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The Annoyed Man wrote:

Solaris wrote:

treadlightly wrote: As a result, US-based encryption will always have a shadow of distrust, and I wonder how long it will take bad guys to apply a little meta-encryption.

To this day I am not sure what happened to TrueCrypt, but the above statement is true. If Apple loses, the entire US crypto industry cannot be trusted.

And we used to be the very best at it...back when. How ironic that the government of a "free-market" constitutional republic is willing to kill off that which we used to be good at in order to exert more power and further subvert the constitution upon which it is founded.

To me, it reinforces the idea that it is the nature of government.....ANY kind of gov't....to always try to grow its control over the governed. It is an insatiable beast, and Leviathan is the perfect name for it.

"Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts, absolutely." This applies to groups of people (government) just as much as an individual.

When did you ever hear of a politician who was also a technical type? I can't think of one.

The truth is, most people truly believe all manufacturers leave a back door just so they can help them out when they forget their password. They just don't want to believe that is not true.

I spent 20 years providing technical support (both in the field and on the telephone) for a major manufacturer of fiber optic telecommunications equipment. Our customers were all the big telcos, some Mom & Pop telcos, cable and internet providers, and various government agencies.

Every couple of weeks, we would get a request from some customer to unlock a piece of gear. Old Joe used to work on this box and he retired/died/was fired/transferred away. Nobody else knows the user id or password to get into the box. Of course, they had been changed from the default the equipment shipped with. Many times, they simply would not believe us that it was not possible to break into the equipment and retain it's provisioning (data). Oh, there were ways to get into it, but they would all destroy the data and drop all of the traffic going through the box.

If there had been a back door and we used it to help one of these guys out, the result would have been a flurry of lawsuits from all of our customers for failure to meet the security standards we published.

Apple is almost certainly sitting in the same boat with their commercial and government customers.

jerry_r60 wrote:Has there actually been anyone from the FBI acknowledge that they asked for a back door to all iphones? The only place I've seen that is in the letter from cook. The one interview I watched with an FBI spokesman was that he didn't want any back door and for all he cared, they could just print the contents of that one phone on paper and give it to him.

I don't trust the government but I don't trust what cook is saying either. I assume he can be twisting it a bit to make a compelling public statement to garner a public outcry, just like politicians do. Maybe the FBI did demand the backdoor and I just have not seen it yet. I've only seen Cook make that claim so far.

It is not possible to create a hack to access just one iphone. If it works on that iphone, it will be usable on any iphone.

Apple knows that caving in to this court order would cost them some small number of individual accounts. They also know it would cost them much more in lost commercial and government business.

Creating this hack would cause lots of corporations to cancel their contracts. The same goes for many government agencies. The security of iOS is what got them those big customers to begin with.

IMO, anyone who sides with the government on this probably thinks "1984" was a story about utopia.