clark M. Neily III for a planned Second Amendment lawsuit that he would personally finance. Although he himself had never owned a gun, as a Constitutional scholar he had an academic interest in the subject and wanted to model his campaign after the legal strategies of Thurgood Marshall, who had successfully led the challenges that overturned school segregation It's not just court battles, but grassroots movements, too. Rosa Parks was not the first person to fight back against Montgomery's bus seating, but she was the one whom civil rights leaders thought would be the best person to rally around when organizing the boycott and pursuing a court case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Parks > NAACP organizers believed that Parks was the best candidate for seeing through a court challenge after her arrest for civil disobedience in violating Alabama segregation laws, although eventually her case became bogged down in the state courts while the Browder v. Gayle case succeeded
- rpgmaker 11y ago
  > Actors can pick what case they want to appeal or prosecute. They pick the case with the best facts and the right time and try to maximize their chance a decision will be written into law. Looking at it from that perspective, would it have been better if Apple had picked another case to make its stand?
  - dantiberian 11y ago
    This is the point Ben Thompson has been talking about recently. https://stratechery.com/2016/apple-versus-the-fbi-understanding-iphone-encryption-the-risks-for-apple-and-encryption/ https://stratechery.com/2016/apple-versus-the-fbi-understand...
txru 11y ago
Devil's advocate: Consumer preferences or the fact that it was a work phone don't matter, as long as a warrant has been attained. This case is a constitutional matter from the beginning-- the Federal government does possess the ability to search a citizen's belongings and communications, given that it has a proper warrant. The Fourth Amendment checks this power. So, if a Federal judge has issued a warrant, and it is possible, even if difficult, to serve that warrant, the government does have the authority to make that material available to the court. What I'm getting at is that encryption can make subpoenas and serving warrants impossible for the courts, and that's something that I understand the government being concerned about. Could this be a power play to establish a precedent, and say the party withholding is aiding terrorism? Probably. Despite that, I understand the government's case.
- zepto 11y ago
  You could equally argue that reducing security is aiding terrorism by enabling a class of cyberattacks that wouldn't otherwise be possible.
- bad_user 11y ago
  They are coercing companies into using their resources to produce software and introduce backdoors that can hurt honest customers. And this will hurt companies like Apple, since security is something they sell. In regards to subpoenas, can the government read your mind? Should they be able to? Well, our devices are an extension of our mind and if you make the case that the government should have access, that's a slippery slope imho. Furthermore, this will only work against small time criminals. Crime syndicates on the other hand have the resources to acquire knowledge and protect themselves. There's always the analogue loophole and some would argue that such tactics do nothing but to misuse resources, instead of good old detective work, ultimately hurting the honest taxpayers.
  - qiqing 11y ago
    On that note, if the government has a warrant, should they be allowed to use EEG to get your phone's PIN code regardless of your consent? https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity12/technical-sessions/presentation/martinovic https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity12/technical...
AJ007 11y ago
There is an incredibly strong national interest to build and maintain the most secure systems possible. Whether it is banking communications or nuclear reactor controls, the integrity of these systems needs to be treated as a critical asset of both economic and physical security. This is damn hard enough to maintain as is and is completely taken for granted by most of the population who do not need to think about hackers on a daily basis.
newman314 11y ago
Hijacking top comment here but the latest news is that the passcode changed while in government custody. Also mentioned in the same TechCrunch article is that Apple had provided the iCloud backups. Which begs the question, are local backups of the iPhone crackable too? If so, the mere presence of having iCloud or local backups means that the government have a way in. So not the latest info but some.
- ddinh 11y ago
  For local backups, Apple says [1] that "There is no way to recover your information or turn off Encrypt Backup if you lose or forget the password." so I'm inclined to thinking it's done with a secure symmetric encryption scheme with the key held by the user. If that's the case, since iTunes prompts you for a separate backup password (only used when restoring a backup), a security-conscious user would probably make that password sufficiently long as to be impossible to brute-force, regardless of any help from Apple. [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205220 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205220

mc32 11y ago

No country needs another's precedent to proceed with their own laws based on their own basic laws. They are not "waiting to see how country X handles this". If they want to they will. They have large enough markets to force or persuade companies to comply. China is not waiting to see if the US will censor news outlets to see if they can censor journalists. They'll just go do it. They'll do it like India did to BBM a few years ago, if they so wish. They don't need the imprimatur or precedent from anyone else.

glhaynes 11y ago
Sure, technically, they can pass whatever laws they want as a sovereign nation. This would make it less costly from a "political capital" standpoint, though, and thus presumably more likely for them to do it. FTA: The White House has told Beijing that it has major concerns about its new counterterrorism law, a somewhat vague piece of legislation that may require American companies to hand over encryption keys and provide backdoor access to their computer systems. “This is something that I’ve raised directly with President Xi,” President Obama told Reuters last year. “We have made it very clear to them that this is something they are going to have to change if they are to do business with the United States.” Those demands will be harder to make if the federal government succeeds in getting Apple to give up its fight, according to one of the Senate’s leading voices on technology policy.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- mc32 11y ago
  That probably explains their acquiescing to American concerns about human rights, torture, press and reproductive freedoms as well as their speedy roughshod trials of dissidents and others. I really don't see them persuaded by that logic. They'll do what they want to do regardless so long as its impact on their economy is minimal.
chiph 11y ago
And yet within the US, legislation originating in California is often used as a model by other states when writing their own statues. No one is forcing Rhode Island (way over on the other side of the continent) to do this, but they do because it's easier to copy/modify/paste.

