Bitter Clinger wrote:The Annoyed Man wrote:If you build it gov't will use it. As far as the families of the victims, I sympathize, but that is the SAME argument that the families of the Sandyhook school shooting victims used to argue that so-called "assault weapons" should be banned.
It's not all Apple by the way. Microsoft and Google are backing Apple's play. No.....it's NOT about me. It's about the Constitution.
You are smarter than that. It is not the same argument as that used by gun grabbers - there is no 2nd Amendment for the right to bear phones. Don't wrap this in the Constitution, call it what it is, a legitimate difference in opinion. And pray if it goes your way no one else is murdered. Phones don't kill, terrorists whose opsec is protected by naivety kills.
My constitutional argument is not founded in naiveté. No, there is no right to keep and bear cellphones (and neither did I say there was, anywhere in my post), but there most definitely
IS a 4th Amendment right to be free from unwarranted intrusions into our personal effects and papers. It is, among other things, why we can put locks on our doors, and cops have to go get warrants and serve them in order to pop those locks off......EVEN when they suspect that criminals live in that house. And Apple (and Google, and Microsoft) maintain that what gov't is asking for
cannot be accomplished without writing a back door into the phone software. I have a 4th Amendment right. I do not want Apple (and Google and Microsoft) to write back doors into their operating systems that will give gov't the ability to exploit that back door at gov't's whim. You make dire warnings of terrorist murders if I get my way. I don't accept that. Those murders are on the murderers heads. You seem to have great faith in the integrity of gov't. I do not. Gov't can't secure our borders. It cannot successfully prosecute a malfeasant AG who sells guns to narco-traffikers. It cannot successful stop dead people from voting.
Is there
some risk to the public if gov't can't hack our phones any time they want to? Sure, there is. But a gov't which can mitigate all risks can only do so by suppressing the liberties its citizens. The freedom from unnecessary intrusions into our private affairs (including on our cellphones) is one of those liberties which the 4th Amendment
guarantees. It is no longer a guarantee when gov't can violate it at will. What the FBI is trying to force Apple to do gives them that ability. They shouldn't have it. You started this thread by saying that this is why you'll never buy any Apple products. Does your anger over this also mean that you'll never buy an Android or Microsoft phone....since they are backing Apple's play? Anyway, that's my position. You and I differ on it, that's all.
So we are at an impasse. You're a good guy Bitter, and I don't want to fight with you.
BTW, did you read that link I posted? Here it is again:
https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=231146. Here's another quote from it:
The current Apple flap is not really about that particular phone. There is a general problem with encryption keys in that short passwords and such are not really the key; rather, they unlock a key. That's algorithmic and thus where the key is actually stored becomes the big issue. Without hardware backing that secures said key in a way that if tampered with immediate and permanent destruction occurs you can dump the contents of the flash memory that's in the device and pick through it at your leisure.
In other words I believe the FBI is lying when they claim they cannot recover the data via any other means, simply on the known and published architectural differences between the OS on the phone and later versions of Apple's hardware and software. Push comes to shove they should be able to dump the NV image from the phone which contains the hash of the pin because that device has no separate hardware keystore, load it on an emulated device and hack away. Since there are only 10,000 possibilities and the encryption algorithm can be determined from disassembly of the object code performing such a test "offline" is trivial. The instruction set of the iPhone processor is not a secret; it's well-documented and open to the public.
This is not true for more-modern devices, but my understanding is that the version of IOS on the subject phone is IOS7. Because IOS7 was built to run on the iPhone 4 which has a (relatively crappy) processor it did not protect "everything" on the device -- probably for performance reasons. IOS8+ not only does it also, on newer devices, uses a hardware keystore which makes what the FBI is asking for worthless on such devices. Further, that implies that the data the FBI wants may not be encrypted at all in said flash memory!
Second, there's a bigger issue here with the FBI demand, which is that of chain-of-custody and forensics. The first principle of forensics is that you cannot modify that which you are examining and, if you ever intend to use said information in court you had better be able to prove that you didn't.
Etc., etc., etc. In other words, because the subject phone is iOS 7, it does not require Apple to crack it. The FBI can do it themselves with existing technology they already have, and they should already know that. So what they are
actually asking for is for Apple to write a back door into iOS 8,
without having a need for it within the context of the San Bernardino terrorism case. They are trying to force Apple to do it for future use. When they are done with Apple, they'll do the same to Google and Microsoft. When they're done......the US mobile phone manufacturing industry will be dead and buried, as customers desert them for foreign made products with better security.
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”
― G. Michael Hopf, "Those Who Remain"
#TINVOWOOT
I'm done.
