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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 wh

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

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