rrggrr 11y ago

tl;dr - USGOV master access to Apple's encryption gives repressive regimes the moral and political cover to publicly conduct the same surveillance they are already doing, but also to make similar demands of US Manufacturers. It will provide some competitive advantage to a hardware manufacturer from a country who refuses to backdoor their equipment, but not in markets where decryption keys will be required (eg. US)

SFjulie1 11y ago

Argh I guessed the OP meant repercussion 1) unintented consequences and 2) re emission of percursion ~= reverberation While reverberation is kind of just the echo of a vibration.

spectralwarp 11y ago
Reverberation: 2.b. An echolike force or effect; a repercussion: Reverberations from the stock market crash were still being felt months later. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/reverberation http://www.thefreedictionary.com/reverberation
- SFjulie1 11y ago
  I guess the unintended consequences rather than the physics matter. Okay, it is a question of taste. But my proposition works in more than one language (latin included). ;)

teacup50 11y ago

Or, China could acquire Apple's signing keys and/or source code through espionage, and then unlock any device -- now, or at any point in the future. We already know this occurs: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/technology/20google.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/technology/20google.html The backdoor already exists; Apple is just being forced to admit that they designed their security (in this case, the security of the KDF-performing hardware) around the idea that Apple can neither be coerced, corrupted, nor compromised. Pin numbers are weak passwords, and Apple built tamper-resistant hardware to provide a physical solution to this inherent weakness in the keying process. They also left a door open for themselves to subvert this physical solution in the 5c, and also in later devices with Secure Enclave. If they hadn't left that back door in place, then the FBI would have nothing to ask for, and Apple wouldn't be an extremely high value target for authorities in states like China. They did leave that door open, however, and whether or not the FBI compels Apple to use it now limited bearing whatsoever on the risk going forward.

criddell 11y ago
What exactly is the back door that was left in place? Making the secure enclave firmware writable?
- teacup50 11y ago
  Correct; more specifically, leaving the KDF retry enforcement behavior writable on locked devices, and in the case of secure enclave, possibly exposing fingerprint-protected keys themselves to Apple-signed updated firmware.
  - pcwalton 11y ago
    Do you have a source that confirms this? So far everything that I've seen, including the story on Hacker News [1], indicates that we don't know whether the Secure Enclave code can be updated without already knowing the key. [1]: https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2016-02-19-what-is-the-secure-enclave.html https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2016-02-19-what-is-...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

tracker1 11y ago

I think the article's premise is right... whenever I see the U.S. Government encroach like this, or try to undermine domestic security, I always want to ask those Senators, and other government representatives if they'd be okay with China, Russia, Iran and the like also having these tools... because they rarely stay secret when they're created.

JoshTriplett 11y ago
Those same government representatives don't see any problem with asymmetry between governments, because of course a good American company should respect the American government (or more to the point, is subject to US jurisdiction).
- tracker1 11y ago
  It's not about the U.S. having tools other countries don't have.... when it comes to something like this, if created, it's a matter of when they have them. Strong security is strong security... creating artificial back doors, regardless of intent, weakens security... We already have a three letter agency whose job it is to crack these things, why isn't the FBI making these demands to the NSA to build?

micwawa 11y ago

I gotta say, for someone who is very much pro-TPP, Ron Wyden seems suddenly concerned about entities overseas using legal power to push around US businesses.

rogeryu 11y ago

Great to see that China requested Apple to prove that the US government could not snoop data on their iPhones, while at the same time the US government is scared that China gets encryption keys. This sums it all up!

bawana 11y ago

I thought Apple was an Irish company (like Google,Pfizer Tyco, etc all those companies that have done tax inversions). How can they be compelled to follow US law? Just because they have an office here?? What if they moved ALL THEIR JOBS to Canada and Mexico? Would the CIA then have the right to engage them because they were foreign? Would drones accidentally crash into their headquarters? Or is the CIA going to start a campaign against Apple? This looks a lot like cancer when the body attacks itself. Though I agree with the sentiment that terrorist behavior is abhorrent, we cannot allow the terrorists to win by succumbing to the pressures they create. I understand the need for improved intelligence to predict and prevent future incidents, and I think there is no better example for the value of human intelligence (humint). Rather than engaging in the dirty business of scouring everyone's dirty laundry, I think the gov should crowdsource this effort. The gov's role should be in developing infrafrastructure, methods and plans on how to assess, verify and value the information they receive-rather than pursue the acquisition of data themselves. Ultimately it's still the same problem they have with their own agents-how do you know the information you are getting is true? Wasn't the search for WMDs in Iraq an example of unverified intel acquired by our own agencies? As Snowden pointed out, no one lives in a vacuum. The gov has the metadata of every tel no and IP address that phone connected to. Those are probably much lower hanging fruit. The individuals that own those devices may be couriers, innocent bystanders or unrelated websites. But that is the job of the agency-to rank these leads, pursue them and prosecute the highest risk ones.